Ask HN: If I want to compose my own music, how can I get started?

The types of music you're interested in dont profit much from "coder-affine" music production environments: ie. Nodal/graphical programming languages, DSP platforms.

I'd highly recommend the following:

Buy yourself a copy of the following software: Steinberg's Cubase (specifically this software instead of the more common FL studio, and Ableton - because it's made for arranging linear musical events and has excellent expression control which you will need when you are trying to emulate human player expression. A High quality symphonic sample based library (VSL, Berlin, SWAM, Audio Modelling - check out VI-Control forums + KVRAudio forums for indepth discussions on the merits of each. You will need to combine several to get breadth. Grab yourself a VST (software) Bass guitar (?? look this one up im blank off top of head), drum sample library (DrumKit from Hell 3), electric guitar sample library (Shreddage).

So thats all the software more or less. You will need a beastly computer to run these live with human latency figures (vicontrol forums talk extensively about computer and processor architectures which are best for composer workstations - intel i9's are pretty popular for pro stations).

For composing - the piano roll will be your friend. As you're a coder, copious amounts of clicking shouldnt deter you...playing things in with keyboards like a pianist is fine - but requires you develop the mechanical skills to do so.

There is a lot of literature + youtube videos about the theory. Your first goal should be reproducing a metal tune...using your software instruments. A second goal - some sort of simple symphony.

The comment about transcription is key - you will need to develop an ear for what the composers are doing. You will need to start embarrassingly simple - and build. Starting with romantic era composers as a target will end in tears.

Happy to chat (my email is in profile) if you have questions.

My good friend Dylan runs https://producerdojo.com and I design music instruments for a living.

One of the most underrated reasons to go to that site is the solid and extremely supportive community. You can start with any piece of software. I highly recommend https://ableton.com because it is designed to support live performance and has a very strong following

Beyond that, music is the expression of yourself into the outside world through sound. This can mean ANYTHING. The most effective way I've found to start this and pretty much any other creative task is to follow what you find interesting. Self-motivation is the tough part here and you've already started pushing up against that. Great job!

8-bit music is a place to start and given your list of music you really REALLY should avoid making music software (I HATE the word "should" but in this case I have 4 decades of experience so I'm leaning in). You'll feel comfortable doing it and you'll make cool stuff, but in my experience it pulls you away from the emotional connection to the work. The genres you mention are very feeling oriented.

Get yourself a simple MIDI keyboard or pad machine for drums to start. Use your body. Associate yourself with the movements so you can FEEL it as you make the music.

It will take a LONG time to get to a degree of proficiency and every time you make some music in 10 seconds you'll wish it was better. This is a wonderful and fulfilling lifelong practice if you can avoid psyching yourself out before you get rolling!

> I've also considered making my own audio software in C, maybe starting with 8-bit music

From personal experience, this is a very efficient way to have yourself a great time not composing any music for potentially quite a long while.

Start by learning to read sheet music and play the piano. After you can play other people's music, you will likely find that new musical ideas naturally emerge from your practice, in the form of variations and combinations of other things you have learned how to play.

You can learn a lot of things on YouTube, but the problem is that there is very little sequential content, so you already need to know what to look for, which can be tricky when you’re starting out. I much prefer online courses for that reason.

Udemy has a lot of music theory courses, as does AskVideo, and you can also learn music theory on Duolingo.

I’d love it if you posted again in a few years to show your progress!

In short - all of your ideas are on the right path.

If you’re in the US, consider a class in community college. My CC have one combined piano + music 1. The teacher will guide you to next steps too. CC is inexpensive and a teacher is better (I think) than any course you find online.

I personally went from taking Music 1 out of curiosity to taking every theory, piano, viola, percussion… that was on offer in my CC over the last 6 years. Highly addictive.

Did you have a look at music programming languages, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impromptu_(programming_environ..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Csound or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChucK?

> So, whats the best way to get started?

It depends on the level of professionalism you are aiming for and how many years you want to invest. If you intend to learn an instrument, then I recommend to become familiar with a piano keyboard. All the music you referenced can be created via a piano keyboard (see e.g. http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1221). If you want to take the "traditional" route you would take piano lessons for many years and take courses in harmony and composition; if you want to compose for orchestra like Rimsky-Korsakov, expect this to be a lifetime achievement. But it's possible to just learn the concepts behind notes, harmonies and rhythms and their relation to the piano keyboard without really mastering the instrument, even by trial and error. With todays means you can get quite far with it. If you prefer graphical entry instead of a programming language, have e.g. a look at https://nodalmusic.com/.

If you want to make music, making music is simplest thing that might work.

If instead you actually like the idea of making music more than making music, you will probably do something else in line with what you like to do.

Good luck.

********* COMPOSITION *******

You don't need formal theory, but it certainly helps when fleshing out a simple motif. If you can't play an instrument, you'll need to be able to at least hold a tune, hum, whistle, sing otherwise I'm not sure how you'll be able to even conceive a simple melody.

That being said, I'd recommend deciding on an instrument and taking a few introductory lessons from a local teacher.

I was singing my own melodies as a kid, and later picked up a simple midi notation software which I used to transcribe them. In high school I picked up piano and guitar, and then finally took some contrapuntal composition and formal music theory classes in university.

Ultimately everybody's musical journey is going to be different.

********** DAW *********

Making software to generate 8-bit music and composing orchestral works are a bit all over the map. You need to think much much smaller.

If you've got a Mac (even a modest one) it's fine to start with something simple like Garageband which is included out of the box and shares a lot of similarities with its big brother Logic Pro. Audio latency is relatively low using the default CoreAudio interface. While you can certainly use a DAW with the mouse, you're not going to build the muscle memory of playing a keyboard so I'd recommend picking up a cheapo 40-60 key midi controller.

On the PC side, while you don't need a MASSIVE rig, you'll definitely need to either use something like ASIO4ALL or an audio interface (MOTU, Focusrite are relatively inexpensive) in order to use a midi keyboard/controller and not want to murder yourself.

Alternatively if you're looking to explore a more procedural non-linear DAW (outside of the big boys like Bitwig), you could try something like Midinous.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1727420/Midinous/

I’d recommend learning at least basic piano first.

If you spend at least an hour each day on focused learning and practice, you could probably be writing basic music in a year.

Pianote.com is where I got started, but now I’m learning on my own.

Also learn to transcribe melodies by ear as you go. Start with Happy Birthday and keep practicing.

Dude, just learn to play piano and read sheet music for classical music.

I got through the first 5 grades of piano in a single term. Literally the easiest thing I’ve ever learned.

And once you know how to read sheet music and play something like the piano, composing music (any genre) is piss easy, especially if you’re using computer software to do so.

If you’re serious about composing music, no matter what genre I really recommend learning the piano, you’ll just learn so quickly the “rules” of music, especially if you do the theory along side your playing.

Very informative, not just the class subject:

Rick Beato - Music Theory Masterclass 1: Drilling the Basics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De97zQi5rzc

If you consider the idea of music as language, genre as somewhat akin to regional dialects, and performance as akin to a recitation in that dialect to an audience, then the most fundamental prerequisite for composition is having something to say.

My background is in jazz, and often I encounter beginner students who have learned enough about the pedagogical aspects of music to know about a thing called theory and that there is virtue in knowing it, but they also mistakenly believe that an knowledge of theory is sort of the fountain from which ideas flow, which is not the case. For example to learn to compose and improvise in the jazz idiom, the way I learned it, the way essentially all the people I play with learned it, and how I teach my own students to do it is to internalize a great deal of music in your chosen style by players whose style resonates most with you. Memorizing changes, transcribing recorded parts on whatever instrument you enjoy playing, and so on. After doing this for a while you will start to develop a vocabulary of musical phrases which will occur to you spontaneously as a reaction to some kind of prompt, for example in jazz there are common sequences of chords that occur frequently in compositions, and by absorbing thousands of melodic phrases that occur over those changes you will have an innate idea of what you like to hear over them without having to think analytically about the relationships between tones and scales. You can certainly apply knowledge of theory to expand on your ideas in an analytical way, but the intuitive part needs to be developed first.

Many beginners balk at this idea because they like the idea of having purely new ideas, and you can certainly do music however you want, but I think ultimately most composers/performers want audiences to hear their work and there is a tacit relationship between the two; the audiences have an opinion about what sounds good and if your compositions don't sound like the genre of music they enjoy, neither of you are likely to be happy. I like to use the analogy of stand-up comedy; your jokes may crack you up but people don't want to watch somebody else laughing, so you have to meet them partway.

So having said all this, I think step one is to develop some opinions about what you think sounds good. Make a list of your favorite recordings and your favorite performances on those recordings and learn to reproduce them somehow. If you don't play an instrument, figure out how to sequence the changes, or noodle out a melody on the piano (if you don't play any instruments the piano is the smart choice, since it's like knowing how to type if you're a musician). The act of making these reproductions will tune your ear to hear chord qualities that might not be apparent to you until you try to recreate them, and relationships between notes in a melody and the supporting changes that you missed when just listening.

During that process, take time to just play. Undirected noodling on an instrument is the way you develop an intuition about where the notes you like live in relation to each other, and bumping around the space of notes on an instrument is a great way to learn.

At some point during those play sessions, you'll have an idea that'll get stuck in your head. Capture those ideas, save them, and then when you have a few you like, its time to start working on the composition process, either by notating/sequencing them with software instruments, or making a recording of mixed live/sequenced performance. I generally use Garage Band for making demos that I give to people I perform tunes with, some of my friends love Ableton Live, and the friends I know who do arranging for a living typically use something like Sibelius to produce scores.

I think that after you've made a few compositions of your own, if you decide you want to continue, its not a bad idea to take an introductory course on harmony to help develop your ear so that you can identify sounds that you like, but I think its best to do that after you have started to develop an intuitive sense of what sounds good, since that's the skill thats going to determine whether you make something that is interesting and not built from a formula.

Good Luck!