Author: Samuel Plum

And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog…. already in progress? No? Well, sort of, now.

Music 30/30 – Day 11

I took a bit of a slight detour in my musical training today. I still spent some time going over the basic rules for Second Species Counterpoint, which was interesting, but I’ve also been realizing that so far I’ve had a very strong focus on more or less “pure” music theory, which the counterpoint work so far is reminding me lends itself very well to classical music. I know it applies to other forms of music as well, and having good fundamentals is going to be really important for making really quality stuff, but I’m also not certain that its where I need to be focusing right now, given my stated goals. I’ve been enjoying the heck out it, sure, and I’m sure I’ll keep going at it for a while at least, but I also wanted to start some new threads of investigation to see if I can’t get something a little more directly in tune with where I’m trying to go.

To that end I picked up a different course from this same instructor (J. Anthony Allen, if anyone is wondering. He has a Ph.D. in music, is a collage professor, and an award winning composer and performer, and has some very excellent music courses on Udemy, including the Complete Music Theory course I’m enrolled in.) This new course focuses in on composition for electronic music, so rather than focusing on sheet music and piano parts, he’s using a digital audio workstation, drum loops, piano rolls, and the like, which is a very similar setup to where I’m going anyway. Since I know I already appreciate his teaching style it should be a good fit, and hopefully a good segue into the more specific if somewhat theory light classes I already have from others on writing music for games.

Music 30/30 – Day 9

So, I started in on counterpoint today, and already it is hurting my brain. So many rules to keep track of. I’m sure it will start to sink in with some practice, and I’m also sure that it doesn’t help that I’m starting the process so late in an already long and tiring day, but for the moment I’m scratching my head just a bit on first species counterpoint.

That said, aside from being a bit overwhelmed by all of the rules, I think I’m getting the general gist of it. Try to have your melody move mostly in smaller steps and intervals, try not to stay in one place for too long, stay away from dissonant intervals, at least in first species. When harmonizing, try to keep the two melody lines moving counter to each other, avoid landing on intervals of fifths or octaves in general, and certainly avoid having more than one of them in a row. There’s a lot more too it than just that, but it mostly all boils down to what seems to be a couple of main rule categories: don’t be boring, don’t be jarring. I’m sure with some sleep and practice it will start to click in.

Lazy day today, taking advantage of the weekend, I did get some drawing in, playing around a bit on the new drawing monitor we picked up. It’s an interesting experience. It’s nice having the advantages of a digital medium, with its layers and tool options and variable erasers and all, while still having that direct feedback of moving a thing and leaving a line more or less where it makes contact. I say more or less because there is a slight offset between the pen nib and the cursor point on the screen, which is unfortunate, but still, it’s pretty slick.

That being said, I’ve actually gotten pretty used to using my regular, non-monitor based drawing tablet, so so far I’m not really seeing much difference in the results. I’m sure it’s a matter of degrees and getting used to things, though.

Music 30/30 – Day 8

On the music front, in addition to the standard piano practice, which for today included an almost recognizable rendition of some parts of Megalovania, I spent some time today learning more about intervals, as well as consonance and dissonance in intervals and how they resolve. Tomorrow gets into counterpoint, which I have been looking forward to. I’m not entirely sure why, since I’m not entirely sure what it actually is, but I have a feeling that understanding that is going to really help push my composition skills up into a new bracket.

Wow, so, somehow I forgot to actually post this earlier, so before it gets any further, here goes…

Music 30/30 – Day 7

I feel like tonight’s piano practice went really well. I’m not going to get any cool points for saying that I nailed 100% on Hot Cross Buns, but that’s a thing that happened, so I’ll report it anyway. I decided to spend a little bit of my piano practice time working on the ‘classic’ starting piano pieces that come built into Synthesia. They are exceptionally easy at this point, but I’m sure they will ramp up quickly enough, and it seems like this is the sort of thing you generally start playing when you first learn, so why not. Of course I also made some progress on my regular practice pieces, so I feel like that’s going rather well.

On the music theory side of things, I spent some time today learning about modes, how they are formed, named, used, etc. It’s pretty neat stuff, honestly. 

Music 30/30 – Day 6

Not a whole lot to report today, though I did learn some interesting things about the minor scales and keys. The main takeaway revolved around the cyclic nature of the patterns for major and minor scales, and how each major scale has a relative minor scale that shares all of the same notes, simply centered around a different starting note as its base.

The other interesting bit of learning came in the form of the harmonic and melodic minor scales, which are essentially adjustments that are made to the natural minor scale to account for it essentially just being an offset major scale. Basically, in a major scale there are certain tones and chords that naturally try to resolve back down toward the root, or tonic, of the scale, but since a minor scale, or a minor key, is essentially just a major key or scale with a different tonic, you run into issues of these leads being missing, or worse, sounding like they are trying to lead back to the root of the major scale. So the harmonic and melodic minor scales make small adjustments to the pitches, borrowing some notes from their own major counterparts to provide those leading tones and chords. Pretty neat stuff.

I’ve finished the videos for the first batch of courses, which according to the instructor puts me pretty firmly around 3/4 of the way through the first semester of his collage music classes, which is encouraging. I say finished the videos rather than finished the course because I still have outstanding homework left to do, including a couple of full analysis projects, entirely aside from the analyses I still intend to do for my two Final Fantasy pieces. Even so, I’ve jumped ahead and started in on the next course anyway, as we are really starting to get into some of the nitty gritty for writing music. Homework will be coming soon, but I’m still soaking in knowledge before the review.

Other Stuff

Hey, another actual video today! It’s been so long. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this camera, I don’t think it looks particularly good, but it does at least record in a viable frame rate, so it has that going for it. And, as of today’s experiment it has another thing going for it as well: since I’m recording directly on the computer, I am able to actually record the audio with my good microphone. Before I would have to record the video and audio separately and go through the hassle of syncing them up in post, throwing out the comparatively crappy audio that came with the video and replacing it with the track recorded on my mic unit. Now I can skip all of that and have the nice audio already integrated into the video, while also keeping a consistent frame rate and having the result already on my computer for editing without needing to transfer both the video and audio files over to it. So for the moment I’m thinking that the time and trouble it saves me might be worth a small dip in video quality, at least for the sake of these Journey videos. I may need to come up with a different solution if I need to record myself for something else.

But, regardless, on to the meat and potatoes.

Music 30/30 – Day 5

Today the music theory course finally starts getting into some of the stuff I’ve been waiting for: note and chord progressions, and minor keys. It’s just getting started, and I’ve been really enjoying everything leading up to this point, music is a fascinating subject, but this means that I’m starting to get into the stuff that’s potentially going to help me write a decent tune. Here’s hoping.

In preparation, I took the time to finish transcribing my Final Fantasy selection into Musescore so that I’m ready to sit down and do a full analysis once I know what I’m doing. I’m hopeful that if I can work out what is in the piece I’ll have a better understanding of how I might go about making something similar myself. For added measure, I also started a second one, the main theme to Final Fantasy VII. More complex than “To Zanarkand”, but still with a very recognizable and memorable melody while maintaining a haunting and wistful tone throughout. The beautiful thing about that one is that, being the main theme, the melody line makes repeat performances throughout the soundtrack, even shifting tone to become triumphant and hopeful at times, so understanding its construction could go a long way toward reaching my goal.

I also found a handy app for Android that lets you practice reading musical notation, and I already feel like it’s helping me get a better grip on things. At this rate, I may actually be a mildly acceptable musician by the end of this challenge.

Somewhat.

Music 30/30 – Day 4

Ok, some actual music today, just for fun:

Just a little playing around with the LMMS DAW.

As far as actual work and progress goes, I feel like I learned a decent amount today. I learned that I still have a lot of practicing to do before I can hit the right keys without looking at them, which is a bit problematic if you are trying to keep proper time with notes moving across a screen on your laptop. If I watch the screen in synthesia too closely I tend to get all messed up on where my fingers are and miss everything. And if I watch the keyboard to play the right notes, my timing is atrocious. But, that’s why we practice.

In theory class I learned, or relearned, a lot about keys, scales, and chords, getting into triads and inversions, and a bit into how to analyze a piece of sheet music. Of course, I need to practice, so I set out on the internet in search of some for one of my favorite composers of all time: Nobuo Uematsu. In particular I found someone’s arrangement of his piece “To Zanakand” from Final Fantasy X.  It seems like a good choice, haunting and powerful while still being a relatively simple piece overall. I think it will be a great starter exercise. 

Other

In other news, well, I don’t have much other news. I did a couple of quick sketches today, and some sculpting practice before dinner, but nothing actionable. Reviews are coming in on my game jam submission, and looking generally positive so far, though everyone seems to hate the music. It’s understandable, I kind of slapped the version that’s on the game together relatively quickly, with only the minimal musical understanding that I had going into it, and having never used the program that I used to write it in before. It was meant to be placeholder music, but when it came time to add in the real music, I found that I couldn’t actually do it.

You see, the game’s music is designed to play more or less randomly, following a fairly standard chord progression chart, meaning that the root chord can be followed up by any of the others, but the other chords have certain places that they are allowed to go. The game was designed around this concept, with the obstacles in the game fitting into shapes that matched that same pattern. I had a section of music designed around each chord, and each time a section finished playing the game would choose the next one randomly based on the chord progression, and send out the appropriate matching obstacles as the song played on.

The problem came in with my general lack of understanding of Unity’s sound system. No matter what I tried I couldn’t quite figure out how to get the next section to play exactly on time. There were random sub-second delays in the playback as it would switch from one section to the next. Occasionally it would even go the other direction, and start playing the next one very slightly early, or skip a part of one, or other weird results. I’m sure there are ways to smooth things out, but I certainly couldn’t find them in the short time allotted for the game jam, so the problem persisted.

Unfortunately, the “enhanced” soundtrack that I wrote for the game, to replace my quick placeholder music, made these odd audio sputters really stand out. The placeholder music was already kind of wild and chaotic, so it tended to mask it more, but the “real” soundtrack was much more organized, had a tighter flow and was more rhythmic. It even had a percussion track to it. In this case better was actually far far worse. Even though it sounded great when played together as a whole, when put into the random generator with it’s timing issues, it sounded awful.

So, since I’m sharing music today, I’ll share that one too. The soundtrack to Flight of Light that never saw the light of day. Enjoy!

Music 30/30 – Day 3

Today I thought I’d try out another one of the courses that I picked up on Udemy, this time specifically geared around composing and recording music for film, television, and video games. It seemed like a good fit for the sort of thing I’m trying to accomplish. I’m not entirely sure if it’s going to be a good course yet, it does seem a bit more professional than the other video game music course that I have, but at the same time the course so far has mostly been focused on what expensive hardware, software, and audio sample packages I should be purchasing. The last lesson I managed to squeeze in did finally start to cover some techniques for actually writing music, so it may turn out alright in the end, but I’m not super impressed so far.

Aside from that I did manage to get at least a bit of piano practice in, mostly focused on the same rhythms I’ve been working on, but also just spending some time on basic scales. I also spent a bit of time playing around in Cakewalk, trying to see if I can figure out how to use the thing. It seems like having a decent DAW (digital audio workstation) is going to be crucial to the project, and they seem to be the best available without shelling out a large sum of cash.

I also spent some time just playing around with making some music, this time directly in musescore. Nothing that’s done to the point of sharing, but it’s good to be practicing at least.

Other Items

Aside from the music, I put some time in today on Unity training as well. I’m trying to wrap my head around how to use their suite of Unity for Film tools. The toolset was designed for creating in-game cut scenes for more cinematic games, but people have also just been using them to create realtime rendered animations and videos, including a short series that Disney is developing based on Big Hero 6. In my case, I’m wondering if the tools are going to be friendly enough to allow for rapid production of animated educational videos for youtube. I had originally planned to produce them directly in blender, but it seems like my lack of power in the render department is going to be a huge hindrance on that front, so these cut scene tools may be the thing that saves that project from the trash pile of infeasibility.

Music 30/30 – Day 2

These updates will be a bit sparse for a bit, I’m afraid. There’s a lot of basic ground to cover before I can start to make any actual music (though astute readers and viewers will note that I have already fudged out some very basic music in the past, and even slipped it onto the site in various places).

That said, in addition to today’s piano practice (primarily focused on a straightforward “Straight Beat Gospel Style” rhythm, but also dipping a bit into a few video game themes) I spent some time going over the beginnings of some basic music theory around scales. While I’ve never been a particularly good musician, I’m also not a complete novice, so there wasn’t really anything in the lessons covered today that I wasn’t already familiar with, but it’s good to have the refresher all the same.

I was reminded of something that was mentioned in the first part of this music theory course, which I of course cheated and watched a little over a month ago, which is the use of solfege around the world. You may think you don’t know what that is, but I’d bet that you are wrong. Solfege is a fairly standard note notation method for music that represents the notes with a set of basic syllables, specifically: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti. See? You do what it is. Thanks, Sound of Music.

What I found interesting is that according to the instructor, in other parts of the world, specifically parts that are not the United States, (and possibly the UK?), the solfege are often used as the actual note names themselves. By which I mean, as I understand it from the course, and the instructor has the credentials to know, we’re pretty much the only ones that name the notes with the letters A through G. Which is fantastic to know. Some places use the solfege with a fixed “do”, meaning that what we call a “C”, they always call do, “D” is re, etc. Apparently other places use it a bit more like we do, with a flexible “do”, where “do” is always the root of whatever key you are in.

It’s one of those things that you don’t really think about until you start to dive into this stuff, but it is fascinating to learn. It also kind of addresses at least some of one of my main gripes with music theory, which is the question of why C is C. What I mean is, if you want to use letters for the notes, fine, I get that. You want to use A-G, sure, why not? But, you’ve got a key, literally one single key in which the major scale, the basic pattern that is kind of the basis for everything else, lines up with that letter grouping exactly to have no flats and no sharps. And for the tonic, the root note of that scale, you choose the letter “C”. The third one. Why?

C Major is one of the first scales anyone learns, it’s what the piano keyboard is built around, we even refer to the center of the keyboard as Middle C. If the letters are just arbitrary and really just represent concepts, and are looping around anyway, why in the world would you not just call that note “A”? Let that be the beginning note, and have the whole thing make a lot more sense.

I’m sure there’s probably some advanced technical reason out there as to why the actual A makes a better starting point than C, and if and when I find it I will take this rant back, though to be honest I would have hoped that whatever the explanation is it would be important enough to come up at least from time to time. I have a sneaky suspicion that it’s just one of those scenarios where someone simply didn’t think things through, or more likely when they decided to go with letter names just started with their favorite scale, and worked up from there. Which is a classic case of A+ favoritism.