Dave's Music Blog

What I Learned By Playing RockBand 3

2010-11-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

Not sure where they came from, but somewhere along the way I came up with a bunch of misconceptions about music, and learning to play, and practice, and so on. Then I got RockBand 3, and learned a few things:

There's no disgrace in starting off with the Easy songs, and 3 stars are okay the first time you play a song. Heck, if you're having fun, 3 stars is always okay. And you probably won't stay at 3 stars for very long, if you're playing at the right level.

The particular song you're playing doesn't matter. What matters is that you're playing.

Let's say that again: you make progress by putting your hands onto the keyboard. I didn't play any one song more than a few times, except for the ones that I was playing over because they were fun. But I got better anyway!

There's nothing wrong with practice mode, either. The first time through, I wasn't able to nail anything but the simplest of songs.

Feedback is nice, especially if it's supportive, i.e. You Rock! when you get 3 stars on easy on, say, Rock Lobster doesn't mean you're ready for Carnegie Hall, but it does mean that you actually did something.

It's a game. Nobody's going to be impressed. Nobody needs to be impressed. You play the game because it's fun. You do it for you. If you get skills out of it, so much the better, but you do it because it's fun, not because of what anybody else might think.

Rock Band 3

2010-11-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

Go ahead, you snobs, tell me that Rock Band 3 isn't actually making music. I've got a couple of posts coming up with more details, but I've had my hands on a keyboard more since I've gotten RB3 than probably in my last two attempts to become a "real" musician, and that's gotta count for something!

CSound

2008-09-16T03:50:00.000-07:00

After a wee break (6 months?), I'm back looking at music, this time playing around with CSound. I had looked into it maybe 4 years ago, and was not enthused at the time; it looked way too DIY for where I was then.

After playing with PD last year, I got frustrated with what seemed to me that not too many folks were actually using PD to write music. Graphics, yes. Signal processing, maybe. But I was having trouble finding folks just doing plain, regular music. Seems like CSound has more of that going on, even to the point of having a podcast of MP3s on their front page. And CSound has grown quite a bit in the past several years. Color me new and clueless, but the fact that you need to roll your own reverb in PD was a little scary; CSound has at least a couple reverb opcodes built-in.

So I'm dipping my toe into the CSound world. We'll see what comes of it.

Taking It Easy

2008-03-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

Who knew taking it easy could be so much fun?!

I've been continuing to pick easy songs from my MP3 stash and play along with them, both on guitar and keyboard, and it's just been darn fun. Songs like Vangelis' "Hymne" and Alison Krauss' "Baby Mine", which are very simple, but get me to A) figure out what key it's in, B) play IN that key, and C) play in time.

Which leads me to another observation: those lesson books (Mel Bay, etc.) are full of songs that I don't want to play. (I mean, really, who DOES want to play Greensleeves and Koom Bai Yah or however you spell it?) Of course, coming up with enough different books to suit everyone's individual tastes is an impossible task, but that's all the more reason to throw the books out and find stuff I like to play.

And last night, I found a harder (for me) song, with triplets and sixteenth notes, but pretty much in a straight run, that's currently a challenge, but still doable (on the keyboard, anyway; I'm finding I'm better on keys than guitar atm). Gobs of fun!

I might just make it yet, takin' it easy.

What I've Learned Lately

2008-03-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, I played Guitar Hero 3 for the first time, so naturally I'm addicted and am thinking about nothing but music again. My first thought after playing the game is "wow, I'm addicted". My second thought was "hey, why can't playing a real guitar be this much fun?"

By shear coincidence, IT Conversations released a talk by Raph Koster on Monday entitled "A Theory of Fun", which I listened to, which got me thinking more about how to make music fun. Fun, roughly speaking, is about learning, and is about a balance between too easy and too hard. There's obviously more to it than that, but kids think tic-tac-toe is fun, until they figure out that every game played well is a draw, then they move on. I've had loads of fun with various programming tasks, but only until I've explored them fully, at which point they become boring and I look for something else to do.

Then I started thinking about Runescape, which I've played way too much of over the past few months. RS has roughly 30 "skills" that you can gain experience in and "level up". The initial thrill of RS was learning how each skill worked, but even now, I find myself switching back and forth, trying to raise my lowest, working on the most fun, going back to one I haven't done in a while, etc. Some are exciting, some are flat out boring, but each can be fun, depending on my mood at the moment, how much of a challenge I want, etc.

Then back to Guitar Hero 3. I saw my nephew play one of the harder songs (on Easy, but it was still a challenge). I just laughed; no way would I start out on that. I went through the tutorials, then worked my way up through a few of the easier (yet fun) songs I knew. By the end of the evening, I had completed Cliffs of Dover twice, and was loving it.

I got a couple of insights from that. First, on a real instrument, I wanna play like Leo Kottke. Right now. (Ha, ha, only serious.) With GH3, I was much more realistic. Start simple, work your way up. RS does that, too. Start small, put in the time, get leveled up gradually.

Secondly, I was grooving on the feedback that GH3 gives. Not sure what to do about that re:real instruments, (an instructor can be paid to give feedback; perhaps I can find others to play with on occasion as well), but I at least realize that it's an issue.

Perhaps obviously, I shouldn't expect to progress on a real instrument as fast as I did on GH3 or RS. Those games lower the bar for what you have to do to progress, to keep folks playing. But I think I can do a much better job of breaking down learning music into smaller, more easily accomplished tasks, which can serve the same purpose.

So I'm going to be putting together a list of "skills" that I can move around among, to keep things interesting. One of them will be playing along with music I have and know (similar to me playing the songs in GH3 that I knew and liked), but I'll be quick(er) to say about any given song, "that one is a level (or dozen) above where I am right now; I'll save that one for later", rather than what I've been thinking, which is "there's no way I can do that".

Which leads to my last "thing I've learned lately", which I've known all along, but was still fun to see. I watched "Meet the Robinsons" last night, and just loved the scene where the kid had just used an invention to spew PBJ over the whole family, and was cringing, expecting them to be upset. They recoil, turn on him, and ... start cheering: "Yay! You failed!!" Yes, I can celebrate failure. I may not find joy in missing a note, but I can start looking at such failures as a reason to figure out why, and as an incentive to keep trying.

Boredom is my friend

2007-11-27T05:49:00.000-08:00

I won't practice. I've tried, really I have. I say "this time will be different", and I "commit" to an hour a day, or a half-hour a day. I pick up my beginner's level books (Mel Bay for guitar, or Alfred's Adult for keyboard), and hop to it. Sometimes I make it a month, once or twice I've made it two or three. More often than not, I make it a week. This has happened at least once or twice a year for my adult life.

I just won't practice.

But the fact that I come back to it year after year tells me that something is going on between me and music. I can't just put it away. Something in me wants to make music.

Without getting too self-psychoanalytical, I think I try to bite off way too much at a time, and I think I've missed the mark in the past with my efforts. Rather than "learning to play an instrument", followed at some point by "then creating with that instrument", I'm instead going to just get my hands on the instrument (primarily keyboard, but perhaps guitar as well) very regularly. Hopefully daily, but if not quite that often, oh well. Make something up. Play around. No time limits, just make sure I'm there.

And then, I'm gonna get bored.

But it'll be a flavor of boredom that will make me curious about what else I can do. I will have run out of things that I know how to do, and will go looking for more. What little bit can I learn that'll make it a little bit interesting again. (Which will be a different kind of boring than the old, familiar "oh great, I've got to do scales AGAIN", which after a week or three, makes me want to scream.)

This happened this morning. Many years ago, a keyboard teacher taught me a blues scale. Pretty darn hard to play those 5 or 6 notes and make them sound bad. So for the past couple of weeks, I've been sitting down and playing the blues scale up and down the keyboard. And it's gotten pretty boring. So this morning, I did it again, only trying to figure out what else to put in there. I didn't come up with anything worth writing down, but I started jumping around a bit more, and threw in a few extra notes, just to see what they'd sound like. (Mostly, like crap, but here and there, I had a few happy mistakes.) So now I'm off and running again.

And in a few more days, when I get bored again, I might just try modulating from C to F or G, and see what that sounds like for a week or two.

Anyway, the point is to use my boredom as a wedge to get my brain to loosen up and have fun. To me, playing other peoples' music isn't that fun; making my own looks like a blast, and on those rare moments when I make up something interesting, it *IS* a blast.

So yes, boredom, or at least the right kind of boredom, is my friend. A gentle force to nudge me onward, and to remind me that I should be having fun. Because without that fun, I'll be done with this in a week.

PD's Help System

2007-11-26T09:46:00.000-08:00

In the process of learning PD (in particular, trying to understand ex. 3.16), I've been poking around the PD help system. Curiously enough, the help "pages" are actually patches in their own right. In my case, I went looking at the help page for [stripnote], (Help, Browser, 5. Reference, Stripnote), and the window that comes up lets you play with a [stripnote] object. Click on the note-on message (the message box on the right), and you get print output on the console window; click on the note-off message (on the left), and you get nothing.

The other thing that's cool about the whole visual programming paradigm is being able to connect a number box to one of the outputs of, say, [notein], and watch what's happening as you play keys on a keyboard. I believe you can also get a graph of a waveform displayed in a control every so often, but I'm still figuring out how to do that.

Pretty neat that PD lends itself to such play.

TTEM's Example 3.16

2007-11-20T12:00:00.000-08:00

(We now resume this blog, after a few days out with a cold.)

This morning, I got example 3.16 (from TTEM) wired up and working. (I believe the examples from TTEM and the PD examples (i.e. that ship with the program) are one and the same, so I wouldn't have had to wire it up myself, except I wanted to get my hands dirty putting something together.)

The first thing I noticed was how nicely expressive it is, compared to my beginner's "notein->mtof->osc~" patch I had been using. 3.16 gives a little buzz at higher key velocities, has a similar volume at the higher pitches as it does at the lower, and fades quite satisfyingly when you lift the key.

Now I just need to go through the text and understand better how it works. I get most of the top two-thirds, but get a little fuzzy below the phasor~, with all the *~'s and the cos~'s and all. Sounds like my next mini-task, (before I figure out how to wire 3.16 up for polyphony).

Theory and Technique of Electronic Music

2007-11-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

Having gotten PD to hear MIDI from my keyboard and play my very simple patch, my next thought was to figure out how to get polyphony out of PD.

PD is a pretty low-level softsynth. It gives you the basics, like oscillators and D/A converters, but beyond that, you wire them up to suit your needs. Kinda like being given a box of tubes, resistors and capacitors and being told you can build your own stereo. Hence my need to "figure out polyphony". I'm doing so because a) once you figure it out (and it doesn't look to be that hard, really), you can do pretty much anything you want, and b) I'm a geek.

So my next step was to dust off (figuratively speaking) my copy of TTEM, known also as "The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music", by Miller Puckette. On the one hand, TTEM is (if not "over my head") a lot of complex stuff about synthesizing sound, but wrapped around the math and theory is explanations of how to do stuff with PD. Like sampling, reverb and polyphony.

Having read TTEM pretty much cover to cover a year or so ago, I'm just skimming over things, and heading for the practical, and this morning, I stopped and got halfway through understanding example 3.16, which looks like a more complete MIDI patch.

Puredata and MIDI

2007-11-13T12:03:00.000-08:00

I fired up Puredata (PD) yesterday, pulled up my first (and only) attempt at putting a MIDI-controlled patch together, and for some reason, it wasn't hearing MIDI. So this morning, I troubleshot it.

Turns out that under the Media menu, PD remembered that I use OSS for sound output, and that I had default-MIDI selected, but didn't remember the MIDI devices that I was using, so when I pulled up the "MIDI settings..." dialog, it showed "none" for the input and output device. First time through, I tried switching to ALSA and back, and I seem to recall somehow that worked, but as I write this up, it leaves the MIDI devices blank. Anyway, when I set them both to "OSS MIDI device #1", it works just fine.

Back to Music

2007-11-12T07:23:00.000-08:00

Time for another run at creating music. I play keyboards barely at a beginner's level, guitar barely at a beginner's level, and have a tolerable understanding of what they teach in the first two semesters of college level theory. I've wanted to do something with all that, but for various reasons, get discouraged in short order and put it back on the shelf.

I have a decade-old Takamine acoustic guitar, a several-year-old Casio keyboard, and MIDI cables connecting the keyboard to my Linux box. I have Rosegarden and PureData/PD installed (among other things like Hydrogen and I think FreeBase), but have done very little with any of them.

So anyway, this blog will chronicle what I'm doing. I hope to use it to share what I'm learning, in theory, gear, software and the mental processes that I'm using to make beautiful (ahem) music.