Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid

Quote: Original post by Kylotan
I'm going to buck the trend here and say that you can do pretty much everything you need to with FLStudio.

I've read a lot of support here for FLStudio. How easy is it to compose with this software package?

As easy as you want it to be.

Quote: Original post by Rain 7

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid
I've read a lot of support here for FLStudio. How easy is it to compose with this software package?

As easy as you want it to be.

I suppose I was setting myself up for such a short answer with my terse question [smile]. What I'd like to know is what features does FLStudio have that a beginner composer such as myself would appreciate over the features of a freebie sequencer such as ModPlug Tracker. Plus I've checked out their website and there's a plethora of versions and plugins available which confuses me; I'm not sure what's useful or not.

I like the recommendations in this post but thought I'd post my own.

SOFTWARE:
I've been using fruity loops for a few years now and I highly recommend it. It's great and easy for beginners, but also allows you the flexibility of professional equipment, plugins, recording and mastering. For the price, this program cannot be beat. They offer everything you need to get started writing complete musical pieces, along with some songs demonstrating the potential of the different modules and any new features they add. You can load up a song and start tweaking to learn yourself, or go through the excellent help files they have to learn every little aspect of the different modules. I think they even have a tutorial on how to make a song from scratch. Don't be turned off by the included song files, they aren't that great because they are using

This program is available as a free demo or about 150$ with the midrange features. Some really useful features for fruityloops are the beatslicer, soundfont player, and sytrus. Sytrus is an amazing synth.

You can grab a ton of free soundfonts and other stuff from hammersound.net (unfortunately the site is down right now but I was there yesterday).

Goldwave is good for manipulating audio samples and recording things and is also shareware.

HARDWARE:
If you have a decent computer you can get by with ANY SOUND CARD. Don't let people fool you into thinking you need a $100+ sound card. If you want to get a little more serious later on the added benefits of a pro soundcard is nice, but you don't need it as a beginner, and you may not need one for quite a while. The songs that your music software will mix down has nothing to do with your soundcard, meaning if you make a great song with onboard audio it will sound even better on an audiophiles machine. Onboard audio will work just fine, but beware that it will be heavy on your CPU and might be a tad inaccurate in reproducing the exact sound (and actually some people cant even tell the difference). There's a wonderful driver called ASIO4ALL that will allow you to use ASIO for low delay audio on any soundcard.

Well I have to leave this post prematurely because i have things to do, I hope that helps you out and if I made a mistake someone should correct me.

I'm almost finished polishing up my first piece of music using ModPlug Tracker. I don't have any webspace at the moment for storing music, but I'm thinking about getting a GDNet+ membership in a few weeks, so I'll ask for comments about improvements then.

By the way, what types of file formats and sound quality are usually used when posting music to these forums? I can convert to Ogg Vorbis, or I could hunt down a tool for MP3 conversion. However, with high quality stereo the file size is pretty large (over 7 Mb).

Oh, and you should have warned me how addictive music composition is [smile]. I don't mind losing my reading-for-leisure and gaming time to a creative task, but now when I'm meant to be writing research papers or figuring out new algorithms I can't think clearly because there's constant clarinet solos playing in my head.

You can save to Wav...I use RazorLame to convert to MP3 sometimes, if Im doing quick and dirty I'll just export as MP3 from sound forge.

As far as -im- concerned, you can just zip up your tracker file and share it:)
I like to watch the notes fly by and I could offer some advice if I see somewhere you could improve.

Quote: Original post by krikkit
You can save to Wav...I use RazorLame to convert to MP3 sometimes, if Im doing quick and dirty I'll just export as MP3 from sound forge.

That's what I'm presently doing; converting to WAV from ModPlug Tracker, then using Audacity to convert to Ogg Vorbis (I presently don't have the plugin for MP3 conversion). I used to have a whole swag of audio and music tools that I was collecting, but they all got hosed a few weeks ago when something wiped the boot sector of my Windows system partition a while back and I had to wipe the disk to fix it (well, at least that gave me a chance to implement a better partitioning scheme).

But is Ogg okay for sharing music? I'm not really the most hardcore of audiophiles, so I'm not sure what sort of quality is expected. Presently I'm using 44KHz stereo (32-bit represention, I think), but then the file size is pretty huge.

Quote: As far as -im- concerned, you can just zip up your tracker file and share it:)
I like to watch the notes fly by and I could offer some advice if I see somewhere you could improve.

I could do that, I guess; although since I was learning as I go the file is a horrible mess (the S3M equivalent of hacked together C code [smile]). Plus since I haven't found a good way to get my samples to loop properly for the long notes, the WAV samples that I'm using are about ten seconds long, which makes the S3M file nearly the same size as the Ogg. And it doesn't sound the same in WinAmp as it does in ModPlug Tracker, so I'd have to distribute the Ogg/MP3 version anyway.

But I do like the scrolling piano-roll like effect too. It helps you see the rhythm a lot better than a traditional styled score does.

Edit: I've just thought; does it sound better if you program in some dynamics into the volumes of the instuments ModPlug Tracker. Presently my instruments stick to the same volume throughout each pattern (they change throughout the piece, but tend to stick to certain levels). It might be a bit of a pain to go through and add swells and phrasing by hand, but I've already done that for simulating rests for breathing for the woodwind instruments, so I might do that as well. Plus I'm not sure of the best way to swell the volume in a phrase for every type of instrument; I think I have a good idea for wind, since I used to play, but I'm not sure how a bowed string instrument would alter the volume. Ah, I'm just babbling via the medium of my keyboard now. Maybe I'll wait until I get some feedback.

[Edited by - Trapper Zoid on September 10, 2005 8:18:06 PM]

As far as dynamics and tracking, its a fine balance between automated dynamics and just getting down and dirty.

Typically the volume envelopes help express character of the sound(you'd be surprised how big a difference a small change in teh envelope can make on some sounds).

For general dynamics, theres nothing for it but to get down and dirty. However, with the new versions of OpenMPT, there is now an ability to select a range of rows, open an window and "draw" your dynamic swells. Very handy. Also, I'll share this one, since Ive been using MPT for years and just noticed this one. If you put beginning and ending volume values in the volumne column, select that range, and right click, you get an "interpolate volume" command. Highly useful for swells and for filling in big gaps of dynamics instead of hard coding each row.

Quote: Original post by krikkit
As far as dynamics and tracking, its a fine balance between automated dynamics and just getting down and dirty.

Typically the volume envelopes help express character of the sound(you'd be surprised how big a difference a small change in teh envelope can make on some sounds).

Forgive my lack of musical understanding, but what exactly is a "volume envelope"?

Quote:
For general dynamics, theres nothing for it but to get down and dirty. However, with the new versions of OpenMPT, there is now an ability to select a range of rows, open an window and "draw" your dynamic swells. Very handy. Also, I'll share this one, since Ive been using MPT for years and just noticed this one. If you put beginning and ending volume values in the volumne column, select that range, and right click, you get an "interpolate volume" command. Highly useful for swells and for filling in big gaps of dynamics instead of hard coding each row.

I'd forgotten about OpenMPT; I think I'm using standard ModPlug Tracker for Windows. I didn't know that it had a feature like that. I might however just stick to hand crunching for now, so I get used to the interface (that's part of the learning experience with this piece).

Well, I guess if you are learning the S3M format, you dont get instruments or enveloping for your samples.

Quote: Original post by krikkit
Well, I guess if you are learning the S3M format, you dont get instruments or enveloping for your samples.

Okay, I guess that makes sense. I'm picking something like S3M because I know it's been used in high profile games already (Deus Ex, Unreal Tournament etc.), and it supports patterns (I'd like to have dynamic music). I'll probably be implementing my own music playing code so I can easily do funky stuff with the instruments, or implement something like that MIDI playing system used in old Lucasfilm games (what was that called, something like iMUse?). At the moment, since I'm only using WAV files and simple commands (setting instruments, volume and tempo) I know I'll be able to implement the code for that myself.

But listening to the music (which I am right now as I type this), probably the biggest flaw at the moment is that it does sound a bit flat. I should at least put in some dynamic volume changes mirroring the change in pitch, and leading into the changes. That should really make the piece come alive.

Of course, I've probably spent a bit too long on this single piece already (it took ages to mix the instruments panning and volumes so that it didn't sound off). Hopefully my next one won't take so long, since I'm planning on doing everything else as well.

Edit: Actually, what's the best way to figure out how to do the volume changes to make an instrument sound dynamic? Would just listening to other pieces of music be sufficient to get an idea of what to do?

[Edited by - Trapper Zoid on September 11, 2005 12:39:22 AM]