Music

Introduction

I remember buying an electric guitar with my brother. We never did learn to play it, though we tried a few times. I created a fuzz box for it, got some strange sounds, but that was about it. My brother later bought an acoustic guitar, but that never went any further either.

I've always wanted to be able to play a musical instrument but gave up. A while ago, some friends suggest I should get into loop sampling, so I went out and bought Making Waves, a sequencer loop sampling package. I created a few tunes with it but it never went much further. Much later, I tried again, this time with Acid Pro, a sample stretching loop sampler. It could adjust the tempo of any loop to suit without raising or lowering the pitch. Again, I found a lot of interesting tunes here, but they were always someone else's loop, and copyright. MIDI caught my attention, along with DX instruments and VSTi - that lead me to KVR, a website dedicated to VSTi and their various hosts. Acid Pro's MIDI editor is broken, so I looked for alternatives. I bought Ableton Live which shares some features of Acid Pro, but has much better support for MIDI/VSTi instruments.

I bought a Creative Audigy ZS 2 Platinum (since upgraded to a Creative X-Fi Platinum) which came with a copy of FL Studio Express. I took one look at it and dismissed it as 'too wierd'. I started looking at different hosts, and came back to FL Studio and realised I understood how it worked. Working with other hosts had taught me enough to understand what FL Studio could do. FL Studio comes with a lot of presets and sample songs, some of which I liked, and an active online community who submit music regularly.

I started looking into the theory behind music, studying scales, chords and finally progressions (see Music Theory for Songwriters). This led me to look at Band-in-a-box and Jammer Pro, music generators or "jammers" that play along with you.

I did have some samples of music I've created myself here but since I switched services on my ISP my website limits have dropped, so I've removed everything for now.

Copyright © 2006, 2007, 2016 Pete Goodwin. In other words, it's all mine