Live School

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Live School
Feb 092015
 

There’s a really good Intro to Ableton Live course going on right now on Coursera, taught by Erin Barra of the Berklee College of Music. It’s only three weeks long, but it’s a good way to meet a bunch of different people who are into Live, make some music, and pick up some tips.

I’ve been using it as a way to practice working with Live and Push, and as a way to create music on deadlines. That helps a lot. Having an obligation to a group inspires me for some reason, even if it’s for 4-5 people. The music is all going to be hosted on Blend via Dropbox.

And the music I am making for the class can be found on my Blend, right here.

One of the restrictions I’m putting on myself is to only use the tools in Live Suite, no outside VSTs. So far, it’s been fun. In a way, it’s freeing in that I don’t have to obsess over picking the “perfect” synth from my stupid long list of VST plugins, instead I’ll go with the instruments in Live, which are really good in their own right.

In order to get a little deeper into some of them, like Sampler and Analog, I’ve been using MacProVideo.com’s videos to go into more detail. That’s also kind of cool– using the class as a springboard for further individual study.

The assignments themselves are also fun, in that each assignment has basic minimum requirements that have to be met, like four tracks, two audio and two MIDI, and so on. The restrictions work both as minimums and as something to prod creativity.

Another nice part of the class– Ableton is letting students enrolled in the class demo Live Studio free for 30 days, and Studio usually runs in the $600 range, if I remember correctly.

The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 0: Get Some Knowledge For Free!

 Education, Music  Comments Off on The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 0: Get Some Knowledge For Free!
Sep 202014
 

I’ve been kicking around the idea of making this kind of guide for a while. Why? Because every day on Reddit, I see 2-3 posts of the, “I want to get into EDM or EMP, but I only have 35 cents in my pocket right now. How do I do it?”

First, you need to get the right attitude towards doing this. It’s going to take a while to get good at it (I’m still not good), so you need to have your expectations set at the right level.

It’s Okay to Suck at First

Listen to Ira Glass, who is talking about producing news for radio, but this advice applies to everything. See? Even he sucked for a long time before he started to get good. So it’s okay for you to suck.

Now, I hope you’ve adjusted your expectations accordingly, so you don’t feel like you want to jump off of a building if nobody likes your first song, or even your first fifty.

It’s cool! We’ve all been there. That’s how we learn.

It helps if you focus on not sucking. (This is a great article to keep in mind.) But it’s hard to not suck at first, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing, so don’t beat yourself up too much.

The same guy who wrote the article on how to not suck wrote this excellent article that you need to engrave upon your soul. You really need to read this before you make the mistake of wasting a lot of time and money on stuff you don’t need.

Step 0: Now Get Some Knowledge (But don’t go overboard.)

Before you do anything, buy anything, whatever, go get some knowledge, but don’t bury yourself in it. Get enough so you know the basics, understand what you’re doing, then move on to making music. Don’t get caught on the hamster wheel of over-training. There’s a fine line between getting knowledge and never getting off the starting line.

This also goes for things like shopping for gear, talking on forums, etc. I’ve talked about this before with respect to Japanese– it’s the meta game. It fools you into thinking you’re doing X, but you’re not. You’re talking about X, you’re preparing for X, but you’re NOT doing X.

With that caution in mind:

Coursera has a bunch of free music classes. Look for the Berklee classes:

Or you can just take apart your favorite songs, and try to rebuild them yourself. Your call. I found the classes to be pretty useful.

Other resources:

  • Dave Conservatoire, which is kind of like Khan Academy for musicians.
  • Music Theory, the TL;DR version is a free/pay what you want PDF book.
  • Musictheory.net has a lot of resources for learning theory on your phone or PC.
  • Hooktheory is another phone/PC app/book combo with some cool stuff in it, too. Hooktheory’s “Theorytab” is really useful for figuring out chord progressions from a lot of famous songs.
  • Kunst der Fuge will give you total access to all of its MIDI files and PDFs for a one-time 20 EUR fee. Analyze away, or just add the MIDI files to your chord progression database.
  • The Dance Music Manual is great if you want to get into EDM. It’s a brilliant book. Rick Snoman has forgotten more about producing than you’ll ever know. Yes, you have to spend money on it. But it’s not much money, and you’ll get a ton out of it. This is a good way to avoid sitting through 8,000 hours of videos.

There are some great YouTube channels out there, too. In no order I like:

  • ADSR Sounds for Reaktor and Massive in particular, but they do a good job on all Native Instruments software.
  • Sadowick for Ableton and general music production advice.
  • Seamless for FL Studio, IL’s plugins (like Harmor!), or Serum.
  • ArtFX for Massive and other plugins.
  • SonicState for witty banter, music production news, and reviews.
  • DubSpot for a variety of tutorials for a lot of DAWs
  • Point Blank Music School for all kinds of tutorials.
  • Tom Cosm knows a ton about Ableton.
  • ScanProAudio has some great Push tutorials, and a lot of other useful info.
  • Pensado’s Place, because he is a god of ProTools, and even if you don’t use PT, he knows so much about producing, it’ll make your head spin. Really good stuff.
  • ReasonExperts for Reason
  • TherSiteZ also for Reason (and his awesome voice!)
  • This video is part of a series on How Music Works. A good watch.
  • Part two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five of that series.

And many more!

Pick one or two primary sources, finish them, and then see what you want to do next. Use the YouTube videos as sources of inspiration.

While you’re at it, find someone to teach you piano or keyboard. If YouTube doesn’t do it for you, then check out your local community centers. You might find something cheap there.

I love the Older Beginner’s Piano Course. Book 1, Book 2.

And remember to make music!

Ya Big MOOC.

 Education, Technology  Comments Off on Ya Big MOOC.
Aug 202014
 

I went back to Udacity in order to finish up some programming courses, and because they were offering a deal. It’s been a while since I did any work in Python, but it’s funny how quickly it comes back to you. (Well, mostly.)

The only thing that’s kind of weird is going back over all the work I’ve already done. It feels like someone much smarter than me has already done a lot of this.

I’ve also been finishing up a Coursera MOOC on Music Theory, just to refresh a bit. It wasn’t bad, but the class felt kind of rushed towards the end. Really rushed! It was a good class, but the final exam was a little unreasonable, based on the amount of experience a lot of the students had.

I think the faculty had a “Well, this is obvious, isn’t it?” moment, when, “No, this is not obvious to a beginner. This is far from obvious,” is what they should have realized.

Still, right up until that point, it was very good. And I still got my PDF diploma (or whatever), so it’s all good.

And now I know what a hemisemidemiquaver is. But I’m still going to call it a 32nd note. And no way will I call a quarter note a crotchet. Makes me feel dirty.

But other than that, it was pretty good!

I’ve taken a lot of MOOC classes, on a bunch of different platforms, and I like the Udacity model the best– there’s no “You can only take this class NOW” problem. Take it whenever you want.

Coursera is too traditional in its approach, from my point of view, and some classes place far too much emphasis on the social aspect of learning. Honestly, I rarely, if ever, have time to use the forums. I barely have time to do the classes, and you want me to waste time in the forums? No thanks. If I want to socialize, I do it in the real world, or at least over Skype or voice chat.

The time pressure of Coursera isn’t fun, either. If I’m learning for fun, I want to learn at my own pace. Especially if I’m paying for it.

But! Coursera has an outstanding variety of classes, especially in Business and Music. I finished up a Marketing class offered by Penn’s Wharton School of Business. That was pretty interesting. And the music courses offered by Berklee are interesting. Sometimes I’ll drop the $50 for the certified certificate, but I have a hard time justifying that for something like Songwriting.

Oh, I took a look at the edX Linux class. My eyes glazed over at the cost. Really, guys? I get that you’re a non-profit, but that’s a crazy amount of money for what I can get from some YouTube videos and RTFMing a bit. A lot of the first week’s videos were just ads for the Linux Foundation, and that did nothing for me, either. I dropped it. I don’t have time for it.

It’s too bad. I was really excited about this course, and about edX, but the amount of money they ask for is just way too much for what’s essentially a DIY course. Coursera has already set my expectations at the appropriate level– $49 for a certified piece of paper is about right, considering it’s “college lite.”

I’m not a huge fan of the amount of money Udacity wants for its certified courses, either, but the coaching is useful. edX just wants the money, no coaching. As mom would say, “Das geht nicht!”

More Coursera Fun

 Education, Music, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on More Coursera Fun
Jan 202014
 

Prof. Donald Hornstein is a fun lecturer to listen to. I highly recommend his new Coursera class on Environmental Law. If you have any interest at all in the environment or in law, take it. (Even for you lawyers out there– it’s a fun refresher.)

I take my CLE every year at the UNC Festival of Legal Learning, and every year, I look forward to Don Hornstein’s lectures. They’re not just entertaining, they’re also fascinating. He takes a subject that at times can be really dry and breathes life into it.

I also signed up for a class called “Write Like Mozart.” It started a few weeks ago, so I’m already behind. I’m going to have to hustle to catch up, but there’s some really interesting stuff going on there. I’d like to learn more about 18th century voice leading!

Is Paddy the Coolest Thing Ever???

I was sitting here, surrounded by my MIDI gear, when I had a thought that other people have already had. “What if I could use this stuff to edit my photos in Lightroom? Wouldn’t it be a heck of a lot faster?”

The answer is yes, so long as Lightroom doesn’t break the plugin you’re using.

Paddy is a program developed as donation-ware, that lets you use just about any MIDI controller to control the sliders in Lightroom to develop photos. If you’ve used Lightroom for any appreciable length of time, you know that fiddling with the mouse to change levels for all of Lightroom’s sliders is finicky business. Sometimes the sliders misbehave, sometimes the mouse misbehaves, either way, it’s tedious.

What Paddy does is take that tedious, repetitive mouse clicking, and if you have an old MIDI mixer with some motorized faders, you can zoom through editing photos in a snap. The faders will automatically go to the positions of the current photo in Lightroom, and you can just mess around with them as you please. I love the idea of this kind of tactile feedback, as well as the idea of mixing MIDI and photo developing.

This is one of those things I need to put on the “Come back to this in a few months” pile and see how the software is progressing.

Progress Report

 Art, Japanese Language, Music, News, Photography, Technology  Comments Off on Progress Report
Jul 252013
 

So I start a lot of projects on this blog, and some get finished, some don’t. I use David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” approach to constantly examine what I want to do vs. what I can do. GTD is a lifesaver in that regard. It helps keep me focused when sometimes it feels like I’m being torn apart by ducks.

So here are some short updates on projects I’ve been wanting to work on/finish.

The Grammar Songs

I discovered that in order to make it work, I need to improve both my Japanese and my music production skills. I studied music from 4th grade all the way through college, so I know a lot about performing music, but I don’t know as much as I should about composing and producing it, which are two entirely different skill sets.

I’ve been using Coursera to work on the production side, and now I need to work more on the composition side. And when it comes to writing lyrics, that’s the result of daily writing exercises.

My Japanese is pretty good, but it’s not quite at that level yet, so I’m working on it. Same goes for melodies. I’m looking for a way to get more music theory under my belt.

Japanese Studies

Those are going pretty well. JOI makes it easy to load up on classes for grammar, conversation, and vocabulary when I need to, and they meet my level, which is a godsend. Being an advanced student in a room full of beginners can be helpful sometimes, but it’s hard to make progress that way. So I’m glad JOI has classes that meet my needs. That’s going well so far.

Also, because of work, I work with Japanese people on a pretty regular basis. The only downside is that since we’re in the US, we mostly speak English and follow US business customs. Not all the time, but a lot of it. Those times when I need to slip into Japanese Mode it comes in really handy.

3D and 2D Art

Well… that had to get put on the “I’ll do it after the JLPT” pile. There’s just too much going on right now, and too many projects require my attention, so I find it’s best to whittle it down to what I can handle. I still want to get into it, but I need to find the right time/place to do it.

I sketch whenever I can. I’m not very good at it, but it’s relaxing, and it’s fun. It also helps me with my photography, and my eye for how I want to compose photos.

Where ARE the Photos?

That’s another thing that’s being put on the shelf for now. I have a giant pile of photos to edit, and just no time to do it. Editing requires big chunks of time for me, and unless I’m getting paid to do it, I just do it when I can. I’m going through the older stuff and gradually adding it, though. I don’t know of a good way to bump old posts up to the top of the site just because they have new material. Maybe I’ll create a new tag?

Calligraphy/Shodo

Well, ever since my class in Raleigh ended, I’ve been going to my usual calligraphy classes. Before the classes in Raleigh ended, though, I spent some time studying Edo-moji, and that was a lot of fun. Now I’m trying to decide what to do next in calligraphy/shodo.

Other Site Stuff

I recently moved the site over to Suffusion, and I like it as far as CMS/frameworks go. I can’t really call it a template, because it’s more like a framework you have to set up and tweak yourself to get it to really sing. My current design is a little Spartan, but I’m from the Jakob Nielsen school of web design. It needs to be easy to read, and accessible first above everything.

Done with Intro to Music Production

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Done with Intro to Music Production
Apr 272013
 

That was fun.

I just finished up the Berklee Intro to Music Production class on Coursera. I learned a lot, and had a lot of fun doing it. I would love to be able to point you to my insanely popular tracks that are burning up all of the interwebs, but I’m still a scrub in that respect. The only way to get good at most things in life is to practice.

My only problem is that I keep coming across new and interesting things to do. Ahh! I need another 10 hours in the day. Someone get on that for me.

Digital Sound Design Class

 Music, Technology  Comments Off on Digital Sound Design Class
Feb 272013
 

Well, the intro to digital sound design class on Coursera is over. That was an interesting class, and I learned a lot. I’m looking forward to the next class I’m going to take on Coursera, Intro to Music Production, taught by one of the faculty at Berklee. It will be interesting to see what’s the same, and what’s different. I wonder if they will cover anything related to Reason, my DAW of choice. I don’t really use Cubase as much as I should, but it’s because I’m not invested in VSTs.

FM Synthesis

 Music, Technology  Comments Off on FM Synthesis
Feb 172013
 

When Propellerhead Software released their new PX7 FM synthesizer for Reason last fall, I bought it on sale because I fell in love with the sounds of my childhood. It comes with over 100,000 patches that are translated from the Yamaha DX7, and that’s great.

But there’s one small problem: I don’t know anything about programming an FM synthesizer. I understand the basic theory behind FM synthesis and how it works, but I don’t know how to turn that into PX7 patches that sound musical and not like train horns. Yes, I could just use the 100k I got from the Props, but I’d also like to make my own.

Someone on the Propellerhead User Forum suggested this book: “FM Theory and Applications by Musicians for Musicians,” by Dr. John Chowning and David Bristow, Yamaha, 1986. I went to my local library and requested a copy, and they got it through an interlibrary loan. It just came in today. Looking forward to reading it, and maybe untangling those FM mysteries.

Also, I’m really enjoying the sound design class on Coursera so far. It’s all pretty easy to understand and relatively straightforward. Some of it I already know, some I don’t.

Coursera-sera // Nektar Panorama P4

 Education, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Coursera-sera // Nektar Panorama P4
Feb 092013
 

I signed up for Coursera today, mainly because I was interested in an Intro to Sound Design class taught by Steve Everett of Emory University. I’m coming in a little late, but I’ll still have time to finish it and get my certificate, if that’s what I want. What I really want is to learn how to do sound design.

I’ve been trying to get more and more into music production, but it’s always a question of time. I don’t seem to have enough of it to figure this all out on my own, so I’m hoping I can pick up some knowledge here and skip ahead a few steps.

I like the offerings in Coursera, but I wish they had more of a Udacity model that lets me pick up and finish a class whenever I feel like it, kind of like Khan Academy, only with certificates if I want one.

All three sites are pretty amazing in their own way, but it’s still a matter of making the time to get the work done.

Nektar Panorama P4

I keep forgetting to mention this. A few weeks ago my patched-together Edirol MIDI controller was dying again, and this time, no amount of pencil work could bring the dead keys back.

So I started looking at new MIDI controllers. I first went to the local Large Music Supply chain store, and tried a bunch of keyboards out, and just wasn’t impressed with any of them. Some were too mushy, some were too hard, none were what I was looking for.

I could have spent $300 now, and wound up buying another new keyboard in six months when I got sick of it.

So I kept looking, this time online. I decided to give the Nektar Panorama P4 a try. Amazon is good about taking returns, so why not?

The P4 has really tight integration with Reason, and the keys feel great. There’s some weight, but not full weight. The display and rotary knobs/sliders mean that I don’t have to fiddle with the computer as much.

Nektar also says that they’ll be doing frequent updates to keep up with the growing number of Rack Extensions in Reason. If a RE isn’t mapped, you can’t do anything with it from the P4. That’s kind of annoying, but it only affects the latest REs.

I like this growing trend of creating instruments that feel like instruments, and pull me away from the monitor.

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