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[Evan Balster]

Okay.

I am a programmer who dabbles in pretty much every other area of game dev, but I'd like to develop a secondary skill to a competent level.  I've done some musical stuff in the past and I have a decent intuition for it, but I am by no means an experienced musicker.  My past experience is (in order) piano and synthesizer, loop-based mak song software, module editors (ModPlug and TurboFM Music Maker) and as of yesterday, Musagi.

I am officially resolving (like a New Years' resolution, but not) to build my musical skills and (should I keep it up) will log my progress here.  I'm making this now because I've made something of which I'm reasonably proud.

--

This week:  learning how to create harmonized arrangements of notes.  Have an incomplete experiment in TFM (not posted) with pretty harmonic melodies.  Read up on music theory, and was introduced to consonance and dissonance.  Decided last night to try out Musagi and completed a song tonight.  May revise it later.

Today (and yesterday) -- 4-6 hours of Musagi-foolery:  http://evanbalster.com/music/goodbye-friend.ogg

Previous work -- TFM/Genesis, not very good: http://evanbalster.com/music/laserback.ogg

[HDSanctum]

Very cool! I have been meaning to try and get back into learning music too, this is inspiring stuff ^^ Looking forward to updates!

[mcc]

Pretty!

[antymattar]

Good but try to not make every instrument have an echo. Otherwise it might become complicated to understand the thing. I like it.

[Evan Balster]

I'm only using premade instruments, and that does bother me.  I'll see about taking the effect out if it gets to be a problem.

[Triplefox]

It's sounding pretty good.

There are actually at least three distinct things you could focus on: Composition, arrangement, and production. It's kind of weird because changing the production environment tends to change the others very radically for me.

In the last year or so, I've sort of moved towards using a palette of tools for each part of the process - recording and "auto-arranger" environments(e.g. Busker, Band-in-a-Box) to get the song idea down, trackers to fill out a custom arrangement in detail, and then loops to put it all together and add extra production gloss.

I use piano rolls when I absolutely need to, but trackers are so much faster 

[Evan Balster]

Today: had a long talk with a very experienced musician/audio engineer friend, and was introduced to chords.  (I had a vague familiarity with them before but a limited understanding)  In a series of eurekas during the conversation, I came to understand why three-note chords are near-universal and also pertinent to four-note harmonies, and why the black keys on a piano are laid out the way they are.  Learned that most musicians, despite all the theory, just do things more or less intuitively as I have been.

I also ordered a 25-note MIDI controller, since signal overlaps in my laptop keyboard prevent me from trying many sets of notes.


I uploaded the two-week-old unfinished experiment during the conversation, so here it is:
http://evanbalster.com/music/regret.ogg  (TFM Music Maker, four-note harmony)

(The second part of the song is rather mediocre; the experiment is mainly in the harmony-heavy bits at the beginning and end.)


One last thing: apparently, there is no simple piece of software for voice-controlled composing.  (IE, you hum, sing or beatbox into it, it gives you back sheet music you can put into your favorite tracker)  I am tempted to make one with my new knowledge of DSP.

[tesselode]

Your songs are quite chiptune-y.

The first song is good, but the sounds just don't seem fitting. The second instrument that comes in has too much portamento time.

The second song is just a buzzing noise.

That third one is also pretty good, but I don't care much for the chord progression. It's too abnormal.

Apparently you can use FL Studio to hum a melody into a microphone and get a piano roll, which you can export as sheet music if you really want.

[Evan Balster]

I feel like I've come a long way since Laserback, yet it's only been three or four songs since then, only one of which feels semi-complete. 


The MIDI controller has been lots of fun and I've done a lot of free-style playing on it to get myself accustomed to using a keyboard.  I was struck by another musical mood today, and got a second Musagi song (which I'd written a small bit of earlier) to a listenable place.

http://evanbalster.com/music/prospector-wip.ogg

This one's a concept piece for a slightly dark game I'm working on with a friend.  I'm getting much more confident making and modifying Musagi's instruments, so I feel better about the individual sounds I'm using here.  It has gotten to be a bit less ambient than originally indended, though -- I didn't expect that violin-like instrumental to become the leading voice.  :\


A new friend of mine is giving me advice on all this; here's a very good writeup of hers for anyone else who wants a crash course in musical chords.  (Chord = set of 3 notes that sound good together, possibly with additional 'copies' of those notes in other octaves)
http://music.bytenoise.co.uk/keys_and_chords.html

[Evan Balster]

So it's been a while.  (7.5 months)

In the meantime I've picked up the accordion, gotten a lot more intuitive about melodies, timing and chords, and picked up just a little FL studio.

Here's my partly-finished electronic composition:
http://evanbalster.com/wreath/wreath-0-2.ogg

And a rather bad, somewhat outdated recording of the accordion version...
http://evanbalster.com/wreath/wreath-acc-2011-10-30.ogg

[increpare]

You should do an accordion duet with Terry some time <3

I don't know if I like the recorder line - it's too repetitive-sounding for me (especially given that I listened to the accordion version first, which didn't feel repetitive to me (in spite of its badness in other aspects ) ).  You could try, for instance, adjusting the volume, or changing the time values/rhythms of the notes somewhat (even perhaps make the repetitions not all the same length), or changing the harmonies/melodic motif somewhat (or maybe put an LFO on with a nice filter that'll help vary it?).  I can't promise that any of these will make the piece more acceptable to me, but they'll be worthwhile for you to do, I think.

The recorder figuration around 1:20 sounds a bit out-of-place to me.  

The bit after that with the plucked thing, I'd probably modify the pads a bit (they were getting a bit monotonous for me by this stage).

[Ted]

I like the wreath song, Evan. You're improving, keep it up

[Reives]

Yeah, even though the styles are totally different, I think you've really improved with the newest ones from the first couple you posted here. A really nice build-up and sustained atmosphere, nice job.

wreath-0-2.ogg in particular gives off a cool Minecraft + Elder Scrolls hybrid vibe to me, hahah.

[Cheezmeister]

Rock on, Evan. Music is a great complement to programming, and a fairly skills-appropriate one, too (like code it takes creativity to conceive but math and logic to execute).

My high school philosophy teacher, of all people, once told me that these two plus philosophy are a sort of trifecta that analytically-minded people tend towards. Make of that what you will, I guess.