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.

Create Digital Music has an excellent tutorial on creating a foot pedal from a QWERTY keyboard for use with Ableton Live so you can record hands-free. Check it out at Create Digital Music. If I knew of something like this for Logic and Reason, I’d be building it right now!

I’d like to see an implementation that accounts for the small key size; maybe some kind of modification that makes the pushable area larger. If you’re an Ableton user, head on over and take a look. I think it’ll be worth your time.

Update: Michael Una, the author of the tutorial, left this useful comment:

Hi Joel. With a little bit of ingenuity, you can apply this DIY footcontroller to any DAW.

The trick is all in the key scripting programs I mention in the article- you can very easily script any combination of keystrokes and mouse actions to be triggered by the push of a single key.

So, with a little fiddling, you could assign each of the buttons on the footcontroller to a different function, such as play, record, mute, solo, etc.

Also, it’s a bit hard to see in the pictures, but I did hot glue some larger bits of plastic to the keys to increase the surface area of each button. I used a transparent plastic so I could still read which key was which, but you could really glue anything on there.

One of the first Midnight.Haulkerton tunebacks, Overclocked, was written in honor of work by Cory Doctorow, a from that time on, we’ve released all the tunebacks under Creative Commons licenses. Since we allow derivatives, we even go as far as releasing the raw tracks for some of our songs, for remixing. We’ve so far had two (one, two) remixes just from Overclocked.

Creative Commons encourages musicians to provide the materials that get listeners involved, and listeners who get involved are, as fans, much more loyal, dedicated, and committed to the band and its music than those who just whack it on in iTunes once in a while.

Technically, all you have to do is put a song up under Creative Commons (they can attempt the remix just using the MP3) to give listeners more options. Of course, it’s much more viable to remix from source tracks, but nevertheless, there’s one reason that Creative Commons is great for bands.

A guitar-playing friend of mine is dabbling in the art of on-the-cheap home recording and asked me a question about getting a decent signal. He was going through his computer’s built in line-in and could only get a very small signal that sounded quiet and weak, and if he tried to fix this he got a clipped and distorted signal.

I’m not a recording expert, but I do know it’s important to get the signal right! It’s possible to go directly with the line-in through your computer (my friend didn’t know that input volumes could be adjusted in Windows XP’s software volume controls just like output volumes), but I recommend to anyone who is even half-serious about home recording to at least get a cheap pre-amp. Better yet, get a Behringer Eurorack–you can get them with two phantom-powered microphone/analogue inputs and built-in pre-amps for about AU$100, so it would be well below the $100 mark in America.

From there, all you have to do is turn up the volume, make sure it’s loud enough, and bring it down (or up) enough until the red “Peak” LED stops blinking when you play. Check that you’re getting a similar signal in your computer’s digital audio workstation–loud enough, but the signal metre isn’t hitting red. You’ll have a clear signal with no clipping.

For XP users with no pre-amp or mixer, skip to measuring volume directly in the DAW. For Mac OS X users you don’t even need to check the DAW meter. The input volume settings provide a good signal gauge.

Of course, nothing beats a decent digital input with a built-in pre-amp to get great sound quality, if you have the extra money!