Musician’s Notebook

It takes a talented and experienced musician to write hit-quality songs and coordinate a band and it’s repertoire, but everybody has to start learning somewhere. In the digital age, there are many ways to learn to make music with little to no skill and non-musicians can play with these tools either just for fun, or as one of the first steps to building a sense of rhythm and melody, and especially arrangement. Every Mac owner gets a copy of Garageband for free, and there are other similar programs like Ardour and Audacity that PC and Linux users can get there hands on for free as well. It’s a bit unusual to start learning music like this, but it makes it easier to pick up an instrument when you already have a sense of rhythm, melody and arrangement.

FYI: I believe there are serious problems in the music industry and popular music culture at this point in history and that our airwaves are overrun by people who just don’t know a damn thing about music. I am not condoning that with this article. This article is for those who wish to learn and cannot yet begin learning an instrument.

1. Melodyne

Melodyne is a helpful program for musicians and non-musicians alike. It’s billed as a tool that allows you to edit soundwaves with a piano roll interface. What this means for non-musicians is that if you have a melody in your head, you can sing it to Melodyne to determine which notes it uses. These melodies can be exported as MIDI files for manipulation as virtual instruments; so, if you have a bass line, flute melody or guitar riff in your head, record it vocally and fiddle with the MIDI in Garageband (or any other consumer level audio program) until it sounds like a melody for the instrument you have in mind.

2. Drum loops

Drums can be confusing for many people, including musicians who write songs who are not primarily drummers. So it’s doubly difficult for a non-musician to work them out with a drum machine such as Reason’s ReDrum. Thankfully, there are plenty of websites out there that offer free, and premium paid, drum loops. Check out ccMixter as your first stop.

3. A good rhyming dictionary

If you haven’t written a great deal of songs, nor have you had experience with poetry in the past, it might be difficult to grasp the mysterious, intertwined elements of rhythm and rhyme in the lyrics to your home-made music. A good rhyming dictionary such as Rhymezone will help you get started while you learn to think in terms of the sounds words make, as well as their various meanings and connotations.

4. A blog or frequently updated website

Whether you get some hosting with the affordable GoDaddy internet hosting company and install WordPress there, or use the free WordPress.com blog hosting service, you can release your new-found love for amateur masterpieces on a blog and have those tunes heard. Sure, they may not be the next chart hits, but what’s the point of a songwriting hobby if nobody ever hears the stuff?

5. A digital audio input

Once you’ve started getting into the hobby a bit more and have perhaps brought home a MIDI keyboard, a bass or a guitar, it’s worth purchasing one of the more affordable digital audio inputs so that your sound quality isn’t as terrible as the recordings you get from the computer’s default analogue inputs. Start out with something cheap like the FastTrack USB which can handle microphones, guitars and various other live instruments. If you’ve bought a MIDI-capable instrument such as a keyboard, you may have to pay a few more dollars to get something that does audio and MIDI.

With the above tools, I’ve seen a completely untrained non-musician make a song that didn’t sound half bad. You won’t be making masterpieces, but you’ll be having fun and getting a sense for songwriting and arrangement in the progress. Keep up some music lessons, either from a teacher or from books alone like I did, and given time those strange jingles of yours may just become the hit songs for the remainder of this century. Just remember when you’re using your voice to hit Melodyne with your next bass line: warm up first so you don’t screw it up before you begin!

Disclaimer: I do not have any financial or promotional connections with any of the services I have suggested above. I’m simply attaching to these suggestions the software and services that I use in my own songwriting and recording work with my band.