Maidens of the Kaleidoscope
~Hakurei Shrine~ => Alice's Art Atelier => Topic started by: BT on August 28, 2015, 07:22:25 PM
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Hi!
Just how many of you folks play an instrument, sing, or compose music? Do you need a little shot of motivation to make you do it more often? Then you're like me! (My condolences.)
:dragonforce: :flowerpower: :dragonforce:
My idea is to have a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly thing (whichever is more likely to hold out over time) where we pick a tune and create our own cover of it, with no constraints on the result as long as it was inspired by the original. Who's in?
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Any existing tune? Or are we free to create our own tunes and let ourselves pick which tune to work on?
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Any existing tune? Or are we free to create our own tunes and let ourselves pick which tune to work on?
Oops, ambiguous wording. I was saying we'd pick ONE specific tune to tackle and be creative about, but thinking about it, most people wouldn't end up being happy with the choice. How about a list of songs, or a category, say, any song from <videogame>'s OST, or any mainstream hit from '77, and so on.
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I express my interest. I'm a total beginner and anything I try sounds too crappy for me to stay motivated to finish. Anything that'll force me to finish and thus improve is welcome.
edit: though since I practically have zero pop song knowledge from any decade, I'll stick to the vgm ones
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Sung music is kinda troublesome because most of us would be making instrumentals, and songs tend to fall apart comically without the singing.
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Sung music is kinda troublesome because most of us would be making instrumentals, and songs tend to fall apart comically without the singing.
Some sung music, not all, but sure.
If enough people are interested, I'll try picking a topic, see if you guys are cool with it, and we'll roll. Other people can try picking it instead, though. Totally fine by me.
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Aye, not a lot of people, but that's expected. We don't necessarily need them. Let's try something, then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-s-VQBoUdc
https://soundcloud.com/chrono-trigger-remastered/tracks
Chrono Trigger is a pretty nice catch-all - you can probably find most genres in there without going too crazy. How's a month sound to come up with something neat inspired by one of Chrono Trigger's tracks?
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Just saw this. I'll give it a try. There happens to be a song I like a lot from that game, so I'm good with it, and a month sounds like a fair amount of time as well.
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What's the progress with you guys? I sat in front of the piano a few times to get into the groove of things and try to get the right chords for my track. Nothing concrete yet, but I hope to get work done tomorrow.
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I've learned the notes, practiced actually playing them a bit on piano. It shouldn't be too hard (not to say the result is gonna be any good). I hope to try it on guitar as well. I'm not planning on getting particularly creative with it, but we'll see I guess.
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Haven't done anything yet. I don't have any nostalgia to help me, unfortunately. Can we have a tentative end date up on this?
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September 30th sounds about right.
Btw, you can post you results ahead of time! There aren't really any restrictions on this.
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I can't contribute much, but i thought it would be the best place to ask about music theory.
Do you have some links to start learning to analyze and compose music? Not about how to (physically) play instruments.
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I honestly don't know if there's any appropriate place for that question here, but it seems the most appropriate, at least.
Anyway, music theory, hooo boy. Music theory is a beast. I've started studying informally like two years ago, less informally about half a year ago, and will start formally this coming school year. And I feel like I've made only a pebble throw distance. I'm finally getting somewhere interesting with my less informal lessons, today in fact.
Though don't let that discourage you. I've picked up a lot of revelations and tiny eurekas on my own when I was informally studying. In fact, I think I picked up as much as I could alone until I realized I needed a teacher to help organize what I knew into actual formal learning. I felt roadblocked and needed guidance to get through.
But you should know that you yourself can definitely pick up enough to analyze music. What you learn from analyzing, you try to apply to your own language. Pretty fun stuff. Not that I've gotten anywhere near that less informally though. Informally, I experimented around a lot.
Music theory has been around for waaay longer than the internet has, you'll find a lot more books on the matter than anything you'll find online. The 'learn music theory online' all cover the same basic stuff, just find one you can easily follow along with and you've seen them all. Personally I liked this video series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gHEIF0rT2w&list=PLB585CE43B02669C3). These basic stuff are really mind-numbing grueling work about terminology and identification, what not. If you feel you don't need it, I don't blame you. I assume you know how to read music at least.
As far as I've looked, no one has the time to teach anyone anything beyond these basic ideas. And they simply present this information without really teaching you to apply them or check that you really know them. That video series assigns homework, some of which I've done, helpful. To be honest, I don't know what lies beyond this basic music theory. Terms like voice-leading, 3-4 part harmony, counterpoint rise up but elude me. This is around the point where I got stuck because the books I've read about these 3 subject matters where definitely geared more towards composition rather than analysis, and I needed help applying them. I think I'm just about to get into those.
Analysis wise, there's this thing called SHMRG (https://ttumusicology.wikispaces.com/SHMRG+details), which is an acronym for Sound Harmony Melody Rhythm Growth. It seems to be a common thing taught, and does seem useful to keep in mind when thinking about a certain piece of music. Personally, I find the growth element the most fascinating part of music, how ideas take form and develop over the course of the music. Again, this eludes me but I find it alluring.
If you want to analyse stuff, I think harmony is the most important for pop stuff and also anything [not atonal] from the past 2 centuries or so. I think the best part of music theory is trying to figure out why a certain part of the music makes you feel a certain way. Because realize this: it's not an accident. This is the same as color theory explaining why blues and oranges contrast well. The songwriter/composer may have stumbled upon this evocative mood by accident but the sound world it generates is most definitely not an accident. You have to try and unlock this secret. Most of the time, I find the answer lies in the harmony. Some harmonies sound poignant and others sound unexpected and you have to try and figure out why it's poignant or why it sounds unexpected. The music arriving at a major chord over a series of minor harmonies and minor scale melodies will sound unexpectedly rich and lush. Try to become fluent at determining the harmony of the music and you'll be able to see a basic blueprint of the score. An emotional map, you could say. Cadences also play a big part in this.
Analyzing game music or pop songs will probably give you a very good intro course of determining what the harmony for passages are. Touhou music, for example, almost invariably follows some kind of 6-7-1-7 progression to introduce the main theme. And the bass note is the root of the chord, so it's that much easier. It'll help you see which are the chordal and which are the non-chordal tones. Books will very much help you here, as they often contain analyses of compositions by past composers, giving you an idea of how to analyze music yourself.
I've also just now found this internet archive (https://archive.org/details/texts?and%5B%5D=music+analysis&sort=-downloads&page=2) which I myself will have to peruse with a comb later. Probably a little too advanced to start with, or even for me probably, but even big things can give you big ideas.
Well hope that gave you some ideas of how to start.
tldr: learning how to identify the harmonies of the music will help you the most immediately
Edit: I also found this blog (http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2013/06/harmony-as-structure.html) by a classical guitarist and composer that I'm really enjoying going through. Try look through it for some neat ideas.
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Well then... https://soundcloud.com/toads-numbers/frogs-theme
Obviously it's a very simple song, and I did nothing creative with it. There are probably better ways to record things than with an iPod microphone. Not sure what else to say. The song was fun to learn and I probably wouldn't have done it otherwise, so thanks for the inspiration. It's a shame there are so few people here, but if you decide to do this again next month I'll stick around.
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Well then... https://soundcloud.com/toads-numbers/frogs-theme
Obviously it's a very simple song, and I did nothing creative with it. There are probably better ways to record things than with an iPod microphone. Not sure what else to say. The song was fun to learn and I probably wouldn't have done it otherwise, so thanks for the inspiration. It's a shame there are so few people here, but if you decide to do this again next month I'll stick around.
It came through clear despite the iPod, which is nice because I wanted to record the same way.
That was short and sweet. There are improvements to be made but, I mean, yeah, the idea was to have at least some kind of finished product. Thanks for playing!
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I just saw this I supper want to do this too now.
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You're welcome to share your enthusiasm. I clearly lost mine halfway through! If you have some cool idea, I'll participate.
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Hello, I just saw this thread and thought it sounded cool. Since it's supposed to be a music club, I was thinking, how about compiling an album, or musical collaborations, and what not? Music don't really seem to be the main focus around here, as opposed to drawing, so maybe publishing works like that might generate more interest in the music side
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well i notice there is a real lack of direction kinda. so if we all had one goal. like covering a song all together as a group. each person does something. it gives people a group goal.
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https://soundcloud.com/reycall-sounds/mm-feet-miyu-matsuki
Put out a new track a couple of hours ago made it on the spur of the moment..... Why does it hurt so fucking much.
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Please take all of my 'yes'.