music and me: as a child

Dustin said...

Dumb question: if I wanted to learn more about music from a total newbie's perspective, where should I start? Thanks!


first understand that everyone learns differently. i'll explain how i think i learned.

i learn best by deconstruction and/or trial-and-error. it requires i have access to the original application(s) and/or asset(s) used to create the given media.

i don't remember my age, but when i was fairly young our family got a cheap off-the-shelf consumer synthesizer. i think it may have been for Christmas. because it was FM-based it was much smaller and simpler than the kinds you'll see today at your typical electronics stores like best buy or circuit city. this was my first exposure to pushing keys to generate sound. i never took it seriously since it was more of a "toy" as a child.

the later "toy" keyboard i had access to was the Casio SK-1. it had multiple consumer-level sounds to choose from (far from realistic), but it's strength was it's ability to record around one second of live audio via a built-in microphone. that recorded sound was played back on middle-C of the keyboard. it sped up or slowed down the pitch of the sample accordingly to the notes of the piano keys. the nifty 'demo' key proved that you could turn a belch into silly music. i still possess this very keyboard to this day.

i vaguely recall having access to a simple step sequencer on our Atari XEGS computer. it graphically displayed a piano on the screen that highlighted pushed keys via the QWERTY keyboard. it allowed you to record your key sequences in to the computer to play back in sequence. i remember trying to sequence a song completely by ear via trial and error, which I think was Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven".

at another point i realized that it could be possible for one person to play all the instruments in a band individually. shortly after i realized this, as test i obtained a couple of blank cassette tapes and got a couple of our portable boom boxes together in the basement. i got a couple of old empty ice-cream one-gallon buckets we had lying around and used some tent rods as "drumsticks". i hit record on one boom box and recorded some horrid plastic banging for a minute. i then stopped recording, rewound the tape, turned up the volume and hit play on that boom box. i then hit record on the second boom box and recorded myself rapping to the beat of my plastic bucket about how dumb our neighbors were (besides their own troubles with domestic abuse and law enforcement, i too caused them a lot of trouble and grief as a child). without any exposure or understanding of professional music production i was able to devise a poor-child's method of multi-track recording.

fast forward to my 7th grade year, shortly after our family got our first 386 DOS-based computer. this is when things took another turning point in regards to music. i think it was a Night Owl shareware CD-ROM that i became exposed to a program called MODEdit for DOS - along with several bundled MOD files on the disc. coupled with our modem and local BBS' i then had an abundant source of strange, free music. eventually i realized that the program was more than just a funky music player (it contained the word "edit". i'm slow like that). it took some time to learn how the program worked since i had no concept of documentation and README files. i would watch simpler MOD files play back - paying attention to how the screen scrolled by vertically, watching which of the four channels were triggering what notes and what samples they referenced. little by little i found a key that did something new. eventually i was able to enter the "pattern" editor and started experimenting with changing existing patterns.

eventually my previous exposure to simple synthesizers and sampling finally clicked together. with MOD files that constructed cheesy and simple dance, pop/rock music i was able to mentally deconstruct the different layers and instruments. i could turn off individual channels and focus on one channel at a time. thanks to some of the sample filenames being retained i learned the different components of the underlying songs. i learned about drums: the kick, snare, toms, hihat and other cymbals. there were crazy bass synths, horrible guitar samples, cheesy strings, brass, horns and other sampled synthesizers. i payed attention to how songs were constructed visually in MODEdit and would find correlations to those songs in real, traditional music which i was exposed to. once i was able to create my own new MOD files and import samples from the huge library of MOD files i had collected i started to emulate pieces and parts of music i knew. i would try to reconstruct the drum parts from a metallica song, with the fills from the different tom sounds and such.

as computers got better so did tracker programs and formats. MOD files were limited to 4 channels - and originated on the Commodore Amiga. Composer669 came out whose files had 8 channels. after i got a SoundBlaster Pro those 8 channels were split in to 4 channels per left+right channels. i eventually started experimenting with recording and editing my own samples with an old DOS sample editor called DigiPlayer v2.5 by Sami Tammilehto (psi of Future Crew). since the sample results were not so great for the music i turned to using the sample editor for simple mixing and sound design. in time ScreamTracker3 came out that had 16 channels. it was around this time that i was able to stop relying entirely on preexisting MOD/669/S3M samples and started to sample small snippets from my personal music library, either via cassette recording or ripping short samples from Red-Book audio via CD-ROM.

that pretty much details my childhood experience with music up until my sophomore year high school.

in regards to today...

i would highly recommend looking at Apple's Garageband application. it has the software instruments, live recording and effects processing side of things elegantly integrated into one simple to use application that anyone should be able to figure out with some time on their hands. i prefer to use it amongst most other things because i find its limitations to be a good limiting factor in exploring creative music.

in regards to music in today's age...

since anyone can make music on their home computer we're barraged by a lot of songs which lack creativity, originality or depth.

it's easy to get bogged down with the technicalities of hardware, software and recording - consuming you to a point where you're almost expecting the tool to magically write good music for you.

the reason you don't find a lot of original material by yours truly is because i'm still fighting with both of the issues detailed above. i don't feel a special need to share mindless creations with the world at large. i also occasionally lack the discipline to focus on writing truly creative music.

maybe one of these days things will change...