How do you get into writing music?

This is a question that's been sitting in the back of my head for a while, I really want to write music. Not necessarily good music, I just want to be able to do it. Evidently I have no idea where to start and youtube would only provide me with overchoice and end up delaying all this, so I turn to you dearest lainons for help. Do I actually have to know how to play an instrument to make music? It feels like so many people have gotten by without knowing a thing about it. additional questions to break the ice, why and when did you start writing music?

>>13566 What genres of music are you interested in? It would help if you gave more detail about specifics like what motivated you, the sounds you enjoy, what you've tried so far, etc. Regardless, software makes writing music very accessible! I'd suggest visiting openDAW in a browser and drawing some notes onto the piano roll. See how it goes! Try MuseScore if you're interested in less electronic, more acoustic stuff. Music theory can be interesting but none of it is necessary for writing music, if you're prepared to experiment and trust your ear.

>>13566 Out of interest, does anyone know of some good composers through history that didn't do it as their main profession?

Music takes time. Mostly you will be amalgamating songs or genres you like into something that is unique to you(not always tho). Repetition is definitely a factor, most great musicians spends hours upon hours developing skill on an instrument or a few different instruments. You don't have to know how to play an instrument in the technical sense, to make music and even using a synth is a type of instrument, but it's highly unlikely that you just soykaf out songs that are good, or I should say good and unique, if you don't have the skill set. It's a process and what you practice will be what you're most proficient at. Say, there is a guitar player who only practices scales, but never actually writes songs. This person will be great at playing scales, but not so great at writing music or possibly they'll be great at writing solo riffs, but not good at constructing chord progressions. Failure is key in developing music styles. You will suck and you will most likely write bad music at first, this is just an inevitability of progress. You can't be a proficient musician overnight. Learning other people's songs is a great way of developing the skill set to make music you like and/or want to make. Practice, practice, practice. To answer your other question. My drum teacher when I was a teenager used to say "real musicians have day jobs", which at face value isn't very helpful, but he was getting at the hustle and bustle of playing after working. There is a certain ability that comes out after you've wage slaved all day, you don't want to necessarily play music(or maybe you do) and through your tiredness, the music just comes out. Lots of tribal music is geared towards this approach. The release of stress after a long day, through social interactions and fellowship, the music takes over. Though, musicians that we listen to in recordings and streaming etc... are mostly people who play for a living or are studio musicians who have a group of people help them produce music. Being a solo artist is tough. Id recommend listening to Ben jordan on YouTube, he has a very articulate way of explaining musical processes and endeavors through the lense of his own career. I started playing music as a teenager and it took a while to get into the groove of things. Making my own music was not easy but the sounds came almost immediately and I've been off and on playing for years. I'm just now focusing more and practicing more and creating music I am happy with. It took a long time of being crap or just barely making songs that I considered good. Lots of changing my focus of genres and experimentation. Id say that my lyrical progress was a cluster fuarrrk, at one point I was so fuarrrked up on drugs, I'd write pages and pages of gibberish, that slowly became a style I like. Though, writing lyrics was never very difficult for me, I always felt generic until I explored through my own consciousness and refined my process over the years. Sometimes I'll play a song I wrote in my earlier years and like the rawness of it compared to my more refined and structured music I wrote these days. Like anything else, you just need to start doing it, bashing your skull against the medium until your brain naturally starts making pathways and structuring the sounds. No better time than now.

>>13567 >interests too many to count, i'll try to keep it brief to the main ones, 2000s and 2010s j-rock, 80s synthpop and new wave, 80s post hardcore, grunge, nu metal, and depending on how well stitched it is i may include breakcore >motivations i can't explain it, it's just this weird urge in my gut, like I just HAVE to write something, i don't want fame money or anything I guess I just want to feel whatever musicians feel >tried so far sometimes i get too excited and i hit my desk with my fingers pretending i know a single thing about drumming until they start hurting i'll try using opendaw, thank you ! >>13568 you may find dexter holland's (the offspring) non-music career mildly humorous >>13569 >The release of stress after a long day, through social interactions and fellowship, the music takes over. Genuinely an incredible thing to read, I don't think I could've thought of this on my own, i hope you don't mind if I assimilate it and parrot it as my own thought sometime in the future ! >you just need to start doing it, bashing your skull against the medium until your brain naturally starts making pathways and structuring the sounds. that's a very lovely way of putting it >I'd write pages and pages of gibberish, that slowly became a style I like. To further ask on this, how do you go about writing lyrics? Whenever I attempt to do that I feel like I inevitably end up attempting really soykafty poetry, sometimes I feel forced to do rhymes even when I know they're not really necessary. Are your lyrics just something that spring out of a melody you have in mind or viceversa?

>>13576 I think the easiest way to get started is to download a midi file of some of your favourite songs and then just play around with it your editor of choice. Change the instrument tones, the tempo, and eventually start writing your own bits and adding them in. You'll figure out what sounds good and what doesn't soon enough that way. Playing an instrument isn't necessary, but I would say it is very helpful for writing music.

>>13576 >2000s and 2010s j-rock, 80s synthpop and new wave, 80s post hardcore, grunge, nu metal, and depending on how well stitched it is i may include breakcore That's quite a diverse selection. If you want to jump straight into the creation process and learn that way, I'd suggest picking one genre at first. It's like saying you want to "make art", and then citing linoleum prints and pottery. There are shared skills between the two but many techniques apply to one and not the other. >like I just HAVE to write something It's a bit weird that you keep saying "write music"; I thought you meant literally putting pen to paper and scoring sheet music. A lot of musicians just experiment on a keyboard or guitar until they come up with something catchy. Record your finger drumming, hum a tune, play around with digital or physical instruments. It's music, not an essay, you use your ears to make sound. >i'll try using opendaw, thank you ! DAW stands for digital audio workstation. Just like you'd write a report in office, you can make music in a DAW. The process goes like this: You draw in notes and have a digital instrument play them back, or drag audio clips of sound. You then arrange and move these clips around, stack effects and mix the tracks together, and voila you have a song. There are plenty of free (and paid) DAWs and tools for music. After you've explored openDAW for a bit, tutorials for your genre of choice on YouTube can help guide you further with sound design and chords for 80s synths, sampling techniques for breakbeats, etc. Go wild!

>>13566 Just make noises in your head like beep boop da da doo wop and go from there.

>>13576 It says my post is spam, so I'm uploading it in a pic. Idk why it would be considered spam, very dumb restrictions on minute details in my very on topic post... The limitations of this site are tiresome.

>>13649 not related but ask on >>>/q/ with the exact error you came up with appleman usually replies. it's still an open source project looking for contributions (i think) so maybe things slip up idk.

I'm still a beginner, but remembering how clueless I was when I was starting out, I feel like writing a couple pointers. I started about 8 years ago because I thought it was cool, but I've only worked sporiadically, so I never managed to get good. >have no idea where to start You need a DAW, which is a program for music making. Any professional DAW will do, lmms or audacity won't. Music is sound; so you need sources of sound to make music. There are three types of audio sources for computers: microphones, synthesisers and sampling. With a microphone you can record instruments, your voice and random sounds for percussion or ambience. You can use software synths. And finally you can use audio made by other people: sample packs, virtual instruments or sampling breaks/songs directly. Obviously, different styles of music have their own typical instruments and sounds, but some flexibility is possible. A good starting point are soundfonts: they don't take up too much disk space, they are free, and they give you a lot of instruments with decent quality. The compromise is that heavier modern libraries are significantly better at emulating certain instruments, so they can be worth looking into later. Then, you need to learn the very basics of mixing. The truth is that mixing is very closely tied to arrangement, there's a reason why most bands don't have two bassists. The two key ideas are levelling and the frequency spectrum. Leveling means simply setting the volumes of the instruments in a song relative to one another. It's something you do by ear, there aren't really any tricks, but you have to do it consciously. Avoid clipping (any channel going in the red, including master). Also, all sound is composed of a sum of fundamental simple vibrations (aka sine wave), each of which is fully described by a frequency and amplitude (aka volume). A note of an instrument has a pitch, which is the loudest frequency, and a timbre, which is created by a lot of additional higher and quieter frequencies called harmonics. These harmonics are different across instruments, which is why a piano sounds different from a violin even when playing the same note. Different instruments occupy different regions of frequencies. The bass plays lower notes and generally keeps to the lower frequencies. Other instruments play the mid frequencies. The high hats and the letter "s" in human speech occupy high frequencies. The idea more or less is that sounds that occupy similar frequencies are hard to distinguish, which can sound muddy and unpleasant, especially for lower frequencies. The EQ and filter effects can help avoid conflicts, but using them effectively is not simple. The message here is that you need to be careful when adding instruments to a song to avoid conflict or overcrowding. When it comes to composing, music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive, and it mostly fails to explain why music feels the way it does or how to write good music. Nevertheless, learning the basics such as the names of notes, chords and scales is quite useful, just make sure you don't avoid things that sound nice but you can't describe. How you actually write music is by noodling around on an instrument. Keyboards is the best one to pick up, because you can record notes for any synth/virtual instrument directly into your computer (midi). Guitar is a close second, particularly if you're into guitar genres like rock. Most other instruments don't play chords well, which makes them less fit for writing songs. However, if you don't play an instrument, you can still enter notes with a mouse. The problem is that finding a melody you like by clicking on a piano roll is kind of awkward. You could try humming a melody, then try to figure out what the notes are. Some DAWs allow using the computer keyboard as a midi keyboard. So it's possible, but I think getting an actual midi keyboard makes life easier, even if you're not a piano player. The most common advice you'll find for learning to write music is to analyze the music you like, and try to understand how to make stuff like it. Thing to pay attention to: instrumentation, song structure, melody/harmony, bpm, drum patterns, lyrics, etc... P.S. To learn synths, I recommend syntorial. It's an educational program that introduces you to techniques through videos, then makes you recreate synth sounds by ear. It covers subtractive synthesis, which is a good starting point for the modern wavetable stuff. A free but quality synth is vital. Recording with microphones has some nuance, if you go that route you'll have to dig into youtube or other sources. You'll need an audiocard, a cable, a microphone stand and a microphone. If you pick up an electric guitar, the best online resource to learn it is justynguitar. You can also likely plug it directly into an audio card, which would allow you to run a virtual amplifier with loads of different settings and have no need to record with a microphone, just make sure your pc is decent so it can handle that with tolerable latency. Piracy is kind of inevitable, since the prices of most software aren't aimed at amateurs. Rutracker is your best bet. If you really want to avoid piracy, a nagware DAW is reaper. Linux has a few professional DAWs, look it up if you're using it, also, avoid pulseaudio.

>>13682 Most of this is your subjective opinion so I'll let it be, but: >each of which is fully described by a frequency and amplitude (aka volume) This is very incorrect: what about phase? Beyond that, consider that two sinusoids of the same frequency but different amplitude/phase can be summed to make a third sinusoid of the same frequency. Subtle difference, but it's ultimately more useful to think of the spectrum not as a frequency and amplitude for each sinusoid, but an amplitude and phase for each frequency.

>>13683 I had forgotten about phase. I'm not sure how important awareness of phase is for someone who's just starting out, although either way I should not have tried to sound so authoritative. Also, feel free to comment on my subjective opinions as well; yours are probably worth more than mine

It's really easy to get started I don't know what the point of this question is. Just download Sunvox if you want to quickly get into it without all the bullshit.

>>13682 Hey, I've made some really good music on LMMS and then people learn that I made it on LMMS and it catches them by surprise. That is to say that gear cannot substitute creativity, because it's about understanding the mechanics of your tools enough to be able to exercise an intentional relationship with them, understanding that they influence your creative behavior as much as you influence them. Audacity and LMMS suck, but you can absolutely make great music in them by developing mastery. All this being said, what the OP needs to do is figure out how they want to approach music by trying different things out. Borrow a friend's instrument and see if they like playing a traditional instrument or if they're rather more interested in a sound design approach to music (IDM, ambient), rather than a traditional one. I actually started writing a compositional guide for IDM (now abandoned), which will go on my website soon -- just having to wrestle with web BS. It ultimately depends on what your goals are (which you can't know before you start fuarrrking around). Do you find enjoyment in finding novel ways to glitch vocals using something like k-means clustering on wavesets or do get satisfaction in playing with other musicians? My question for the OP is why do you want to make music? What appeals to you about it? The way I make music is by exploring a variety of synthesis methods and processing techniques for fun, until I end up making a patch that gets me inspired, then I work that into a song. It's simply because I get so much pleasure from exploring what the tools can offer and what new tools could exist. Another musician's goal might be to translate their love for Yiddish poetry into music by singing the words of Yiddish poems and adding instrumentation (and if you're curious, Modern Yiddish poetry gets very evocative). Art is a tool for exploration, otherwise there would be no need to make anything if it were all resolved.

Get audience participation and improvise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TURkB9zqxa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtI1rxEgD-U