inkyscape

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I wasn't going to say this because it is kind of embarrassing. Or maybe not. Anyway... I decided to learn music from scratch in 2015 because I gave up chess playing. I had been playing chess since I was 8 and interestingly I taught myself the moves from a book. Out of nowhere an online chess site accused me of cheating in chess with no evidence whatsoever to support that. As I said at the time "I am losing games so I would be the most incompetent person at any underhand way of winning!" So chess is over for me. So I had a lot more time for something else. Actually I had been thinking on some level of learning music for a few years before that but it was a vicious circle; I thought of learning an instrument but to learn one I had to know about an instrument. The first thing I did in the first week of deciding to learn music [late 2015] was to email some music teachers but I never got any reply. My emails were normal and I expressed my desire to be positive about learning music. But I think a lot of music teachers don't want to teach adults. Maybe adults don't fit into the ABRSM industry and its exams. So I felt really dejected and depressed for a week and then decided if nobody would teach me then I would do it myself. Bear in mind that at this point I knew absolutely nothing about music, save very vague memories from school of every good boy deserves fruit. I had forgotten long since what a crotchet was. I had even forgotten what a staff was. The book I got and I am holding it now was Understand Music Theory by Margaret Richer. It is a good book. But it was still a real struggle. I would learn something like what different rests do but I couldn't put it together for what I wanted to do: I had given up trying to learn a musical instrument and instead I wanted to do one thing - compose some music. Even if it was bad or mediocre, I wanted to compose some. Yes. I was bonkers enough to think that I could create some. But I reasoned that sometimes craziness/impetuousness could be a good thing. But the decision that really turned it all in my favour was getting Finale Software. There are a LOT of things wrong with Finale and I have listed them in other threads. But Finale gave me two things that I had never had: [1] a chord checker so if I did something wrong I would know and if I something right I would know. So for the first time I had in effect a kind of quality control and progress checker. [2] a way of playing back what I composed to get a musical outcome that I could improve, abandon etc. From then on and that was about early 2016 I could really start doing things. It took me about till mid 2016 to be able to make anything that sounded musical. A big obstacle was getting music to "progress" . That is, I would compose music that didn't "move" or have any forward energy. Eventually I found various ways, some of them pretty normal such as varying the notes [ e.g whole note moves slower than a 16th] and other methods that are more arcane such as cluster chord/note density methods. One of the results of all this was "A Dark mirror Cracked" that I composed in mid 2016 and is in the piano composition thread. I vowed in all this to be as experimental as I could; 1 4 5 chord progressions bored me to tears. I departed from normal chord progressions as much as I could. Indeed, I suspect that I compose what is called "modal" music though I am not sure. I also found other things such as what I call jazz jumps. At this point I realised for the first time that like chess, music theory is enormous. As a bit of an aside if anyone wants to read a book on chess as a cultural force [ you don't need to know anything about how to play to read the book and enjoy it] then the book to get is "A Book of Chess" by a late chess master C H O D Alexander. Then I bought a book on jazz theory and that is probably the next step in all this. What I do already with jumped around, irregular, jazz jumped ways of composing piano suggests it. So I bought jazz theory explained by Julian Bradley. If I am still on these boards in 2030 I might have learned something. It took me 30 years of chess playing and I still made terrible moves though I did get some wins against experts. I have made some compositions of multiple instruments [ e/g about 6] and I like doing that more than solo piano. It's more interesting even though at first i was lost. Then you enter a lot of other theory. When I composed with a viola that was a different kind of staff - a middle C staff so I had to google what that was. Then there are issues of getting instruments to not shout over each other, transposing instruments and a million other things. But int he end I made a few 5 minute compositions with a lot of brass. I am entitled to say that 999/1000 people would have given up all this a long time ago. It has been an enormous amount of work. At one point I even composed a 10 minute piano solo and entered it in a music composition. The academics didn't like it but it will be on my album nonetheless. In all this I have nobody to bounce my music off. That said my ways of doing chord progressions are so unusual that I don't know if it would help. I don't make progressions by numbers. Or by the tonic, super tonic etc. I look at chords as qualities. So I will often have progressions like a C major and then variations of it like C minor or a suspended or extended C chord. Sometimes I even go keyless altogether. I would go atonal if I knew how to do it. Anyway, I hope above anything else that I make interesting music. I could not be a formula composer. It would bore me silly to say have a sonata formula and then I have to follow that formula. Anyway, that went on for a bit! In about a month I will put my debut album on Bandcamp. That will be such a highlight. In late 2015 I never expected to get past what a crotchet was. Make an album? Would I be the first person to mars?

I have already done a lot of things that vary from book theory. I am always to open to other theories. For instance: CEG , say you delayed part of it, e.g you went C G and then rest and E. In normal theory that method is not covered. Yet I always argue that it is still CEG because that is what the ear will still hear.

I had the worst music education . I mean, THE WORST. I learnt absolutely nothing at school. I have never played any instrument. I do not sing. I have no music qualifications at all. I am 100% self taught from knowing absolutely nothing and I am barely older than a meaningful galaxy Hitchhiker. [subtle hint as to how old I am. ] In late 2015 I got a book on basic music theory - i.e EGBDF - and I began to teach myself from scratch. I didn't know what a note was. I expected to give it up after 5 minutes. At first I couldn't make anything that sounded remotely musical. But after about 6 months - mid 2016 - I started making something that sounded musical even though it wasn't very good. I make no secret that I am deeply jealous of many people on this board who have been doing this since the age of four etc. But I have nobody in my family who plays music. But now I am close to releasing my debut album of about 45 minutes of music. I have worked like an absolute lunatic to produce that amount of music. I compose it all properly in Finale before using VST instruments in FL Studio. It makes me wonder why school failed me - it gave me limited, confusing pseudo choices that led me to giving up music when I was 13 at school because I didn't play any instrument and only people who played instruments could continue with music.The whole system was capitalism at its worst; a system of music teachers who only wanted to teach elite people while anyone else was not valued and told tacitly to give music up. I am far more inclined to believe in music education via organic, community music instead such as choirs. tribal music etc. Nobody who has ever been on these forums has had a worse music education - or rather lack of it - than I have.

OK. That is great feedback! Tells me everything that I need to know! I have only shown it to one other person and she said that it sounded like a 1950's Alfred Hitchcock horror movie score. So it is doing what I intended: people give very different perspectives; I call this "multi perspective music" or MPM for short. I'd rather not put the pdf score up; on other forums when I have done that with my music people only talk about the score and they stop listening to the music. It's not an intent to be secret. It's just the bad experiences that I have had on other forums. I have a jumpy, irregular, formless style of music composition. In some of my other piano tunes I take that to more of an extreme than here! I have done a rendition with a synthesizer and I didn't like it as much as using a piano approach. Here is a rendition with a metabell synth:

I like the dragged ascending and belled triple sounds. I looked at the score and I use methods that are about the same!

I could include the pdf score if anyone is interested. But it isn't designed to be physically played; the jumps are too big for hands so it's intent is electronic. I can think of some ways that I could improve it but for now comment, enjoy[?] and lose yourself in my pretty strange, self-taught methods for piano composing!

My handwriting is so bad that it makes a doctor's scrawl legible. If I scored anything by hand it would be a cross between Klingon and Elvish. For the sake of my sanity and world sanity I vow to be a software composer, forever, and always.

You could try saving to a different folder. You can save Finale files to any folder that you want; I save them to a folder on my desktop that I use just for these files.

I have the deepest admiration for anyone who ever composes by hand. Because I can not. I have composed some small ensemble music [ about 6 instruments] in Finale and things get complicated quickly. Say you do a barber shop quartet style chord using the 6 instruments, and then you do a complex tie construction with some delay and composite chords, if you can do that on paper you are a genius because I can't. Then add a passing note construct too over many bars. I would on paper by then be totally lost, have thrown the paper against a wall, and be about to give up composing to take up bricklaying.

Ok. For the past year I have been composing hours of solo piano music so I can give a thorough, and I hope helpful, answer. I use Finale. Sibelius is better but I can not stand its GUI interface. I never touch a physical piano. In fact I cannot physically play any instrument. Instead I type my notes into Finale and form my piano tunes. Then I export the file as a midi, and import the midi into FL Studio for a VST virtual instrument such as the Kontakt grand piano. That is my broad workflow. Why don't I do it all in FL Studio? Because I taught myself theory from textbooks [I have no musical training or qualifications] so I need to see the notes. I also compose complex music with a lot of sus chords and slash chords and I need proper notation for that. Anyway, with Finale I can move mountains. What would take ages on paper with certain mistakes can be done quickly and correctly with Finale. For instance I want to transpose a whole bar, copy and paste a page, copy a bar and transpose it down a minor third, put in a trill, accent, mordent or other articulation? It is all doable easily. In fact it's almost too easy; you could use such digital tools as a crutch and I try to avoid that. So that is the great bit of Finale. But there is also what I call the "controversial" aspect: checking your chords with the Finale chord check tool. There is a lot wrong with this tool. One, it won't check arpeggios, two, it does not recognise a lot of 1st and 5th chords [e.g CG missing out the E] and it doesn't recognise inversions of a chord. So it's not a magic bullet; you still have to think for yourself. Then there is in my opinion the most horrid part of Finale: it's note label system. Finale can label the notes A etc but the letters are so small as to be useless. Thus Finale is a nasty program for complete beginners trying to learn note names. Indeed, I would not recommend Finale for musical beginners at all. Finale also has an instrument set but it sounds awful. I do not like Finale. But it's the lesser of evils for the way I compose; I hate Sibelius more and Musescore lacks features. Dorico I don't know much about. Finale also has horrible default layout settings where notes run into each other in really ugly ways. I wish that I could speak to the developers and smash their heads together. But I would not dream of writing scores by hand. That is masochism with a capital M.

I have sound to shape and colour synesthesia. The best pop song for this is Clocks by Coldplay. I see 3D shapes with colour energy sparkling as the shapes spin around.