A few new tunes...

[hardwired]

A few new tunes, getting ready for a new album.

 

[Alien Sugar]

Son...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are you on drugs?

[hardwired]

Nope.

[Alien Sugar]

Way to go! Keep making music.

[ZoeB]

You have potential, but first off, you need to learn some basic music theory. Not necessarily a lot, but enough to know which pitches sound good playing at the same time and which don't. Find a table of which notes are in which key (here's one I made earlier), and try making a good few dozen tracks that, at any given time, stick to the notes of just one key. It can get much more complicated than that, of course, but as a starting point, that's the bike stabilisers that will get your music to sound harmonious. Of course, music that sounds discordant can be useful as an effect, if you want to unsettle the listener, say, but you need to know enough to only do it on purpose at appropriate times, rather than out of naïveté. So I'd start with that. Keep at it, though, as you're not far off from making quite interesting music.

[th555]

Fluid Mosaic is cool, great sounds.

[hardwired]

Thanks for the feedback on Fluid Mosaic th555.

 

Thanks ZoeB. Thanks for the constructive feedback. I'm still a little stuck though. I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind helping me understand a little more. I'll openly admit I didn't set out intentionally to make the listener feel uneasy. I've actually been sticking to C Major. All the "white keys". So I'm not 100% sure where I'm going wrong. I've looked over "Adherens Junctions" and everything is in C Major.

 

I use software synths (In this case a poly 61 vst I just got my hands one), and tend to patch them from scratch each time. I also like to detune them, one way or another. Now after playing "Adherens Junctions" to my wife and getting some pretty harsh feedback (In a nice way!). She's grade 8 alto sax and gets wound up that I've not taken music theory more seriously. So I started reading "Music Theory for Computer Musicians" again, on the way to London last week. I got to the part where he was writing about harmonics and wondered the following. Is the fact I'm detuning the sythns causing this effect or am I completely wrong?

 

Thanks for the chart, its awesome! I've learn't how to use it tonight and I'll be trying it over the next few months. Once I've done a few tunes I'll post em.

[ZoeB]

Is that avatar Briareos from Appleseed?

 

OK, so as a very basic starting point, yes, you can stick to the white keys (C major), or the black keys (one of the pentatonic scales; this is what Aphex Twin uses in On, for instance). Also make sure you don't play two consecutive notes at the same time. So don't just play C and D and E, that'll sound terrible. You can play C and E, and even the D an octave up, but always have gaps. That's the bare basics, and you can write some simple dance music now. :) Other keys are good for variety, but you can always pitch the whole thing after the fact. If you're really lazy, you can even do that by retuning the synth's oscillators instead of changing the notation.

 

So let's say you've practiced that a bit and then you've grown bored. Let's try chords! So you look at the table, and each row has all the notes in that key. The top one's C major, all the white notes, simple enough. If you look at the headings of the columns, you can see that the key of C major has six chords in it: C major, F major, G major (enough to play Pulsewidth), A minor, E minor, and D minor. Now you just need to know which notes are in each of those chords.

 

Now, you can use the same tables to look up the notes of the chord. It's the first, third and fifth column. So if you look up C major, the chord (not key) C major consists of C, E, and G. The chord (not key) of E minor, down in the minor table, consists of E, G and B. And it just so happens that all the notes of all those chords are present in the key, C major.

 

So, to make things particularly musical, you can decide that at any given time, you'll just use notes from one particular chord in the key the song's in, but you'll change the chord every few bars. Maybe you'll use notes only in G major, then only in F major, then only in C major, then only in C major again. (Again, Pulsewidth style. Or Butterfly Holocaust style.)

 

How strict you want to get depends on how simplistic and tuneful you want to get vs. how experimental and interesting you want to get. A little bit of breaking the rules is good, but you need to practice the basics first. Eventually you can get more comfortable adding in notes that are outside of the chord you're playing and outside of the song's key, but personally I pretty much never do this (which is one reason why my music has a sickly sweet sing-songy quality about it... which personally I think is necessary to juxtapose the weird sounds most people probably aren't used to, because I'm experimenting more with the timbres themselves).

 

On the simplistic side, you can add a simple bassline that mostly consists of the first of the three notes of the chord playing. This is what most pop songs do most of the time, I think (though I'm not sure). Dance music tends to eschew chords more and be more repetitive.

 

Oh, another neat thing is inversions. So instead of playing C, E and G for your C major chord, you can play E, G and the next C up. Or G, C, E.

 

Another fun thing to experiment with is structure. In pop songs, that's the intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus, outro. Each of these can have a different chord progression to the others. Dance music often ignores this too. Using some more Aphex examples, Analogue Bubblebath doesn't really have much structure. It's a bunch of stuff that happens, in key. Pancake Lizard's an interesting one, that toggles between two sections (basically, two chord progressions, with a bit of variation of which instruments are there too), then at 2:44, it segues into a completely new section and repeats variations of that one through to the end. Trent Reznor's particularly good at having fun pop sensibilities musically (juxtaposed against harsh timbres and lyrical subject matter), then for the ending completely going off on one into some new section entirely. Basically, the bridge doesn't lead back to the chorus, it just goes off on its own tangent, building up to something quite different. Closer and Ruiner, for example, are more verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, bridge, outro, outro, more or less. Interesting. I think Aphex Twin got into structure around about Melodies From Mars era. Everything before then, more or less, is one big section with different parts coming and going. Everything after gets more complex. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if Orbital made a single chord progression before Wonky? Electronic dance music isn't the best for theory, so it can be healthy to listen to various other genres and cross-pollinate ideas.

 

Anyway, once you're bored of all that, you can try fun things for variation, such as changing key in the middle of the song, especially using a chord that's present in two different keys, to switch from one to the other. Quite a few songs have one key for the verse and another for the chorus. (Such as one of Alanis Morissette's popular songs from her first album, I forget which.) You can also change up a key to ratchet up the tension (the truck driver's gear change) or occasionally drop down for a few bars (6:52 into Actium, for example) or up for a few bars (1:24 into Jonathan Dunn's Ocean Loader 4), or vary the chord progression unexpectedly (2:10 into Matthew Cannon's Night Breed). Why yes, I've been listening to a few SID tunes lately.

 

Bear in mind I'm entirely self-taught at music and quite simplistic at it, but that'll be a good start at least. Probably a pretty good middle, too.

 

I wrote more about this on my website, but haven't read it in years, so it's possible I'd cringe at some of the stuff there if I re-read it now. It might be useful, it might not. The book you have is likely far more authoritative!

 

As far as detuning the synth can go, remember all this is relative. If it has one oscillator and it's detuned the same amount throughout the song, it will sound in tune to most people (everyone who can't hear absolute pitch, which I think is most people). I've written a few songs in the key of something-and-a-half due to forgetting to tune my analogue synth, which was only a problem when I added another part over the top and had to detune it the same amount. :)

 

Now, if you have several different patches in the song, they should be detuned roughly the same amount. And if you have several oscillators, they should be tuned roughly the same as each other. Just how roughly is a matter of taste. A little detuning can fatten things up. A lot will annoy most listeners.

 

The more you practice, perform and listen, the easier it becomes to tell when something's out of tune. My first few hundred tracks, I had no idea. I got my fair share of "Argh, make it stop!" reactions from people who could clearly hear something I couldn't yet. I'm now at the point where I can hear one of my tracks and realise a single note needs fixing. You can exercise your ability to hear these things, basically.

 

Good luck! And yes, please do post updates every now and then. It'll be interesting to chart your progress. It's a pretty odd feeling to go through tracks you wrote nearly twenty years ago and hear just how far you've come, too!

 

On a side note, everyone goes through all this learning. No one's born knowing all this. With most musicians, they don't get to release anything on a record label (remember those?) until they've mastered all this. Electronic music seems to have been a bit different though, being more about who had access to those particular tools, most of whom seemed not to know much music theory. A lot of early Aphex Twin is out of tune, and not on purpose, I'm pretty sure. (Leaving Home's organ part is particularly bad, though it's a nice enough timbre that it masks it.) A lot of early Orbital, too. (The green album's pretty difficult to listen to in places once your ears become accustomed to nice harmonics.) Freddy Fresh's Hillbilly 303's especially bad, with a nice tune mashed together with a nice 303 solo that are not at all in the same key. Which is a shame, as it's a really fun little track otherwise.

 

Anyway, once you get the hang of this, your music will sound nicer than those example tracks in at least one way, and your wife will certainly be happier! :)

[hardwired]

Thanks ZoeB for such a fantastic response. Its awesome. The book can be a bit difficult to get my head round sometimes. It's nice to have it explained in a different way. I'm doing a few tracks using the pentatonic scale at the minute. Interestingly its not as easy as I thought, but seems more descriptive.

 

I did have a look round your website, and your tube video's, there really cool. Learned a lot from them too.

 

In regards to the avatar I'm not really sure, I found it years ago and thought I'd use it. I have an idea for a logo but I'd rather work on the music first and get that bit right.

 

Again, thanks so so much for the feedback. Cant thank you enough.

[ZoeB]

You're welcome! I'm glad I could help. :)

[The Sponge Wiggler]

i think i probably like transverse diffusion the most, i'd cut off the first 28 seconds, but that's just me i guess