mike’s music pages

Posts Tagged ‘make music’

I am not much of a composer, but I love making music on my computer. Fortunately, many great works have already been composed that one can use to make music on a computer. You can find scores for much great music online for free. You may even be able to find midi sequences for the music you want, which will save you some time. For this post, I sequenced a popular piece by J. S. Bach, his “Air” from the Orchestral Suite No. 3. You can listen to it on YouTube.

I chose sampled orchestral sounds for playback, but you can use any sounds that you wish. So, instead of Bach played with strings, you could have electronic Bach.

I don’t have good keyboard skills, so I used the music notation program Sibelius to create my sequence. First I entered the score into Sibelius.

By notating the score, I could more easily check for errors visually or by listening to the playback in Sibelius. Once I was satisfied with the score, I exported it to a midi file. I then imported the midi file into my digital audio workstation (DAW),  Cakewalk Sonar X1.

In Sonar I used instances of Dimension Pro and Garritan Personal Orchestra and loaded the harpsichord, violins, violas, cellos and basses.

I edited midi controllers and note velocities to make the instruments more expressive. The result is what you hear in the video, which shows the piano roll view of Sonar with custom colors.

Do you have musical ideas in your head that you want to record? Do you want to compose your own music? Do you feel a creative impulse? Do you want to know what your music would sound like if you had a band to play it?

You can make your own music, and you don’t have to hire a band to play it. There are plenty of computer tools available that will help you make your own music.

When I decided that I wanted to make my own music I spent money on stuff that I did not need. I did not know how to start, so I bought something that did not fit my purpose. This article will help you avoid the mistakes that I made. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have heard about Band-in-a-Box from PG Music, Inc. It is the best tool I know of for quickly creating original music. Band-in-a-Box is designed to help you quickly generate musical accompaniments or complete songs. To make a song you just select a key, set the tempo, select a style and enter your chords.  There is a Band-in-a-Box for Windows and a Band-in-a-Box for MAC. Band-in-a-Box is an affordable, effective tool for creating original music quickly for making practice tracks, backing tracks, or complete songs; and it costs much less than the other digital audio workstation (DAW) programs that I use. Read the rest of this entry »