Music Making・For Dummies

By: TheoAllen

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This guide/tutorial is aimed to lift you (the reader) off the ground as quick as possible

General song structure

General harmony

How to make a song even if you don't have a musical background

Piano Roll Guide/Tips (Which mean, software like Anvil Studio, LMMS, Reaper, Cubase, Reason, and FL Studio works)

How to use certain software (go find a tutorial for the software you're using, but I'm going to use FL studio interface as an example)

In-depth harmony and music theories.

How to read/write Partitures/Song notation (so if you're using a software that uses a partiture like Musescore, or Guitar Pro, you're on your own).

Introduction:

General things you have to know:

a measure is (usually) divided by 4 steps

For now, I'm making you sure that you're aware of these first

General Harmony・Basic Triads・Major/Minor chords:

Major: Happy sounding tune, relax

Happy sounding tune, relax Minor: Tension, sad, and the likes

Twisting Major/Minor chords:

Arpeggio・A sequence of notes・A "broken" chord ( More info ):

Spoiler

Let's make a piece of music!

let's make it easier by ignoring all of the black notes

since we're avoiding the black notes

it's called "Diminish" chord

Chord has to change for each measure/bar (see above about measure/bar)

(see above about measure/bar) We're only going to create 4 bars, then loop it (generally music looped nicely if you're going to make it 4 or 8 bars)

Use arpeggios for the chords, inverse/twist it if necessary.

or at least it should be predictable

I probably still have some to talk about, but I will leave this like this at the moment.

The important thing when learning anything is to do the actual work! Music making is no exception. No matter the theory you absorb if you don't do the actual work, you don't get the feeling. Again, hopefully, this guide is enough for you to get started.

Comments, questions, critiques are welcomed (pointing about my grammar is also fine). But remember this guide is supposed to be lightweight.

. Thus, I'm going to make it as simple as possible without too many complicated stuff, terms, theories, and labels. And hopefully, this will convince you (the reader) that composing is not as hard as you might think. For proper learning to music theory, knowing their terms, or knowing how to use certain software, please refers to the tutorial/article that is dedicated to them ( like this one ).I have encountered many people either here, discord servers, and many places that they wanted to compose but don't know where to start. I have also seen many people just scramble notes into their software and those don't even sound like music. They are lacking the features that make it music. I hope this tutorial will guide them. Without further delay, let's get into the topic."Measure" (or bar) and "step" are there to "divide your attention", the thing that makes something music, a consistency. Whatever you compose, please stick with those vertical lines as your guide.. It is probably trivial for composers but common people seem to ignore this important line and just go randomly place the notes without knowing this rule. So this need to spelled out loud.Every piano roll interface should at least have a vertical line to split the different measure/bar. And It can be more complicated , but let's stick with the default 4 steps for the sake of simplicity. But how are we going to actually use this? It's going to be in the later part.I'm not sure if the term "step" is musically correct, but ... you get my point.You're opening up a piano roll, you have no idea what you should do, "How am I supposed to know what I should do? I don't know which note sounds good to hear/listen?". I concur you're probably overwhelmed when you're looked at the piano roll (it did happen to me as well in the past).Well, look no further! meet the basic triads, Major/Minor scale. What are these? These are a combination of notes that is "guaranteed to sound good". In piano roll, they're looked like this. For example,To create a major chord, you just pick whatever the note as a base (C in this example) then look 4 grids above, then 3 more.To create a minor chord, you just reverse the process. Look 3 grids above, then 4 more.So thelooks like this:You can try it right away in your software and hear how it sounds like. In case if it's not clear enough:Composers often use these to create various moods. For example, a battle theme tends to have minor chords as their main focus/tonality.In musical term, shifting one grid above/below is called "half-step" while shifting by two grids is called "whole-step". In case if you want to delve into a music theory later because they will be using these terms quite often.So you know the members of C Major Chords are the note C, E, and G. You can, however, put it in any order you want. It's called "inversion". For example, you can twist it like this, and it's still C Major because they have the same note members (C ~ E ~G). They will still sound nice, but different "color".Of course, you can do it like this as well, and it's stillOf course, putting all the notes together is somewhat boring. We can break them down into a sequence which we usually call them "arpeggio". Something like this:Of course, you can get creative and use whatever model of a sequence as long as the notes are still inside the member of the chords. Here are some of the examples you can try (still using C Major chord):There is not much I can talk about arpeggio, all I could say is just "Right away? Yes! Once you know the basic triads, Major/Minor, you can literally make most of the pop song out there. And if you're still overwhelmed with the piano roll interface,. In which, they're these ones:Now all you need to do is to avoid all the black notes.What I'm suggesting you to do is to use "C Major Scale" or "C Ionian Mode", in case you're curious enough and want to google what I'm talking about (tips: don't, unless you know what it is about).Now,, let's try to look around what is the available chords:You see, B got a little funny 3 ~ 3 rows up,. But we will ignore that particular chord and just focus on C to A. Using diminish chord is tricky and you probably are not going to use it often.But before we are going to proceed further, we're going to set rules:Now, let's throw random chords, starting from C Major, and let's just use A Minor, F Major, G Major (It's already 4 bars). It is going to be like this (you can also try a different pattern to see how it's played out): I suggest the pattern need to be consistent. If it's ascending as I've sent, then all the rest of the bar need to be consistent as well,(Unless you know what you're doing. I've seen common people do it often).How does it sound like in actual music? See here:I just composed this randomly out of the blue while writing this thread)And here is my fave progression ever, A minor - G major - F major - G majorAlso a useful resource (the whole of his channel is wonderful, check it out!):