8 ms·
Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?
I am not a professional musician (just played on a music keyboard for ~8 years till I stopped ~10 years ago), but sometimes various ideas flow into my mind or I want to quickly transcribe (at least some parts of) heard music. The problem is with figuring out and writing down the stuff (or staff if you prefer, but literal staff is not needed, anything easily convertible to SMF or music XML would be fine). And doing it efficiently, obviously.
I lack sound recognition skill (cannot immediately reconstruct heard or thought sounds, have to find them out using trial and error method, which sometimes becomes more effective if I am getting into vibe of currently analyzed tune).
I have my old Casio CTK-750, but:
1. It's not next to my PC, so I have to relocate (it would be acceptable if not the other things below).
2. It has memory only for 2 songs.
(There are though many tracks, so I can abuse them going with single idea per track and muting all others during recording/playing. Cumbersome.)
3. After recording I still lack the score and next day I can easily forget how I played it before.
There is a MIDI stuff. Haven't tried it recently, because my current desktop doesn't have gameport or I don't have the cable anymore or both (don't remember now the exact state, sounds ridiculous, I know). But I tried it many years ago on my AWE32 (that was really expensive and huge back then!) and Cakewalk was getting some more notes than I played (some very high and very low tones), so it was practically useless. Never figured out whether it was bad cable (didn't have the second one), bad keyboard (didn't have the second one) or bad gameport (didn't have second sound one). Maybe I should buy MIDI-on-USB, cable, and recheck it nowadays.
Ad rem. I tried some applications (haven't checked them thoroughly, though) like musescore, noteedit, nted, rosegarden, milky tracker, (modplug on Windows also) and possibly some others I don't remember their names now, but apparently no one has sane recording/playing via keyboard feature. The best what you can get are shortcuts for notes, like C for C, D for D, etc. which are possibly ok for slow editing/tuning purposes, but far from being even acceptable for "live performances". Having some music keyboard mode is so obvious that I am amazed not seeing it anywhere.
Well, there is VMPK, but it doesn't have good enough way of mapping tones (tones -> keys instead the other way, which means you cannot have same tones on two different keys) and I failed at seeing/hearing its output in musescore, i.e. did set the connection via qjackctl's connect dialog box, but musescore doesn't have any way to choose the input provided to it in IO tab. Musescore is not the best target actually, as it is ok only for storing notes alone, without timestamp and duration information.
(I have voluntary preemptable Linux kernel right now in my debian squeeze, so it's suboptimal for MIDI stuff and audio in general, but still have to say that latency I get in VMPK is extremely awfully annoying.)
So tell me HN, what are your music prototyping solutions, suggestions, tips, favorite apps, etc.?
My first AskHN thing here, hopefully it's not too long and I'll get some insightful comments.
- jdietrich 15y agoLogic or Digital Performer on the mac, Cubase on PC. If you're very score-centric, Sibelius. Buy a quality audio interface with MIDI ports. Not cheap, but the only way to get genuinely high quality MIDI and score editing. Trackers are a crutch for people without a musical education and simply aren't sophisticated enough. They represent music mechanically, using an abstraction that collapses in the face of something as mundane as triplets. There are no good sequencers on Linux. Lilypond does excellent engraving, but there's no Free software that'll prepare a score without endless hair pulling.
- conner_bw 15y agoThere's a delay column in Renoise that make triplets trivial. The Lua API and users writing scripts, such as this "Fractional Notes Generator" makes it even more trivial: http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?/topic/28248-allow-float-values-in-edit-step-for-quick-triplets/page__p__221850#entry221850 http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?/topic/28248-allow-fl... I thought this was hacker news were people actually knew how to code? Musically educated in what? Last time I checked we're not troubadours performing occitan lyric poetry in the high middle ages. Trackers aren't for everyone, some things are clearly not reasonable to do in them (recording a live band comes to mind), but the "musical education" and "crutch" comment is without foundation.
- jdietrich 15y agoMusically educated in what? Music. Not genre-based electronic music, but music in it's broadest sense - from bebop to Bulgarian folk music, from Stravinsky to Stockhausen, from Abba to Zappa. I write music for sync. I need things like timecode support, which is a weird niche thing, but also things like tempo and time signature maps, which aren't. In a proper sequencer, I can play in a phrase, then instantly quantise it to any time signature and any tuplet I want. Septuplets in 9/8 are no more difficult than straight eights in 4/4. The grid in my piano roll display will conform to my chosen timing, as will the output of my score editor. I can draw in a series of gradual tempo changes to an automation channel, or extract tempo and groove from an audio or MIDI track to use as a tempo map. If that sounds like an exotic requirement, try arranging a piece in a tracker based around drums recorded without a click, or using a tracker to arrange a version of, say, "Anyone Who Had A Heart" by Burt Bacharach. Trackers represent music in a way that is alien to people who can read classical notation and who have studied composition. Someone with a modicum of training can follow an orchestral score with dozens of parts, scanning the score in real time and picking out the harmonic progression and main melodic theme. That's simply not possible with a tracker, either using numerical or piano roll display. Not an issue if you make primitive electronic music, a cataclysmic failure if you deal with big, complicated arrangements. Trackers are a toy. They're intolerably crude if you're a professional user who has deadlines to meet, but also intolerably crude if you're merely an amateur with musical training. Tracker users don't know what they're missing, overwhelmingly because they can't read or write music, have little understanding of musical theory and no experience of playing in ensemble with trained musicians.