Self-help

[Zerox Millienium]

Care to share freely available and useful sources on the Internet to learn music on my own.

- Music theory (composition, rhythm, melody, harmony, and so on...)
- Art of sampling

I'm a beginner. Taking up music as hobby. There are lots resources online, however, it's difficult to read through anything and everything that's online. Hard to distinguish which is for beginners or beyond the basics.

Regards.

 

[kongwee]

If you are really difficult in doing this, do consider join a pop music school or teacher to learn about it. At age 25, I start to take up pop music composition and then I moved to learn DAW and started to get pay from music. Have somebody guide you, you are easier to achieve better result. If you are doing alone, you will find it difficult to achieve what you want. Online learning is good. In my case, it is to enhance or strengthen what I started. There are topic not being taught and I pick up online too.

Environment also very important. It will influence you to get deep into music scene. That mean you have a bunch of musician friends. You will be sure you will stay with music.

 

[Zerox Millienium]

If you are really difficult in doing this, do consider join a pop music school or teacher to learn about it. At age 25, I start to take up pop music composition and then I moved to learn DAW and started to get pay from music. Have somebody guide you, you are easier to achieve better result. If you are doing alone, you will find it difficult to achieve what you want. Online learning is good. In my case, it is to enhance or strengthen what I started. There are topic not being taught and I pick up online too.

Environment also very important. It will influence you to get deep into music scene. That mean you have a bunch of musician friends. You will be sure you will stay with music.

I have understood your message. Thanks for the advice.

I'm not certain of what path I would like to tread. There's no plan. Just thought of music as a hobby. Revival of an interest, supposedly dead for a long time. It's not that I've stopped loving music, perhaps not wanting to admit, I lack resolution.

I'll take my time to look around for a course on the subject. Meanwhile, I'll stick around and read scraps of information online.

Regards.

 

[kongwee]

Start with a keyboard or guitar class. While mastering a instrument, learn about song structure. Learn to build chords and understand chord progression/cadence. Learn how melody develop on chord, or vice versa. A lot of school is providing this. Later on you can learn composing or develop by your own.

 

[prkravi]

Its a long journey and better not to do it alone, else you could get distracted / discouraged and lose focus.
Im a beginner myself of keyboard playing, i recently got myself a synth and it completely changed my focus until i realised one day that I was not focussing on playing anymore and was getting into the quick sand of technology...
So Basics are important, get the fundamentals from a tutor, and then you can cram yourself with info on the web...
I've been through that road, hence this advice...All the best.

 

[Zerox Millienium]

Thanks. I'll keep this in mind.

Regards.

 

[ATW10C]

When I first started I couldn't sit down with a tune in my head and pick out which keys to play. Now I can.
Couldn't play with 2 hands. Now I have an acceptable degree of 2 hand independence. But I find my cantabile-ness in the right goes down when using both. Right gets influenced by the left's rhythm. So that's is being worked on. Took a year and a half but it wasn't daily practice. Quite often it was in spurts.

So it can be done on your own at your own time and at your own pace without a live instructor. But I did find some paid online materials critical.

Piano Magic - http://www.pianomagic.com/
here you will learn a strategy to approach playing with 2 hands. But conceptually it is geared for someone who wants to play, not play what they compose. Some of the concepts expounded are detrimental (seems to me) to composing but can be easily filtered out. If you do this course, just remember to have more respect for melody and its intricacies. I read about one thing he wrote about his experience of his students mistakes in pick out the notes. I saw how it applied to me and after that I could pick out notes in a long sequence. Ear training trains only picking out note 1 and 2.

For ear training, play the major scales cognitively. All 12 scales. Forget scales fingering for the moment. Use 1 finger. But you need to get yourself to the point where you can do all 12 scales in like under 2-3 minutes. Also dun make it a counting game, whole step whole step half step... . And dun be afraid to make a mistake. Just listen to how weird a mistake sounds. As for the other scales, unless you are the type that composes by improvisation, if the melody you hear is minor, you will switch to a minor scale automatically when pecking out the notes. If not, repeat the procedure for your next chosen scale.

As for a DAW, Reaper is the cheapest but has some of the best documentation like Reamix and community. I will not waddle into the question of whether it is the best but if you wonder why it is so cheap, well the developer made a lot of money when sold his previous project, Winamp. So don't worry about its quality. Way underpriced relative to others.

For other stuff, I found KVR forum has one of the best crowd with regards to music software matters.

So what left is to see if you what your really want to do with the keys, piano or synth.

 

[Zerox Millienium]

Thanks for sharing.

I'm intrigued by synths and all that tech stuffs you can do in the digital domain.

However, I feel learning the art of playing keys/piano is essential. Ultimately, I want to be able to create, to compose, mainly in the digital domain. I'm not focused right now, because I don't know how. I'm overly excited, perhaps madly obsessed with all the cool stuffs I can do on my PC.

I am playing with DAWs and pseudo-DAWs some might call it (Ableton Live, Image-Line FL Studio, Adobe Audition, Presonus Studio One, Cakewalk Sonar, Propellerhead Software Reason). Yes, I rotate among them whenever I feel like it. Learning a little each time. I don't think they are very different. It's just a matter of work flow and features they offer. So far I get the hang of using them to get soft synths working and playing. Loaded several VST instrument and effect plugins with little effort. It's great fun.

However, I'm going no where. No goal, no direction. Just having fun for now. Sometimes I just think. Hum in few tunes in my head and put it into the piano roll of the MIDI channel and so on. I get stuck after a while, unable to progress. It feels as though as I know nothing at all, about the art of making music.

I can't play any instrument well. I don't know what I'm doing, I simply load digital toys and I'm thrill by it. Like an infant trying to crawl.

Regards.

 

[ATW10C]

Pianist - I watched the Hugh Sung video on Pianoteq. He said 8 or 10 velocities will not cut it for a professional concert pianist. That's what I mean by pianist. I can probably do maybe 5 velocity regions somewhat consistently. So far, it is enough.

And probably for someone at that skill level, piano synths like Pianoteq will trounced any sample library with regards to response. Those who aren't at the level tend to gripe about timbre and go for sample libraries. Digressing.

Play until the thrill is done and you want to work serious. Else choose a goal and get about doing it. Start with the right hand and then 2 hands since you can peck out the notes in a tune. And probably start narrowing down your choice of DAW software. Then there are stuff like SongFrame, RapidComposer, etc.

For me, mostly I hear the whole song at one go. Though on revisits, sometimes new phrases come into my awareness. So save what you got and revisit again later.

 

[Zerox Millienium]

Please critique.

http://soundcloud.com/zeroxmxi/experimental02

Regards.