There are a lot of bands that have been using Live for performance. Right now Sylvan Esso is my favorite of this new instrument.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ELNiiAldfyM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ELNiiAldfyM</a>PS The song is radio and has everything right about why I have always HATED mainstream pop radio.

Get Started Making Music (In Ableton Live).Love the simplicity, though it does seem to favor EMD (for obvious reasons).I&#x27;ve always loved the idea of using Live in a live improvisation context, potentially with multiple instruments having their own looping setup; or just a solo thing. It&#x27;s hard to find that sort of thing, though.Checking out Tone.js now.

I belive its based around their flagship, Ableton Live [0].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ableton.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;shop&#x2F;live&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ableton.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;shop&#x2F;live&#x2F;</a>

Check out Auxy for iPhone for a really simple way to get started with sequencers.

Wow, this looks great. Is there an app for this? I&#x27;d love for my son to try.

For those wondering, this is made with Elm lang, Web Audio &amp; Tone.js [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AbletonDev&#x2F;status&#x2F;861580662620508160" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AbletonDev&#x2F;status&#x2F;861580662620508160</a>

I started in that mode (since I tend to do long drones) but once I adjusted to the non-linear workflow it became super easy. It helps that the ecosystem around Ableton is so rich now.

What does &quot;hybrid clip&quot; mean? Audio + MIDI in the same track? Live&#x27;s arrangement view + session view in the same screen?

It&#x27;s pretty easy to get the grid idea, but when you start trying to do anything more complicated Ableton turns out to be a mess, with many limitations and arbitrary weirdnesses.E.g. you can&#x27;t send MIDI sysex out of Live (except to the Push 2 controller). That kills it for all kinds of hardware automation and advanced synth programming.Live has no concept of a mono track, so it wastes a lot of DSP resources processing effects and mixes in stereo for no reason.There&#x27;s no simple hybrid clip arranger mode, which is something most other DAWs can do.MIDI clip files come with an audio preview. The clips aren&#x27;t associated with any drum sounds. So you hear the preview, think &quot;I like that...&quot;, load it, and then you have to spend half an hour picking the right drum sounds for it.And so on. I&#x27;ve really tried to like working with Live, but there are just too many design decisions that make no sense for it be to anything other than frustrating.

I moved from Cubase to FL two years ago. I&#x27;m in love with the patterns in FL!The only thing I really miss was the feature in Cubase where you could add effects to an audio pattern in a destructive way. You could create really complex and glitchy patterns and it was easy to mix them together (cross fade and such).The other thing I would love ImageLine to do is a better workflow when you use audio samples directly in the sequencer. Things like fade in and fade out and a much bigger zoom overall in the sequencer to move samples around.Edit : I know you can work with Edison but it isn&#x27;t intuitive imo

FL Studio has a nice learning curve too, though different. FL&#x27;s best features IMO are the pattern sequencer and the piano roll. So intuitive, once you get the DAWs flow you just get creative and the limits disappear.

The Ableton hate is pretty unfounded. Most people use third party synths and effects anyway so who cares about what the DAW comes prepackaged with.

The Kaossilator 1 (KO-1) is available on ebay for under $100 and they are massive fun.  Never a boring train&#x2F;plane journey with a KO-1 and some headphones.

&gt; Took about an hour to hook up an Xbox360 controller so I got a few x-y inputs. Ableton makes it super easy to map them.Fun tip: You can do this with an Xbox 360 (probably Xbox One) Rock Band drum kit for a cheap e-kit. The drumkit just sends gamepad input and there are programs to convert that to MIDI.

I agree. A lot of the other UIs are insane. One of them boasts about its full physics package to accurately render the cables connecting one &quot;device&quot; to another. I thought it was so gimmicky but a lot of them do the same stuff and people buy it so what do I know. Ableton just makes sense.But maybe because I&#x27;m not an artist. I just like learning these tools. I will say that with a few hundred bucks of equipment (a Launchpad and a Kaossilator2) I&#x27;ve had hours of fun just &quot;jamming&quot;.Also for more technical fun, there are 3rd party MIDI loopback interfaces available on Windows, so it&#x27;s easy to write your own instruments. Took about an hour to hook up an Xbox360 controller so I got a few x-y inputs. Ableton makes it super easy to map them.

I can&#x27;t speak for other DAW&#x27;s, but Ableton was really easy for me to pick up as a complete novice to digital music production

If you like that, you&#x27;ll love Madeon&#x27;s Adventure Machine - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madeon.fr&#x2F;adventuremachine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madeon.fr&#x2F;adventuremachine&#x2F;</a>

Similar concept using Daft Punk samples instead: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;readonlymemories.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;readonlymemories.com&#x2F;</a> plus some filtering and looping capability.

One could argue that the basics involve putting sounds together in the simplest way possible - something like this. And that it takes far more work and skill to get to the advanced, low level stuff like writing on staff paper (and on the production side, compression, EQ, mastering, etc.).To put it another way: Is learning x86 assembly the &quot;basics of computer programming&quot;?

If you&#x27;re taking a hardline-traditionalist approach to what constitutes music, why stop at pencil, paper and hard work. Music has existed long before written notation and documented musical theory. You&#x27;re not only taking an incredibly western-centric view, but you&#x27;re ignoring a large amount of music by doing so.

Yikes, don&#x27;t tell Dave Grohl, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, and the countless other musicians who don&#x27;t know how to read or write sheet music...

I somewhat agree with your first sentence, but it&#x27;s not a super advanced technique, either.It&#x27;s simply teaching rhythm and orchestration utilizing a step-sequencer. Similar to how beginners to music are taught rhythm and division of the beat, or Common Core Math grouping.

You may be new here, but asking for downvotes has been in the guidelines for ever.Please don&#x27;t bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or proclaim that you expect to get downvoted.

I have a musician friend who doesn&#x27;t think drums are a musical instrument and that drummers are not musicians. As far as I can figure it&#x27;s has primarily to do with drums not having the same concepts of pitch&#x2F;melody.I feel like this is along your line of reasoning- only certain (classical, western) ways of doing music is real music.

This is not the basics of making music. It&#x27;s a super advanced technique using a computer.  The real basics involve pencil, (staff) paper, and hard work.  Downvotes please.

I noticed many people commenting here think there&#x27;s only one page.There&#x27;s more -- scroll down and click next.

Not sure if that&#x27;s a typo or intended...

&gt; For those of us who haven&#x27;t used abortion yet, what is it missing?AutoCorrect fail? Or not-so-subtle criticism of the product? ;)

It just encourages so much grid based work that you tend to lose perspective on the fact that most of the music made throughout all of the history of ever wasn&#x27;t actually on a grid.I love ableton a ton. It just encourages a limited mind set.

For those of us who haven&#x27;t used Ableton yet, what is it missing?Edit: fixed autocorrect typo

That&#x27;s arguing from authority and ignoring the meat of my point.I know Robert Henke created Ableton Live and it was a tremendous innovation when it came out.Over time it gradually expanded features but never dealt with a variety of things that might be development intensive but would in no way break the workflow.For example:Support advanced midi stuff. Like, any of it. Why is it so mind bogglingly inconvenient for me to hook up my continuum or my linnstrument to Live?Loops of arbitrary length&#x2F;non warped loops, as I mentioned in another comment, are unnecessarily hard to implement.Why can&#x27;t I midi map to certain controls, why can&#x27;t I macro map to certain controls.Why can&#x27;t I easily lock stuff in the arrangement view so I am not terrified to change the master tempo.Why can&#x27;t I group things in arrangement and edit them together.why can&#x27;t I intuitively stretch a sample in arrangement view, when the whole sell of ableton is time stretching?None of that would break the workflow.

I really don&#x27;t buy this. Ableton was created by an excellent musician (Robert Henke), and its design reflects a musician&#x27;s perspective. It&#x27;s intuitive and flexible. It doesn&#x27;t work for every possible workflow, but no individual piece of software could.

Reaper is incredibly full-featured and free&#x2F;cheap.

I tend to recommend ... Ableton! I think the strengths outweigh the weaknesses, especially for beginners.But they are trapped in a sort of convention that makes my life hell when I want to leave it.

It seems to me each DAW focuses on a particular problematic.- Ableton Live: focus on painless transition between live and written electronic music, quick producing- Reason: focus on modulating everything with a studio feel- Orion: focus on cleanly mixing looping music, slow producing- FLStudio: focus on composing looping music- Reaper: focus on customization and performance- Protools: focus on getting the most money out of the customer- Logic: focus on getting the sound you want and making a song easily, pre-made effect chains- Studio One: a bit similar to Logic in spirit- Cubase: I don&#x27;t know what it focuses on tbhA major problematic is that the topdown goal of making one song may easily be dwarfed by mixing difficulties that can then capture your focus forever (aka &quot;loopitis&quot;).As an audio plugin developer, I get to know a bit of every 
DAW out there, for testing. A popular opinion is that tools don&#x27;t matter for making music, but a more realistic opinion is that they actually do matter, by warping how you think about the problem.

What DAW you would recommend? And what features do Ableton miss?

I think either my phrasing was terrible (likely) or people aren&#x27;t seriously considering what I am saying.Try just looping a sample that is of arbitrary length, not some multiple of beats. This is something that we could do fairly easily since the 1980s, and with moderate effort before that. Ableton made this in to an unusual technique.The entire arrangement view only superficially resembles protools, the automation, the time stretching, everything really, is completely different.

Hate to be a pedant... but I&#x27;m not sure any one person gets to define what &quot;music in the art sense&quot; even is.Yes, Ableton is rigid. Yes, Ableton favors certain musical styles over others. Yes, Ableton, here and in their design of Live, may just be giving lip service to anything beyond rigid song structure, tempo and dynamic changes, etc. Yes, Ableton loves their little boxes.But, I find it hard to believe that Ableton has a &quot;complete disregard for music in the art sense.&quot; If &quot;art&quot; inherently means &quot;unquantifiability&quot; or pure &quot;aesthetics&quot;, then sure, session view Live might not be your best bet. Regardless, arrangement view is basically the same as Pro Tools as far as I can tell&#x2F;remember from what I&#x27;ve used of Pro Tools.What is Live missing for you?

Music is made in your head, the DAW is just a tool to get it out. You can turn off grid snapping and use samples the way you like and many more creative methods to do whatever you please.&gt; So many aspects of music are very annoying or borderline impossible to do in ableton.Like what? Scoring music? How about using a proper tool then? Nobody complains that they can&#x27;t write hardware drivers in PHP.My DAW is Reason and because it sucks in making mixtapes I got Ableton too because it&#x27;s superior in that use case.

Typical HN poison?Please refer to my comment history and also please rebut specific things I said. I rarely say negative things and I am a user of this product all the time. I am genuinely frustrated by the lack of progress in recent years, since I use the product literally every day. This is not poison, it is legitimate criticism.

Right on. Anything can be an instrument from a 5 gallon bucket to a $100,000 concert piano. I never understood the snobbery, even among hacker crowds even, for people using certain tools to create music. Heck my C64 made music to the tune of Daisy and it was super cool. If someone wants to produce live music I am all for that.PS Punk Rock and Indie Rock still is better then whatever else anyone else listens to :) Just jokes.

I feel the need to address some of the typical HN poison floating around. I&#x27;ve got a very expensive music education. It doesn&#x27;t make me better than an &quot;Ableton clicker&quot;. Music is open to anybody, and is defined by what moves one, not by the mechanism of its creation. America really tends to treat it as some exclusive art club (beyond required elementary school classes), and that&#x27;s really just wrong.

Ableton Live is my main daw. I use it every day, generally for hours, and for a wide variety of purposes.The most depressing thing about ableton is made obvious in two seconds of messing with that tutorial. A complete disregard for music in the sense of pushing boundaries of time, or doing things that are not tied to any sort of grid, and the sense of music as an emotive form.So many aspects of music are very annoying or borderline impossible to do in ableton. Yet in all these years, and with so many installations, they just never addressed those issues. Instead they vaguely pretend as if music that would require features they don&#x27;t have is radically experimental. Which might become true if so many people learn music only through using their software.Seriously, Ableton. Stop pretending making music is clicking on and off in little boxes. It&#x27;s embarrassing.--Edited to take out the &quot;art&quot; part and put in a couple of more specific criticisms.

Not to mention that OP-1 stands for overpriced-1, you can do much more with way more affordable gear.

It&#x27;s a cool video, but not really a very basic piece of equipment.&gt; That&#x27;s actually a $900 synth&#x2F;sampler&#x2F;effects processing unit called the Op-1 by Teenage Engineering.From this thread on &#x2F;r&#x2F;ArtisanVideos:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ArtisanVideos&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6a2yq4&#x2F;guy_making_electronic_music_with_simple_synth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ArtisanVideos&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6a2yq4&#x2F;guy_m...</a>

What&#x27;s especially impressive is that the OP-1 has only four tracks, and only does destructive recording with no undo. Meaning that if you want more than four instruments, you have to overdub the same track, and any mistake will ruin the current loop.In other words, you really need to know what you&#x27;re doing and have a really good idea of what you want to play to be able to make a song as elaborate as this.

Related, this is trending on reddit this morning. Just fascinating to watch someone build a catchy track up on such a (apparently) basic piece of equipment...<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FK5cU9qWRg0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FK5cU9qWRg0</a>

Intro has a limit on how many tracks you can have.  Which makes it more or less unusable for my purposes.

Wow this is super high quality content.  Props to Ableton.  By far my favorite DAW, but I wish they would come out with a cheaper license.

Are you able to use the Push as a generic input device? Could it drive something other than the Ableton software?I can think of a ton of things I&#x27;d like to do where having a custom &quot;keyboard&quot; would be awesome.

I have a Push (v1) and it&#x27;s a lot of fun. The whole idea is to pull out the functionality from Ableton onto a tactile device, and I think it succeeds in doing so. When I play with it, I stash my laptop to the side beecause you don&#x27;t really need to stay glued to the screen while working with it.Beyond its utility, it&#x27;s a really beautiful device.

Here&#x27;s the thing: music is a lot like math. The more you practice it, the more you find yourself becoming a &quot;natural&quot; at it.I used to be terrible at math. Then I found a teacher who basically made me work every day on math problems.Within a few months, I found that I actually enjoyed maths, and was even good at it.Of course, without natural talent you&#x27;re not going to become the next Bowie, but even a bit of practice can make you surprisingly competent.

Me too. I own a Push 2 and Ableton Suite and I just practice and listen to a lot of music. Soon I will have some tracks to put up on sound cloud.

As someone who has no musical talent whatsoever, I&#x27;m oddly intrigued by Ableton&#x27;s products. I&#x27;ve occasionally stumbled across the Push[0] and been fascinated by it as an input device.This site is another thing to add to my Intriguing Stuff list.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ableton.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;push&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ableton.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;push&#x2F;</a>

I found the Circles, Sines and Signals to be amazing too. An awesome introduction. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jackschaedler.github.io&#x2F;circles-sines-signals&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jackschaedler.github.io&#x2F;circles-sines-signals&#x2F;</a>

Check out Jack Schaedler who works in this at Ableton <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jackschaedler.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jackschaedler.github.io&#x2F;</a>He even made an interactive essay about the GRAIL text recognizer from the 1960s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jackschaedler.github.io&#x2F;handwriting-recognition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jackschaedler.github.io&#x2F;handwriting-recognition&#x2F;</a>

They put Tone.js to good use.
Promoting Ableton by showing what cool stuff you can do with free js library that can work in browser, weird?
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tonejs.github.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tonejs.github.io</a>

Post youtube link of sound to genre appropriate producers forum or facebook group.For the longer route this is a classic <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.soundonsound.com&#x2F;techniques&#x2F;synth-secrets" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.soundonsound.com&#x2F;techniques&#x2F;synth-secrets</a>

There&#x27;s no easy way. As you mention, this is arcane knowledge--people really do study it for years or decades to train their ears to the appropriate levels. The two big components are standard music production techniques (reverb, compression, EQ, appropriate mic usage, etc.) and then domain-specific knowledge for the instrument (characteristics of different guitar amps, say, or synth filters).

Seconded. Syntorial is an awesome way to learn to program synthesizer sounds. It plays a sound, then you replicate it with the synth controls. It starts easy and gradually ramps up the difficulty, adding more knobs to twiddle, explaining the concepts as it goes along. It&#x27;s a million times better than staring at a full synth control board, moving knobs and hoping that you figure it out eventually.

Syntorial is pretty good. If you&#x27;re looking for something free (and much more basic), I have a quick video series on YouTube: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=VSwjp7Zt1GY&amp;list=PLKzX4WhkkVJ4NP-QtR_hQdgjMtYNxkdTH" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=VSwjp7Zt1GY&amp;list=PLKzX4WhkkV...</a> 
I built it as part of my course I&#x27;m working on for Sagefy, so that would include some multiple choice practice questions too:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sagefy.org&#x2F;subjects&#x2F;CgDRJPfzJuTR916HdmosA3A8&#x2F;landing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sagefy.org&#x2F;subjects&#x2F;CgDRJPfzJuTR916HdmosA3A8&#x2F;landing</a>
But there&#x27;s nothing quite like just using the tools and getting experience directly, for sure.

At least when it comes to synths, check out Syntorial. It&#x27;s very similar to what you want, though it only covers a certain kind of synthesis.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.syntorial.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.syntorial.com</a>

as other replies allude it&#x27;s also highly genre&#x2F;goal dependant.if you&#x27;re trying to make your rock band sound more like led zeppelin there is a fairly fixed set of tools and instructions (albeit futile, ultimately)if you are imagining a pure sound in your head that is not straightforwardly produced by an instrument, then it gets a lot more complicated, and there are countless routes to the same goal. the experimenting is the fun part though!

Aside from training the ear, you need a pretty sophisticated understanding of how soundwaves translate into sound.

Picking up an analogue synth with all the knobs on the front is a good way to get your head around sound design, and very quickly discovering what does what (sound-wise). An oscilloscope on the output also allows you to see what is physically happening. VSTs tend to &#x27;get in the way&#x27; because of the interface, but obviously you could get something like Diva and experiment in the same way. I think reading up on the physics of oscillators, filters, envelopes etc. can be a real help getting that picture in your mind of how to make the sound you want as well.I&#x27;ve been building up bit of an epic studio [1] over the past few years after being in-the-box for years. And the hands on nature of real synths is so much more intuitive that VSTs imho.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyurl.com&#x2F;kzl97vl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyurl.com&#x2F;kzl97vl</a>

This is something I struggle as a weekend hobbyist musician: There is some kind of black art involved in making music, in how to get that sound you enjoy on the music you like (which is probably the music that inspires you to make music, at least in my case).What I found was that as your music making experience unfolds, you start amassing these little tricks here and there and they&#x27;re only yours, usually tied to your stack of tools and the way you think. That is extremely hard to replicate and also very personal, imho that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s so difficult to actually pass that sound-sculpting knowledge to others, and that&#x27;s why (besides the odd youtube tutorial on how to make a specific sound -- usually targeted at a specific vst, explaining which knobs to turn), we won&#x27;t find many general sound sculpting learning material online. Even tho it is available if you gather around from forums and etc, it is still pretty much a personal experience.Answering your question: As the time passed, the endless experimenting diminished and I got a proper sense of what does what, and after 5 years making music I&#x27;m more able to pinpoint what I need to fiddle to transform the sound the way I want&#x2F;imagine in my head.I&#x27;m still not quite there yet but if I can offer one piece of advice, that is: Don&#x27;t shun the &#x27;endlessly experimenting to find a sound&#x27;-thingy, because that&#x27;s the best way you can grasp the tools. Over time you&#x27;ll be able to get there faster but it&#x27;s a necessity..This is how much I evolved, without even noticing, only making tracks after tracks:Sep 07 &#x2F; 2012 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;codegrub.org&#x2F;flipbit&#x2F;musicmaking&#x2F;equal02.mp3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;codegrub.org&#x2F;flipbit&#x2F;musicmaking&#x2F;equal02.mp3</a> cringeMar 25 &#x2F; 2017 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;codegrub.org&#x2F;flipbit&#x2F;tracks&#x2F;flipbit03%20-%20Twothousandseventeen%20%28feat.%20Marcix%29.mp3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;codegrub.org&#x2F;flipbit&#x2F;tracks&#x2F;flipbit03%20-%20Twothousa...</a>cya o&#x2F;

I would even narrow that list down to one: Harmonics. Once it clicked in my mind that every sound is just a combination of sine waves, and that it&#x27;s the intervals, amplitudes, and dynamics of those sines that make up everything we hear, it made sound design a lot clearer for me.Of course, finding the right waveforms, filters, and envelopes required to get to a particular pattern of sines is still the challenge, but having that understanding of the medium underlying it all makes experimentation that much more productive (and fun).

Also people who have really hot Sound Tips generally don&#x27;t want to give them away. If you can make a unique sound with some special trick you will have an advantage over your enemies (other musicians).

You&#x27;re right that it&#x27;s a staggering amount of arcane knowledge. But starting out I always recommend experimentation over getting too deep into the theory. It does help to have some baseline understanding of:1. Frequency
2. Harmonics
3. Oscillators&#x2F;Waveforms
4. Envelopes
5. FiltersThe only problem with the last part of your request is that even if you are to watch people design sounds for a couple of hours you might find that when you try to replicate that somewhere else it doesn&#x27;t sound right. This is partially because every synth&#x2F;softsynth is different and will produce different sounds and have different parameters. It can be infuriating to get a tutorial on how to produce that perfect &quot;Bladerunner Blues&quot; synth and come out with something that sounds totally flat and bad.To make matters worse, there are apparently 0 good tutorials on the subject - I just googled for 15 minutes to no avail. The two below cover some of it but I personally can&#x27;t bear listening to the people who make these videos.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TvQVQuV-Kys" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TvQVQuV-Kys</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lJVlWdzoZ0w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lJVlWdzoZ0w</a>

It&#x27;s one reason I like monosynths (or or two oscillators). Really helps you understand basic subtractive synthesis.  Then you can layer on.  A very simple modular system can help too because you have to understand the fundamental of sound and modulation.

Serum is the easiest synth I have ever used. There are a lot of controls, but they all make sense. And if one is just starting out, they can ignore most of the controls and focus on just the basics: Waveform, envelop, filter. Then move to modulation starting with LFOs. (Modulation is where Serum really shines. It is literally drag-and-drop. Compared to the modulation matrices that many synths use, it&#x27;s a cake walk.)If you think Serum look complex, take a look at Zebra 2.

Oh man that is a rabbit hole you don&#x27;t want to go down. Modern software synths are extremely complex, but also extremely powerful.I mean, look at the interface for Serum, probably the best synth on the market right now:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;d84g6yundlaof.cloudfront.net&#x2F;assets&#x2F;serum&#x2F;serumall-b4e3f2c19f47e68cff7b1767eb7af20d629844ba1dfae517ed57ee796bc0b8d9.gif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;d84g6yundlaof.cloudfront.net&#x2F;assets&#x2F;serum&#x2F;serumall-b...</a>It looks like an airplane&#x27;s cockpit.Sound design is a whole another part of music. Most amateur musicians don&#x27;t even bother with it because it is way to technical to master. They just use presets.I personally hate it, but if you have a technical bent, you might enjoy it

The people at Ableton are well aware of this (the term &quot;the studio as an instrument&quot; comes up quite often at their event &quot;Loop&quot;) but I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s a better way to learn besides experimenting. I&#x27;ve heard quite a lot of stories about (electronic) music creators telling about their beginnings, how they would ask for help to more experimented friends, how they would reply &quot;no, just try things&quot;, then how they felt in the end it was a good thing once it &quot;clicked.&quot;

THIS, this right here. That idea has come to my mind many times, having something like a library of &quot;recipes&quot; for sounds. The hardest part for me whenever I try to do something in FL Studio is getting the source samples and make them sound the way I want individually. It&#x27;s a shame to have an idea for a song in my head and not being able to materialize it just because I don&#x27;t know what kind of plugin or instrument I should use.

This is some good coverage of the music theory behind songwriting, which is important in making songs that sound good.However, there&#x27;s another part of making music which is not covered at all here, which is the actual engineering of sounds. Think of a sound in your head and recreate it digitally—it&#x27;ll involve sampling and synthesizing, there&#x27;s tons of filters and sound manipulation to go through, they all go by different names and have different purposes—it&#x27;s a staggering amount of arcane knowledge.Where is the learning material on how to do this without experimenting endlessly or looking up everything you see? I want a reverse dictionary of sorts, where I hear a transformation of a sound and I learn what processing it took to get there in a DAW. This would be incredibly useful to learn from.

I used to be a professional musician and I&#x27;ve used a lot of real Ableton equipment and I still found this incredibly interesting and fun.

I&#x27;ve been using Ableton Live for about a week after getting a free copy with the USB interface I bought (Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, highly recommend) and I had to turn to YouTube to figure out how to actually sequence MIDI drums in it.I use it pretty much solely for recording, but I take advantage of the MIDI sequencer functions to program in a drum beat instead of recording to a click, because I&#x27;ve found my timing and rhythm is so much better playing to drums than it is just playing to a metronome.

Yes, studied music on the conservatorium and have been a professional producer for years doing pop and edm etc.. Used most of the known DAW&#x27;s from FL to ProTools.

Making music (also EDM) is really, really hard. Most people that try will fail, and Ableton knows that. They are just trying to sell their product here which is fair enough. But &#x27;getting started making music&#x27; is like you only need their product, trigger some samples and you can be an artist too.Try sit behind a drum kit for the first time, you think you can start making music? Most aspiring drummers need to practice for years before you can play a reasonable beat. Same with EDM, it takes many years of practice and improving all kinds of skills. This tutorial is just showing how you can trigger samples in a grid and how you can put this together in a DAW. For me that is not making music, sorry.Btw, the resulting loops in the tutorial were not made by beginners, and listen to the result, is that music to you? Would you buy that? Another title that would be appropriate but not sell, could be: Get started making rubbish.

There&#x27;s space for all kinds of music, and for some,  triggered samples under a grid is considered music.

I&#x27;m not an artistic musician, but it feels really satisfying to make something that is my own, even if musically it&#x27;s really simple. Your comment is nothing but unnecessarily elitist.

Everything is a remix, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;14912890" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;14912890</a>.

It&#x27;s really not. Some of the most beautiful songs are just artfully arranged samples.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_h5WJ6J6IlE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_h5WJ6J6IlE</a>

Samples are just instruments, and sequencers are just composition tools. It&#x27;s the end result that matters.

A more appropriate title would be: Get started triggering samples.Making music is really something different IMO.

Love it. Great web app from a really good company. I use Ableton a lot and I&#x27;m continually impressed with their software and content marketing activity.

Quick google: Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)Many comments here mostly mention software. But there are some interesting exceptions. Check Surgeon for example, who likes to use his custom controllers with Ableton. You actually can see him re-wire the controllers every now and then. (Great music too ;))<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KM558N6PJmY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;KM558N6PJmY</a>

Digital Audio Workstation. Think Ableton Live, Apple Logic Pro, Avid&#x27;s Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cakewalk Sonar, Propellerheads Reason... tools to record&#x2F;arrange&#x2F;produce&#x2F;master music.

A DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation, is to building music what Final Cut Pro is to building video, or what Eclipse is to developing software. Most DAWs consist of multiple tracks which hold multiple audio clips, each of which are scheduled to play at a certain time. You build a song out of these clips, which you have loaded into the DAW. You can also add various effects to the clips and manipulate them. You can store abstract music event data (&quot;play note A here at this time, then play note B Flat at this time&quot;) in additional tracks. This data has no sound associated with it, but like a piano player roll, you can set it up to play notes in some instrument, either an internal software instrument provided by the DAW or a third party, or emitted via MIDI to a remote hardware music synthesizer.DAWs are used to produce the huge majority of music you hear in the media, from commercials to hip hop songs. Even seemingly real orchestral pieces for movies are often composed entirely using artificial instruments. For example, here is Junkie XL showing how he composed themes for Mad Max Fury Road.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=VkNeXS0Lmxc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=VkNeXS0Lmxc</a>

It&#x27;s gonna be the fastest piano roll. It will have semi live performance kinda like Ableton live but live is sample based, mine is music based. I don&#x27;t want to reveal too much, but I&#x27;ve talked to professional composers and kind of described the work flow I envision and they all were like &quot;i need to this asap&quot;.Idk if this will appease some of your concerns but I&#x27;ve been around hn for a while (I&#x27;m in the top 30 karma wise), I won&#x27;t spam you.

Can you share some more details? I&#x27;m interested, but hesitant about putting my email into some random Google form.

I kinda wish it would but audio on Linux is such a pain. I think that porting it won&#x27;t be too bad once it&#x27;s done but I&#x27;m not promising anything.

Sounds intriging. Any chance it would work under linux?

So I&#x27;m working on this mostly to scratch my personal itch. I&#x27;m aware of those but to be honest I never found them to be more than toys. When I listen to music made in these, I feel like they generally lack some structure. My thing is all about helping you structure things.

Have you toyed with live music programming ? just curiousAlso nice endeavour

Have a look at extempore, a lispy live music&#x2F;notation language and environment. Only emacs bindings, no vim, but impressive preformance nevertheless...[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;extempore.moso.com.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;extempore.moso.com.au&#x2F;</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;digego&#x2F;extempore" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;digego&#x2F;extempore</a>

Have you looked at Lilypond? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lilypond.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lilypond.org&#x2F;</a>

Use vim to compose an abc file, then play it with software listed at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnotation.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnotation.com</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ABC_notation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ABC_notation</a>

IMO, classical notation is the Vim of music - it looks bizarre to outsiders, it&#x27;s totally unintuitive, it requires a lot of memorisation and practice to use effectively, but it&#x27;s extraordinarily efficient in the hands of an expert user.

I think my idea of a perfect music program is closer to vim than an IDE, but you&#x27;re on the right track.

Same thing that pencils don&#x27;t understand about writing, and paintbrushes don&#x27;t understand about art.

Better question is what do they do understand about music?

I&#x27;d argue that current DAWs expect the user to understand at least something about music. Sounds like OP is working on some &quot;syntax-aware&quot; features for their DAW.

Mostly they don&#x27;t understand well all the possibilities outside of typical meter and tuning systems. They can do some but tend to push you to writing 4-beat meters in 12-note-equal-temperament. Rhythm and pitch both have far far far more possibilities which DAWs either ignore or at least make second-class options you have to kind of fight for or try a few limited tastes.

What don&#x27;t current DAWS understand about music?

I can think a lot more complicated music than I can play. I don&#x27;t always have access to a keyboard. Piano is a good instrument but sometimes I want to write drums. Also sometimes I want to express relationships between the single notes, not just have the notes themselves. To record 10000 notes from a piano, you need to hit 10000 keys possibly more than once to record them. My thing will let you achieve the same thing with less than 10000 actions.

&gt;Also the note input process and experimentation is extremely time consuming and the DAW never helpsWhat is so arduous about plugging a midi keyboard in?

Are you interested in anything particular? I can provide a lot more detail but I think that none of that will do it any justice. Sign up and check it out when it&#x27;s out.

Ofc! Im working on this cause I wanted to make some electronic music but none of the current daws really let me express myself the way I want.

That looks really nice... too bad there&#x27;s no Linux support :&#x2F;

Does it have per note editing? For example in trackers you can specifically set a note to play volume X, pan Y, pitch Z

Sounds really cool! Actually, I&#x27;m close to releasing a (looper) DAW -- kinda geared towards live use, but I&#x27;ve thought a lot about composition too.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zenaud.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zenaud.io</a>Send me an email at mpercossi at zenaud.io , always fun to talk to fellow audio devs :)And for all the vim lovers out there -- my app supports vi commands for movement and editing :)

Both actually :-). And those aren&#x27;t even all of the &quot;composition paradigms&quot; and they are all first class citizens in the UI.

When you say HN audience would be one of your target groups, do you mean that your DAW would be more like a development environment&#x2F;programming language (like Sonic Pi), or would it have a more traditional interface?

What do you think is an over promise? The resulting app will be less than 10KLOC, discounting third party libs.I don&#x27;t have a demo yet if that&#x27;s what you are asking about but I&#x27;ve open sourced this for example<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;adamnemecek&#x2F;WebMIDIKit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;adamnemecek&#x2F;WebMIDIKit</a>Actually I do have some old demos but they don&#x27;t show the best parts. It&#x27;s actually kind of hard to show those right now.

Well you&#x27;re surely over-promising, here&#x27;s hoping you won&#x27;t under-deliver. Do you have anything at all to show yet?

I&#x27;ve also made a few iOS apps for the purpose of simplifying composition, though they&#x27;re pretty limited in scope (on purpose). Although it seems most composers would prefer to use full DAWs from the start, I&#x27;m personally much more creative when I&#x27;m able to jot down and edit my fragmented musical ideas as quickly as possible, if only to make the initial draft. (If I were a better singer or musician, I&#x27;d just use a recorder or a looper — but my skills aren&#x27;t quite there yet, and besides, it&#x27;s hard to note-edit a recording.) Composer&#x27;s Sketchpad[1] lets you paint notes directly onto a time&#x2F;pitch canvas, bending and stretching them as they go along. (This works great for e.g. guitar solos.) MusicMessages![2] is a more basic piano roll that lets users quickly tap buttons across several layers to enter notes. (Musical bubble wrap! Works great for riffing on short drum sequences and chord progressions.)There&#x27;s another similar-sounding project called Helio that was posted a few weeks ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14212054" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14212054</a>I hope that in time, we get more Markdown-style composition tools vs. the full DAW suite. Good luck! I&#x27;m looking forward to seeing what you make.P.S. AudioKit is pretty dope. :)[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;composerssketchpad.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;composerssketchpad.com</a>[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicmessages.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicmessages.io</a> -- working on turning it into a full iOS app, so will probably have to shut it down and fold it into the new app at some point

I&#x27;m actually working full time on a new DAW that should make writing music a lot faster and easier. Current DAWs don&#x27;t really understand music. Also the note input process and experimentation is extremely time consuming and the DAW never helps. Current DAW : my thing = Windows Notepad : IDE. The HN audience is definitely one of my core groups.If you are interested, sign up here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;forms&#x2F;d&#x2F;1-aQzVbkbGwv2BMQsvuoneOUPgyrc6HRl-DjVwHZxKvo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;forms&#x2F;d&#x2F;1-aQzVbkbGwv2BMQsvuoneOUPgyr...</a> and I&#x27;ll contact you when it&#x27;s released.

Myself and two friends have tried to make music production easier (and more robust) on the phone in our spare time, and came up with our iPhone app, Tize (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;tize-make-music-beats-easy&#x2F;id1130726632?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;tize-make-music-beats-easy&#x2F;i...</a>), to that end.If it sounds like something you&#x27;re interested in please give it a go! We&#x27;re always working to improve it and open to feedback. 
 (Android is coming soon)

I am scared to get the OP-1 because it looks like TOO much fun! Yes, I find myself jamming with the Push, not really making anything in particular. The scale mode helps me as I have little music training. Ableton simply works for me. I am using Push 2 + DDJ-SR &#x2F; Serato and couldn&#x27;t be happier. Although Serato has a LOT to be desired (pitch shift + fx + vst support), it just SOUNDS great.

Oh man I&#x27;ve had mine for I think a bit over a year now and I love it so much. It really builds off the fundamentals mentioned on the first page of this shared post: you jam out little riffs and then mix and match them till you get something you like. There have been many days&#x2F;nights where I&#x27;ve needed to do some programming on my game and instead burn 3-4 hours without realizing it because I hit a groove. It&#x27;s so conducive to jamming it&#x27;s unbelievable. Not to mention Ableton is a really powerful piece of software that doesn&#x27;t get in your way when you&#x27;re experimenting. The pairing makes it one of my absolute favorite pieces of hardware (that and my OP-1).

Having tried both a ton before settling on the Push 2, the screen is great, but that&#x27;s not why I bought it. In every way it feels better to make music on than the first Push. The pads especially are a thousand times more responsive — the Push 1&#x27;s got this weird wooden feeling that never seemed to register the velocity I was going for.I think the Push 2 is ~3x as much, and it is worth every penny.

I have been listening to some of the Maschine patches on YouTube and am very impressed.EDIT: Wow the Mikro is very affordable!

Also a fan of the Maschine Mikro, though I don&#x27;t like the Maschine software very much.

Push 1 is still awesome and there&#x27;s a ton on the second hand market for a fraction of the price of Push 2. You get way more than you pay for at those prices.I&#x27;m happy with mine, I like the pads and it&#x27;s fine for sequencing and playing. It still receives updates and improvements.I do like the screen on Push 2, it looks like a nice update, but you are paying a lot for that screen, so you better use it!I also own a Maschine Mikro MkII by Native Instruments, it&#x27;s my go-to machine for finger drumming beats and sonic experiments... great pads, very precise, compact and enjoyable. The Maschine software is very good, and the add-on sound packs are great quality.

I purchased the Ableton Push 2 a month or so ago and it has to be one of the most beautifully engineered pieces of equipment I have ever used. Look up the teardown video. Extremely simple, yet elegant. The Push 1 was created by Akai, and apparently Ableton wasn&#x27;t satisfied, so they designed and built their own.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YItWQdJgXLs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YItWQdJgXLs</a>

I think the design of this is really interesting.It&#x27;s designed in a way to make the user (e.g. anyone who likes music) just want to play with it in a way that&#x27;s very intuitive via its simple, visual layout. And it provides instant feedback that makes you want to continually tinker with it to make something that you like more and more.Web development&#x2F;programming training tool makers should really take note of this.

I first saw a link to this Ableton page from a group I&#x27;m in on facebook on April 24, so Ableton&#x27;s had this up at least since then....

The timing of this post is funny, as just this week I launched a little ear training game built with React an Tone.js: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notetuning.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notetuning.com&#x2F;</a>

Very few skills are just &quot;natural ability&quot;. Music theory is an interesting and pretty important topic if you want to make music. Since people have been creating music for millennia, they have figured out many things that help composers.

When somebody asks me how to solve a particular database problem, or an IT problem, or how to write an algorithm to do something, I will think about it in the back of my mind and &quot;just spit it out after a while,&quot; unless it&#x27;s something difficult enough to warrant a literature review.That doesn&#x27;t mean that those subjects aren&#x27;t covered in detail in textbooks and university courses, or that people cannot learn how to do it.

You probably have learned most&#x2F;all of your musical knowledge implicitly.Some people have a great ear for music and can write solid songs without formal training in music. Other folks come at music from the more theoretical side, although usually with a lot of implicit knowledge of and experience with music as well.For most people who are not formally trained in music, their songs can be improved upon on a technical level by someone who has deeper theoretical knowledge (learned either explicitly or implicitly).For a good discussion of this, check out Tim Ferris&#x27; podcast interview with Derek Sivers. Derek talked about how he had learned a lot about music implicitly. In one summer, a teacher of his formalized that knowledge so efficiently that he was able to test out of lot of classes (1.5 years worth?) once he went to Berklee School of Music.

I created an account just to reply to your comment. As someone who has played keyboard instruments for all my life, it&#x27;s not crossed my mind lately that the idea that there is structure to music is not well known.Just for fun: chords in scales are numbered from bottom to top in Roman numerals. I feels like home base, V feels like wanting to go home. If you want to create the feeling of going home but then not really go there you can go from V to VI instead of I. &#x27;Sad but I have closure&#x27;-type ending? Major IV - Minor IV - I. Bluesy feeling? Add a minor seventh to your I, IV and V chords. Dreamy? Major seventh instead there, except on the V.It&#x27;s even entirely possible to learn to recognize all of these types of chord progressions and sounds instantly. I&#x27;m working on and off on an ear training app that randomly generates them that musicians can use to train their musical ear.

There are certainly people who have natural ability, and compose melodically, applying varying levels of knowledge in music theory.There are other people who can&#x27;t make heads or tails out of a keyboard, compose a tune in their head, or understand chordal progressions, but nevertheless compose music in layers and still do extraordinary work. They find what they like by playing with notes on the screen. Joel Zimmerman, a.k.a. Deadmau5, is an example of this.I am an example of the former, with natural ability, bolstered by training in music theory. But I still use a layered approach when I am composing, generally starting with a beat or bassline, playing with melodic progressions in snippets, and eventually moving into a traditional composition process when I have something started that I like. Ableton makes this process extremely easy and productive.

What I find difficult is that by the time I&#x27;ve got my DAW going and found some synths I like, the tune in my head has evaporated. Do all people find musical thoughts so insubstantial, or is it just me? If I imagine a picture or a paragraph of text, it&#x27;ll stick around and I can remember it more or less indefinitely. I still recall snatches of crap poetry I thought up when I was a teenager, but any music I imagine just disappears before I can get it down.The most successful tunes I made were more or less &quot;discovered&quot; from incrementally experimenting in the DAW, and not from any kind of original plan or idea. Maybe I&#x27;m just not a musician! (I&#x27;m an indie game dev who started making my own tunes for my games)

I think your natural composition skills are unusual, but not unique. I also begain to compose music at a very early age. My knack for picking melodies up out of the air and playing them on a piano when I was 7 years old was how my parents knew that I needed lessons. Naturally, I was surprised later in life to learn that other people had to learn basic things like pitch and rhythm; to me it had always been just as natural as speaking.I believe the same is true with song writing, in a sense. You&#x27;re still applying some parts of music theory, but most by-ear learners like ourselves simply grasp the concepts and have internalized them naturally, without needing to be taught. Music is little more than patterns at the end of the day, and our brains are very good at recognizing patterns. What you and I know intuitively, others can learn through training and repetition. Both approaches are valid, and yield interesting (and often different) observations.I went going through Music Theory classes during my brief adventure with Liberal Arts Majors in college. I felt like I already &quot;knew&quot; the material in a way I couldn&#x27;t quite put my finger on. It was like I was finally understanding what my brain had been doing all these years. I recommend it if you haven&#x27;t yet had the experience.

Songwriting can be taught, yes. In most music courses you start by analyzing the Bach Chorales, which (along with some Gregorian work from the middle ages) is what really kicked off contemporary music composition. By analyzing the Chorales and moving forward from there you learn how to manipulate chord progressions, harmony, point and counterpoint.Composers classically trained this way tend (!) to have an easier time writing melodies, harmonies, and progressions in a consistent manner, ie not having to wait for &quot;inspiration to strike&quot;. The composer, of course, still needs to develop an emotional connection in the music, but the point is that it can, and routinely is, taught.

Do you really mean to say you write songs without using any theory or explicitly sought knowledge whatsoever? Let&#x27;s hear one.

&gt;Do people actually learn how to make up music?People have studied music and composition since at least ancient Babylon, so, well, yes?&gt;I always thought it was just some natural ability that people have.With natural ability you can sing some melodies. For learning to play an instrument, adding chords to the melody, you need studying, even if you learn by yourself and by ear (as many folk musicians did). Song melody, one can have a natural feel for creating, but nobody just starts writing songs in full form &quot;from natural ability&quot;.&gt;For as long I can remember if somebody told me to write a song I would just spit it out after a while.What would that mean? You&#x27;d write a song on the guitar for example? If so, then you already know the chords. And not all of the theory, so how complex is your song? Just barebones songwriting (country&#x2F;folk style)? Can you take it further? Can you write the parts for musicians to play on your song? Can you write different genres on spec?There are more things in making music&#x2F;songs than &quot;spitting out&quot; some melody.

What you said about learning melodies and beats and chords kind of confused me. Do people actually learn how to make up music? I always thought it was just some natural ability that people have. For as long I can remember if somebody told me to write a song I would just spit it out after a while. Am I unuiqe in this respect?

Is this a common distinction to acknowledge in general education environments? You pretty succinctly described the struggles I&#x27;ve tended to have in my education, and described it in a refreshing&#x2F;revealing (for me) way.I love looking at systems and peeling back the layers to find out what makes something tick. That&#x27;s not an approach to learning that I really encountered until I entered the workforce and was met with complex systems that I needed to understand. And I loved it!

Are the free instructions like this out somewhere (build-up and peel-back)?

I think there&#x27;s a difference between learning composition, and learning to play an instrument.In my view, learning an instrument has a lot in common with learning to code, in that some people take to it, and others don&#x27;t. And we probably know some of the reasons, but not all of them. Of course teachers and teaching programs vary, as do kids and their family milieu. But nonetheless, music education has huge attrition.For instance, by way of anecdata, I took string lessons as a kid and loved it, and my kids have gotten pretty serious on violin and cello. They actually like classical music, and it probably helped that both of their parents also enjoy it. So it definitely works for some people.

Interesting, I&#x27;ve never heard of the &quot;peel back&quot; approach, and I can totally understand why it would be instantly satisfying for a beginner in music to get started that way. Do you have any articles or books on the subject manner?How would this approach apply to a more traditional instrument that doesn&#x27;t have the advantages of having a &quot;good&quot; sounding sample already preloaded that can be easily layered into a song that you are composing? I grew up learning the violin and it was endless disjointed drills until it was put together in a classical song that I never heard before nor had the desire to play. 8 year old me just wanted to play the theme song to &quot;Jurassic Park&quot; and roar like a T-Rex.

There&#x27;s also a new project called Helio Workstation <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;peterrudenko&#x2F;helio-workstation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;peterrudenko&#x2F;helio-workstation</a> it doesn&#x27;t have much built-in instruments so you need plugins for everything, but the UI looks awesome

I like LMMS but it has enough vst issues that I just went with a cheap Reaper license.  Plus I need an audio recorder as well.

&gt; there is free software out thereIf anyone is interested in a Free&#x2F;Libre&#x2F;Open Source Software option (cross-platform Linux&#x2F;Windows&#x2F;Mac) I&#x27;ve really enjoyed producing with LMMS over the past 18 months or so: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lmms.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lmms.io&#x2F;</a>It&#x27;s definitely got room to grow in terms of functionality&#x2F;interface but the development community is of such a size that it&#x27;s possible to still make meaningful code contributions. I&#x27;ve contributed a couple of small patches to improve the Mac UI as a way to get familiar with the code base.Of course, the downside is that I have to decide whether to write code or make music whenever I sit down to use it. :)

Seconding this recommendation. The more electronic- or instrumental-oriented songwriters on the show tend to get more into the nitty-gritty details of production, layering sounds, etc. (the first two episodes with The Postal Service and The Album Leaf, for instance) while rock and singer-songwriter types tend more towards the songwriting aspect (the Long Winters is a personal favorite).I sort of wish there were more technical details as a rule, but it&#x27;s understandable given the relatively short format that they can only cover so much ground. I&#x27;d prefer longer episodes personally, but I suppose not everyone might, and there&#x27;s tradeoffs in producing more content. I guess I&#x27;m just glad that the show caught on and is still going strong.

+1 for SE. Also there is an amazing set of Motown tracks split into instrumentals and acapellas out there. I&#x27;m not sure if it can be legally obtained easily, but it&#x27;s a great master class.

+2. Only podcast I listen to. The first few episodes are a little rough around the edges, bad questions, people not knowing exactly what they were getting into, but the rest are all incredible.Protip: sample the guest&#x27;s clips they put on his show :) I&#x27;ve gotten some really great material from this show sonically since most of them seem to be the individual instrument tracks.

The Song Exploder podcast is awesome for both approaches, and I would really recommend anyone interested in writing and&#x2F;or producing music to give it a go.&quot;A podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.&quot; @ <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;songexploder.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;songexploder.net&#x2F;</a>

Garageband is completely non-free&#x2F;libre&#x2F;open which seems what you are saying

Yes, it&#x27;s &quot;free&quot; (not open source). It&#x27;s included with the purchase of a Mac.

Is Apple&#x27;s Garageband free? I thought you need to own an OSX device to run it? (my understanding is OSX only runs on Apple hardware and also is not a free OS)

Anecdotal: there&#x27;s a few different approaches to learning songwriting that seem to click for beginners. The &quot;build up&quot; approach is the most common and is what this link offers: It first teaches beats, then chords, then melodies and then, in theory, vocals etc. These lessons in this order make sense to many people, but not everyone.If you&#x27;re interested in learning to make music and the lessons in the link are confusing or overwhelming or boring, some students find a &quot;peel back&quot; approach to learning songwriting easier to grasp at first. A peel back approach just involves finding a song then teaching by stripping away each layer: start with stripping away vocals, then learn melodies, then chords, then finally learn about the drum beat underneath it all. A benefit of the peel back approach to learning is melodies and vocals are the memorable parts of a song and easiest to pick out when listening to the radio so a student can learn using songs they know and like. Either way, songwriting is hard and fun. Best of luck.P.S. I think Ableton makes good software and I use it along with FL and Logic. They did a solid job with these intro lessons. But worth mentioning, there is free software out there (this includes Apple&#x27;s Garageband) that offers key features a beginner just learning songwriting can practice on and mess around on before purchasing a more powerful DAW software like Ableton.

If you want to get an interesting take on the &#x27;Live&#x27; part of Ableton Live, look for &#x27;Kid Beyond Ableton&#x27; videos. He builds up tracks live on stage by beatboxing all the instruments, and uses something called a Hothand recently as his controller.

Wow, this is super impressive. I fell in love after adding a few chords over drums. Amazing.

I wanted to come and post this. Sonic Pi is an amazing tool with a compelling raison d&#x27;etre that I would think resonates with the HN community. It&#x27;s a realtime code as performance tool aimed at teaching kids programming but is also used by advanced users to create wonderful pieces of music.

Guys if you haven&#x27;t seen Sonic PI (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sonic-pi.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sonic-pi.net&#x2F;</a>), this is also a great tool! You can write beats using a Ruby DSL and it runs them real time.I sat down and did this in an hour: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;exabrial&#x2F;sonic-pi-beats&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;house_beat.rb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;exabrial&#x2F;sonic-pi-beats&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;house...</a>Sam Aaron is the guy behind the project, he does a lot of ambient type stuff: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts</a>

It reminds me &quot;Generative Music Otomata&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earslap.com&#x2F;page&#x2F;otomata.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.earslap.com&#x2F;page&#x2F;otomata.html</a>

This is extremely comprehensive for any beginner&#x2F;intermediate musician&#x2F;composer, and I&#x27;m really impressed at how they managed to implement the content in a mobile friendly manner!

Interestingly enough, my 6 year old was able to drive in and start having fun drawing in MIDI notes in Ableton Live Intro (the creators of the app linked for discussion) and listening to them.Ableton Live is certainly complex, but there&#x27;s so much fun that can be had if you or your children can focus in on one feature and enjoying the musical accidents and exploration.

I&#x27;m sorry for posting this several times in this thread already, but... I made a &quot;music painting&quot; iPad app called Composer&#x27;s Sketchpad that sounds like it would be a good fit. It&#x27;s not made for kids, but it did win a Children&#x27;s Technology Review Editor&#x27;s Choice Award last year. Maybe up your alley? There&#x27;s a Lite version, too: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;composerssketchpad.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;composerssketchpad.com</a>

I was looking for an app like this for my son. He started with &quot;My Singing Monsters&quot; and some music lessons at school, but when I tried to get him into Garage Band it was too much for a beginner.Thank you to the creator ... I will show it to him later today. I am not sure how far he can take it, but I like what I have seen so far.Also, if anyone has other suggestions for music-making apps for tween kids I am all ears ...

I wanted to build something similar for mobile to make music on the go. I started it here (abandoned now, but code is linked): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;buildanappwithme.blogspot.in&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;lets-make-music.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;buildanappwithme.blogspot.in&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;lets-make-music....</a>

The first page of that tutorial reminded me of a product I saw at the Apple store a few weeks ago called Roli. 
They have a great app [0], but the hardware [1] itself is not ideal but unfortunately necessary to unlock some features... I will be waiting for a v2...[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roli.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;noise" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roli.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;noise</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;product&#x2F;HKFR2VC&#x2F;A&#x2F;roli-lightpad-block" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;shop&#x2F;product&#x2F;HKFR2VC&#x2F;A&#x2F;roli-lightpad-b...</a>

MOST guitar players I know use tabs. Personally, I&#x27;d rather see the chord type and root string. Ie. 6th string AMin, 4th string GMaj7. Tabs are almost as confusing because I memorized the notes, not the fret number.

&quot;It&#x27;s not as expressive&quot;Have you ever used Guitar Pro or Tux Guitar? It can be INSANELY expressive. Grab a MIDI of Van Halen&#x27;s &quot;Jump&quot; (IIRC The best one was about 76kB) and import it into either of those. Guitar Pro will be noticeably more expressive vs TuxGuitar. Inside of that MIDI, the solo is 100% dead-on note-for-harmonic-for-slide-for-hammer. Both programs output the exact same tablature. You will get the solo perfect.Most people that have read tablature haven&#x27;t read the guitar-specialized notation found in Guitar Pro or TuxGuitar. It&#x27;s far more instructive.

Many non classical musicians use other notations. For example, many guitarists and bassists use tab notation. It&#x27;s simply a visual representation of the strings and a number for which fret to play.It&#x27;s not as expressive but is far easier to get started with.

I don&#x27;t know a whole lot about concert piano, but I don&#x27;t think you could have picked two better videos to illustrate your point. That student is obviously very practiced and skilled but there&#x27;s just no comparison.

Agreed, but reading sheet music is a very small part of playing piano proficiently (say, at the 97th percentile). Once you get past knowing the notes in a piece, there&#x27;s the much more difficult task of being able to manipulate the force that you exert from your fingers to create the right volume balance. For example, your untrained thumb will naturally play notes much louder than it should, and it takes a lot of practice to be able to play notes with it at the right volume; the opposite is true with your pinky and ring fingers....Not to mention the even more difficult task of knowing what you want the piece to sound like in the first place. A novice playing a piece at 100% accuracy sounds nothing like a concert pianist playing the piece. There&#x27;s a world of depth to music beyond just learning the right notes.Here&#x27;s an example: listen to this performance of Debussy&#x27;s &quot;Reflets dans l&#x27;eau&quot; by Arturo Michelangeli, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LLbpQl1cCl8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LLbpQl1cCl8</a>And then listen to this student play it (she is still a high-skill player, just not world-class talent):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;l2gJSVOdaG8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;l2gJSVOdaG8</a>

This is a really great answer! This is also a big part of why different instruments read different clefs.

&gt; Edit: For those that don&#x27;t know, in most western music you&#x27;re only going to use 8 out of the 12 possible notes most of the time.You mean 7 notes. Traditional music notation and terminology is confused in many ways, one of which is a fencepost-counting error. As a result: octaves are actually seven notes apart in a scale, two major seconds make a major third (2+2=3?), and two octaves make a fifteenth (8+8=15!?).

&gt;Traditional music notation made no sense at all to me until I realized this.Can&#x27;t thank you enough because your characterization is the first one I&#x27;ve heard that adequately explains the foundation of the visual system as one of condensation. I&#x27;ve been shrugging my shoulders about this for many decades!

Think of it as data compression that shows you the notes you&#x27;re most likely to play, without taking up space for notes you probably won&#x27;t.If there&#x27;s a piece in C, for example, in most traditional Western music you&#x27;re unlikely to play off-key notes. So why take up valuable space for those when you can denote that unlikely event with a sharp&#x2F;flat symbol?Traditional music notation made no sense at all to me until I realized this.Edit: For those that don&#x27;t know, in most western music you&#x27;re only going to use 8 out of the 12 possible notes most of the time. This is not universally true especially of modern non-pop music, but traditionally if you played off-key notes people thought you might summon evil spirits so it&#x27;s easy to understand why things would be written down this way. Not only is it space efficient, but you wouldn&#x27;t accidentally summon the devil. To summon the devil you have to really want to and write a flat or sharp in there.

That doesn&#x27;t jive with the &quot;I can do better&quot; mantra around these parts. I say that both sincerely and sarcastically.

Agree 100% with all this. Modern drum notation is probably the easiest case to look at with regards to evolution of &quot;western notation&quot;, with jazz chord symbols being another.Some other reasons why musical notation prevails:- There&#x27;s a huge switching cost, as much of the world&#x27;s written music is in some form of &quot;western notation&quot;. Being able to read standard notation unlocks a huge wealth of knowelege from books, etc.- Standard notation is one of the most flexible ways to create readable music, playable and easy to read across a wide variety of instruments and ranges (clefs, transposing score, etc).- It&#x27;s a common language, in the way that a programming language is. Some of the conventions may be confusing to outsides (i.e. why is the term &quot;puts&quot; used for printing in ruby? this seems normal to any ruby hacker but is completely unintuitive to a layperson). Once these conventions are learned, they provide common reference point. Like a lot of languages, it&#x27;s far from perfect, but much like spoken language, more likely to evolve than be replaced.- There&#x27;s almost no motivation for anyone to replace standard notation. Notation isn&#x27;t required for all forms of music (many great jazz and blues musicians don&#x27;t read music), and for the forms of music where it is required, it&#x27;s by far the quickest and most efficient way to communicate the information.In summary, I think the question of &quot;why can&#x27;t we do better&quot; is valid, but you could ask the same question about programming in C. There are good reasons to write C in 2017, and there are still good reasons to write musical notation.

&gt; I always wondered why musicians keep up with the
&gt; conventional musical notation system, and haven&#x27;t come
&gt; up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).Before starting down that path, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the wide range of music notations that already exist and continue to be used, and then the ridiculously varying plethora of failed alternative music notations that have been invented over the centuries, and why they failed to see wider adoption.And, of course, it&#x27;s fascinating to study the evolution of the existing &quot;standard&quot; music notation, and see the changes that have been adopted, and the ones that weren&#x27;t. For all its apparent stasis, it has definitely evolved over the centuries, in response to the changing needs of musicians.

shameless plug :) lightspeed, the sightreading flashcard game.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;buzzcola.github.io&#x2F;lightspeed-music&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;buzzcola.github.io&#x2F;lightspeed-music&#x2F;</a>Requires windows and a MIDI keyboard.

I wonder if you had been a guitar + tablature player your entire life and picked up piano a few years ago, if you would come to the same conclusion.I&#x27;ve tried learning guitar a few times and when I&#x27;ve asked accomplished players how they get by with tabs, it&#x27;s been explained as tab music establishes a minimal framework that you play within. It&#x27;s a lossy compression scheme (and traditional sheet music is less lossy). Would you agree with that?

&gt; However, from my experience there is a cap on the &#x27;bandwidth&#x27; at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, &#x27;sight reading&#x27; means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)I&#x27;ve noticed this as well and my team has developed a notation based of key&#x2F;scale and a new user interface for the guitar so that experienced players and beginners can sight read on their first attempt at a new song.We reduced the cognitive load of sight reading music, not only that, we then back fill technique like chord fingering where we introduce traditional chords one at a time, here is a series of three videos of what I&#x27;m talking about: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KXpTGIzBONU&amp;list=PLvoNIaPTgacP7lV_1COb9lCoUQwbN8Zfm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KXpTGIzBONU&amp;list=PLvoNIaPTga...</a>

Great point.To a first approximation:Tablature is a _physical description_ of how a particular stringed instrument should be played, and the notes are a side effect of that. It is instrument specific and it doesn&#x27;t contain much information about the musical details of the piece.For example, tablature doesn&#x27;t describe the key the piece is to be played in. To figure that out, you have to mentally translate the mechanical description into notes, and from there determine the key.Standard notation is a _musical description_ of how a particular song should be played, and the physical act of playing is a side effect of that. It is not instrument specific, and it contains a lot of information about the musical details of the piece, but usually no information at all about how a the instrument should be played. (There are a few minor exceptions.)For example, standard notation tells you exactly the key the piece is in, but the player has to mentally translate the notes into the physical steps of getting that note out of the piece.Basically standard notation adds a layer of indirection from the music to the mechanical act of playing. Like many indirections, it can be hard to understand at first, but has adds great power and flexibility that a direct system doesn&#x27;t have.

&gt; However, from my experience there is a cap on the &#x27;bandwidth&#x27; at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, &#x27;sight reading&#x27; means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)Sorry but this is wrong IMO. You&#x27;ve been reading sheet music your entire life, but you&#x27;ve only been reading tab for the past few years.I&#x27;ve been reading tab for 10 years. I think in tab. There are a bunch of songs that I can&#x27;t be bothered learning (sultans of swing, metallica songs+solos, oasis songs.. you get the idea) because I don&#x27;t like them enough but are fun to play along with, and I do so with Guitar Pro playing the tab at full speed. It&#x27;s basically like rocksmith&#x2F;guitar hero but in &quot;real life&quot; mode.

I have played piano and guitar (piano for almost my entire life and guitar for several years) and have used both tabular sheet music and traditional sheet music.Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string. However, from my experience there is a cap on the &#x27;bandwidth&#x27; at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, &#x27;sight reading&#x27; means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)Traditional sheet music has a steeper learning curve, however, I&#x27;ve found that reading this music becomes much more subconscious with practice and the bandwidth at which you can parse the notes is much higher. Also, it is much easier to notice patterns in sheet music - i.e. a major 7th chord in the key of the song is visually obvious no matter what the key.

There are a lot of books on the subject, but the short answer is that it&#x27;s just the most common standard at this point. Yes there are some things about it that don&#x27;t make sense, but for whatever reason it seems to be the most coherent way for musicians to communicate using a common language.It&#x27;s popularity also has to do with what sounds pleasing to the ear (and brain) on a biological level.A number of people have come up with alternative scales and notations systems over the years, but none of them have really stuck for one reason or another. Nonetheless, they are pretty fun to read about.here&#x27;s the whole history of notation <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Musical_notation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Musical_notation</a>Also, if you aren&#x27;t familiar with John Cage, you should check him out. His music and writing deals with a lot of the stuff you just brought up, and it&#x27;s also a really great jumping off point to find other interesting artists and musicians.Indeterminacy, a work he did with David Tudor is a great starting point <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_lOMHUrgM_s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_lOMHUrgM_s</a>

It is confusing at first, but once you memorize where all the notes are it is very good. Notation is based around the idea of key signatures, and once you have that down it becomes very intuitive and you can actually know what a piece of music sounds like just by looking at the notation. Western music has 12 distinct pitch classes, but typically the notes are used in scale groupings of usually 7 notes, with accidental &quot;outside&quot; notes being easily recognized by sharp and flat symbols. Doing it that way gives easy visual cues for musical &quot;events&quot; such as key changes, outside chords.. etc. There is a reason it has stuck around, it is a quite ingenious system.

There have been dozens of suggestions for alternative notation systems over centuries. Many documented here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicnotation.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicnotation.org&#x2F;</a>I guess it&#x27;s just inertia.

&gt; I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven&#x27;t come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).Is this supposed to be satire? Invoking Poe&#x27;s Law on this one

I have mild dyslexia myself and I think any kind of notation is going to be a problem for us. The good news is you don&#x27;t need musical notation to play music. You can play by ear. Don&#x27;t let it stop you if you&#x27;re really interested in music.

I&#x27;m a classically trained pianist, and I basically agree with you. I read sheet music because that&#x27;s what there is. As a young composer, I wrote in standard notation because I hadn&#x27;t questioned it. As an old composer, I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s anything great about it, and I have no need of it. I &#x27;write&#x27; all my music on hardware or software synths. It&#x27;s much easier. All I care about are the parameters. What note, when, how long, how loud, etc.

&gt;I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven&#x27;t recognized yet.I think that this is the incorrect way of looking at it. I suspect it is less that the traditional notation system is highly evolved and effective, and more that getting a critical mass of musicians to transition&#x2F;relearn&#x2F;teach&#x2F;translate into a newer system is incredibly difficult.For instance, while Imperial units aren&#x27;t without some advantage, they are pretty generally inferior to the Metric system. But the US hasn&#x27;t really switched because it requires a significant level of coordination and control that simply isn&#x27;t easy to access. And getting musicians to learn and teach a brand new, objectively better system would be much much harder.

Also, what we have got this way through quite a bit of evolution...The first thing that looks a bit like modern notation is probably plainchant, originating in the catholic church circa 14th centure:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ytimg.com&#x2F;vi&#x2F;4qKRGsJMMG8&#x2F;hqdefault.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.ytimg.com&#x2F;vi&#x2F;4qKRGsJMMG8&#x2F;hqdefault.jpg</a>The basic system we use today originates from about the 1600&#x27;s or so, but has still evolved a lot.There were tons of historical warts along the way that have largely dropped off - for instance, figured bass notation (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Figured_bass" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Figured_bass</a>) or the French violin clef (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;thumb&#x2F;c&#x2F;c3&#x2F;French_clef_with_ref.svg&#x2F;90px-French_clef_with_ref.svg.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;thumb&#x2F;c&#x2F;c3&#x2F;Fr...</a>)

Maybe no one has succeeded with a general replacement, but there are different notations for guitar. I assume some other instruments have their own notation too. When electric music kicked off, to reproduce sound you have to trade setups &#x2F; circuit diagrams, old music notation can&#x27;t encode that! I kind of think of it like x86 assembly. It&#x27;s here to stay, for better or worse, but that doesn&#x27;t mean you can&#x27;t have nicer things on top, and there are still things that don&#x27;t make any sense at all in the x86 world (like FPGAs for one).

See also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12159224" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12159224</a> . Which I shamelessly plug since I was a participant in that one. :-)I got a reply there that the current system is only suitable for professional musicians, and that you&#x27;d need something like shape notes to reach mass musical literacy. Now I&#x27;m hopelessly biased as a music degree-holder, a semi-professional musician, and a Presbyterian to boot ;-), but this strikes me as setting the bar way too low. Given levels of overall literacy in the US (which were very different when shape notes were developed) I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s that difficult to learn the notation itself – the difficulty I think is in mastering the music system.

That&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve done time and time again, and seen others do too. It&#x27;s easy to look at something and think you understand it well enough to know how it can be improved. But when you find out the rationale and reasons it is the way it is, it&#x27;s kind of humbling. Like how it surprised me to learn that there&#x27;s a lot of valid, practical reasons to use the Imperial measurement system over Metric.

Another way to look at it is that the current notation system isn&#x27;t the best overall, it&#x27;s just the most tolerable trade-off between a bunch of mutually-incompatible requirements.Replacing standard notation for all uses may be doomed to failure, but replacing standard notation for some particular use case (especially new use cases that weren&#x27;t anticipated when standard notation settled into its current form) may be a very useful thing to do.Computers also give us a few new options, such as displaying notation in a time-varying form, or using three dimensions, or notating the music in some universal language that isn&#x27;t necessarily easy to read but that can be easily rendered in any desired notation.Lattice notation for instance is something I really like, but I don&#x27;t know how to represent it without some kind of animation.Here&#x27;s an example I stumbled across on Youtube awhile back of the kind of thing I mean: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jA1C9VFqJKo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jA1C9VFqJKo</a>Lattices generalize to higher dimensions, which means they might be amenable to virtual reality or even some sort of human-brain interface that allows you to experience 4 or 5 spacial dimensions at the same time.

I have a theory for this. Please, do not down vote me, I am here with limited English but really good intentions.QWERTY keyboard is something humanity found a better solution, people have developed better layouts like Dvorak, per example, and world keeps using QWERTY (not my case).I have studied long time ago that TCP protocol is also not the best protocol, there are much betters and faster, but people keeps using the old TCP for Internet...I believe when something is already consolidated, it&#x27;s expensive to change, sometimes it&#x27;s not worthwhile do update all the consolidated knowledge&#x2F;investment, even when having better solutions.World updates consolidated solutions just when the gain really worth it, it&#x27;s not the case for music notation.I also agree with you, the music notation could be easier, but I believe they don&#x27;t upgrade because the masters musicians have mastered it, so they like the actual notation, and they are the fellows with enough knowledge to create a better version. I believe there is others types of notation, but it would need to be used by the masters musicians, and music schools, and universities to start a wave that could replace the actual notation (that already works pretty well).

&gt; I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven&#x27;t come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).You&#x27;re not alone, this is a common reaction to music notation by engineers; a lot of people have wondered the same thing, even here on HN. For example <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12528144" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12528144</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12085844" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12085844</a>I see some great responses, but I wanted to add that you have to keep in mind that tons of people have actually tried to make a better system, and nobody has succeeded. That should give you enough pause to ask why and consider the possibility that the system we have is really good in a way that you haven&#x27;t recognized yet.I think the problem is that difficult to learn and bad are easily confused. It is difficult to learn.Also keep in mind that music notation has undergone many iterations, and it represents developments over hundreds and hundreds of years and covers every instrument under the sun - the breadth of what it has done throughout history and what can do might be hard to see.

Well, considering this article on Ableton never even uses conventional musical notation and many working musicians sit in front of their DAW all day, I think it&#x27;s safe to say that the virtual piano roll has largely taken over the roll of classic notation. I don&#x27;t think too many people making rock music, EDM, or hip-hop has really touched classic notation ever.

&gt; Once you get past a cursory &quot;eff this&quot; reaction, you start to see how downright brilliant notation is.In this it reminds me of vim.

Music notation does take time to learn how to read well at, but it&#x27;s no different anything else that takes time to learn and master.Once you get past a cursory &quot;eff this&quot; reaction, you start to see how downright brilliant notation is.The vast majority of music focuses on 7 notes at a time. If you alter a key signature, you are playing 7 other (non-distinct) notes. Music notation encapsulates this concept very well.That&#x27;s only one example, but telling musicians their notation sucks and needs to be fixed because it&#x27;s hard for a non-musician is akin to a musician telling a programmer that Python and Linux needs to be fixed because it doesn&#x27;t look like a violin.

I always wondered why musicians keep up with the conventional musical notation system, and haven&#x27;t come up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).I mean the conventional music notation represents tones in five lines, each capable of holding a &quot;note&quot; (is that the right word?) on a line, as well as in between lines, possibly pitched down and up, resp., by B&#x27;s and sharps (depending on the tune etc.).Since western music has 12 half-tone steps per octave (octave = an interval wherein the frequency is doubled, which is a logarithmic scale so compromises have to made when tuning individual notes across octaves) this gives a basic mismatch between the notation and eg. the conventional use of chords. A consequence is that, for example, with treble clef, you find C&#x27; in the top but one position between lines, and thus at a very different place than C (one octave below) visually, which is on, rather than between, an additional line below the bottom-most regular line.I for one know that my dyslexia when it comes to musical notation (eg. not recognizing notes fast enough to play by the sheet) has kept me from becoming proficient on the piano (well, that, and my lazyness).

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