[22/10/2023] - hi


still under construction

you can listen to my music on youtube.

just so this does not become free advertisement here is a bit about my music and how i made first contact
beware: im stupid and you shouldn't take everything here as absolute truth

setting up

even before i open fl studio, i think on how i want the music to feel. am i going for an anime lo-fi vibe or am i doing an adrenaline-inducing phonk remix of spongebob intro song? after deciding, i check music similar to what i am thinking. for my first music collection i wanted a chiptune-styled mix varying between relaxing and agitated music.
here's some of my inspirations: finding something for your music to be based of is not really difficult. you could use everynoise to find new music and genres

finally, im ready to actually make the music

order

i really enjoy breaking down the compositing process to these steps: sometimes i keep going back and fourth between steps, but i do never skip any of them. doing so often results in messy compositions which i have no patience to fix them and just eventually abandon it. the exception to skipping is the instruments, which i just put some placeholder instrument until i have a nice melody.

instruments

im not going into sound design here, but i have some tips for choosing instruments:

instruments are divided in three categories: harmonic, melodic, rhythmic

harmonic instruments are used to give emphasis to the notes in the melody rhythmic instruments are used to give emphasis on the rhythm of the song melodic instruments play the melody

various things could fit in these categories, even if it is not really an instrument. examples:

harmonic: guitar, piano, violin, someone's voice
rhythmic: drums, bass, piano
melodic: guitar, piano, violin, xylophone, someone else's voice

as you can see, an instrument can fit into more than one category. this really just depends on how you play it. every melodic instrument can be a rhythymic instrument if you play a single note or a melodic instrument if you play a single chord.

identifying which role your instruments are playing is essential for you to develop your music.

classifying instruments:

- instruments with high a attack are harmonic
- instruments with high sustain are harmonic/melodic
- instruments with low attack, low sustain, low decay are rhythmic

chords

first, i choose some musical scale. often you are fine using a major or minor scale, but there are lots of scales for you to experiment on, so testing and googling for new scales can be very helpful for you to choose a scale.

for first contact the music, not the collection. notice the different formatting! i chose d minor natural for the first part, as that is a scale is very similar to c major, but with an a# instead of an b to create a little bit of sadness, and f minor natural for the second part, which got a lot more sharp notes, making it a bit more aggressive and a bit more sad
but what is sadder is that i don't have enough knowledge to explain why the scale pass that feelings. sorry :(

anyways, after choosing the scales i plot some notes, making a nice pattern.
after that, add some notes above those, so that instead of notes they become chords. three is usually fine, but adding more of them can be very useful for variations
generally i just keep trying random things until i find something that i enjoy.
a tip i have is to never repeat a chord or a note, to keep it interesting.

drums

not much to say here, just listen to some of your inspirations and copy the rhythm. drums really are not complex.
usually i'll start with the kick and snare and then add some hats. the faster you play the hats the faster your song will play.

melody

nows the most fun part of making music! also the one that made me trash so much songs.

spamming some notes here and there doesn't always work to make a good melody. you need to know at least the basic about music theory, or else you will be suffering from 1gb of discarded projects.

remember the chords from earlier? well, they are going to be our savior here.
i use the chords to guide me when placing down notes, overlapping the notes from the melody with the chord.

writing a melody is similar to drawing mountains. alternating between smooth and hard transitions of altitude.

when i want to change a note from a chord to another, if there is space in the scale, i use a note between them so that the change doesn't feel too hard.

playing around with octaves can be rewarding too. lets suppose your chord is playing the c e g notes. you could make your harmonic instrument to play c6 e6 g6 while in your melody you are playing c6 e5 g5, while the harmony still works.

remember to be creative and do not stick with formulaic approaches to this step. trial and error can be very rewarding here.

here is a video that helped me a lot to create melodies that i enjoyed. used these tips all over my collection

structure

song structuring is easy when compared with creating a melody. you need to balance between variation and stillness. a tip i have for this is each 4 bars you make a little change to the music, and each 8 beats making a drastic change. on fl studio groups of bars are colored alternating between dark gray and light gray. you can also change that in the configurations.

creating variations isn't that simple though, you need to be aware of how your music is varying with time and create variations according to that.

for example, with kkino there is a variation each 8 bars, starting only with the main melody and some chords, then adding drums and a bass, then removing the melody, then adding another instrument with a new melody and so on.
the "emotion level" is changing throughout the music, going from low -> medium -> lowest -> medium -> high -> higher -> low

if you think about it, it is similar to the mountain analogy i made earlier.
and of course there are names for these variations in music theory but i chose not to remember any of them and just doing what i feel will sound nice. usually works fine but i do want to improve that aspect.

also, there is another video that helped me a lot with song structuring.

mixing

the easy part! usually i will just add some effects to some instruments and change the volume. nothing too complex so ill just list the tips here:

publishing

actually, forget what i said earlier, this is the easy part.

for song names i just type whatever i feel like, sometimes is just a combinations of letters i enjoy, sometimes it's an onomatopoeia of a part of the song, sometimes it takes some thinking to get it. ill just create some fake names if you want to copy this naming style here:
yuuy, defpum, second contact, ween waan woom, koytu?, koytu!!, euclid

and here are some of the names from songs that didn't made into the collection:
eaeeaiot, funny, istaredatthesunfortoolongandnowtheskyisredandimafraiditmightfallandcrushme (this one is really good, maybe i'll finish it later), marko, leviathan

for the cover of first contact, i made some ai art and messed with it with some datamoshing and editing in krita. in future projects i want to limit my use of ai-generated stuff because i do want to improve my artistic skills.

for actually publishing, i used youtube because i noticed an insurgence of small artists growing on youtube, examples are vivivivivi and azali, so i thought the algorthm would be more favorable towards me but sadly it didn't. probably beacause of the song names. but something i discovered is that adding something to the description is really helpful with showing up when searching. that is the reason there is the copy and pasted description on all of the musics. also, it seems like youtube recomends videos with similar thumbnails, as when i was publishing my songs other artists that used datamoshed anime girl thumbnails started to show up on my recommendations, even though their songs did not match the same style i was going forwards.



i think thats all i got for you. now go sub to my youtube channel.
did you really think this was not a big ad?
seems like advertisements got you on the run
btw, all of the music in first contact is free for anyone to use, for any purpose. do whatever you want with this information.