Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: rednova on January 31, 2017, 04:00:17 PM
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Hi All :
All my life i loved music, but always thought it be impossible for me to make it.
But recently I started taking piano lessons, and now I am playing
'blue moon'.
I really want to start making music on my amiga 2000.
I have octamed and deluxe music construction set.
I really look forward to learn.
Any tips ?
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I guess there are two sides of music to learn on the Amiga. I am a noob at music, in the sense of I can play a triangle and sing and er, that's it really.
You have the performance side, where you are playing an instrument, or wiggling, wobbling, pitch shifting or whatever, a noise in real time. Scratching is pretty easy to pick up, when you understand the technique used on a vinyl deck.
The other side is musical arrangement, where you can drag together different instruments and "performances" as it were. Drums are way different to vocals. Double bass is treated a bit different to a rhythm guitar, although the two are closer than the previous pair.
The rest is like any other art. It's down to refinement, technique, talent. I will never be a pianist of any description. I know real pianists, it's very humbling.
Be aware that 99.99% of all musicians never earn a living from their fun. :)
You got two kinds of instruments, a sample that can be manipulated like an instrument (IFF8 and similar, 8SVX) and they are very limited to their musical range in octaves (with most software and Amigas).
Then you've got longer samples, things like drum loops, vocals, orchestral crash, that kind of thing. You can speed it up or slow it down to start with, but you are kind of stuck with a few speeds unless you have a different replay speed and sample rate.
That's where I stop with Octamed really. Those are the simple basics, and they cover DMCS as well.
It's wise to play around with Trackers as well, if only to see how existing song mods are made. Don't limit yourself to one particular program, but do be very careful how you extract samples and preserve them. Make sure you power off before reading an alien .adf download.
It's not wise to try out an Amiga demo, like the music, and rip the content and reuse it. Better to just stick with downloadable mods than go hunting for that one sample. It's a near certainty, you can get it better elsewhere. If you know what song and artist performed it on CD or Vinyl (with a nod that a sample is just that, a short piece, not a substantial part of the whole track).
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Practice. :hammer:
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Or just mess around :)
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I've just embarked on this journey myself. I have a long background in music and play the sax and (tried to play) piano.
Pat's right - software-wise try everything! I started with Octamed SS but wanted to add live instruments so I needed a recorder. Then I noticed certain sequences were better done in OSS (the volume, effects, and duration could be edited) but sometimes I want to play along with the other parts so I use MIDIIn and AHIRecord. I also got a MIDI serial interface, MIDI KB and a mic and mic preamp. Once I have a few parts recorded they're mixed with HDRec.
Rhythm is pretty instinctive but for chords and harmony study the Circle of Fifths.
My Amiga is very high-spec for a classic so I'm not sure how much of this you can do. Even with the 040/40 the mixing to HD doesn't happen in real-time. Since the machine has a SoundBlaster and native audio I can effectively record Octamed as if it were a live musical instrument. Since the recording and mixing are done on HDD a fast IDE/SCSI interface is recommended. I "get by" with the built-in IDE but only because of the buffer and the quicker CPU.
Hope you have fun! Enjoy!
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simply load protracker, load some random samples, and then push some random keys on the keyboard (its anyway hard to reference them to a piano) while looping a module. it always sounds good.
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if your taking piano lessons, then I guess the natural extension to translate the skills to a Amiga, would be MIDI interface with a electronic keyboard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcuFBEZHnIA