Do It Yourself Music

Ah. The best way to avoid having to listen to prefab, soulless, avaricious crap is to make it yourself.

Objectives for a DIY Band

What is the goal of having such a band?

Bob's goals:

Pickin' Up Da Skillz (Peter)

Some things to learn:

Guitar
Where can we take guitar lessons in the area?
Piano
Where can we take piano lessons in the area?
Music Theory
UT class? at least some piano would be a prerequisite IMHO...
Voice
For us troupies: Jennifer & I are both taking voice lessons with Annette (Jay's g/f), and it's going quite well.

Have a guitar handy at troupe gatherings. This provides a tiny venue for learning to play new songs, and it can gradually lower the 'ack' factor of playing music around other people.

Venues

Getting Started (Peter)

Ah, you want to write music, but it just doesn't seem to be happening. Been there. Hell, am there. Let's consider some problems in turn.

Problems:

If these are your only hindrances, then all you need to do is become a more confident and assiduous person.

But for me, becoming more confident and assiduous is about as likely as becoming taller and made entirely of spoons, so I'm thinking of ways to fix the symptom, not the problem.

Possible Solutions:

Write music for sketches.
So you're not saying, "ooo, look at me, I wrote this brilliant song." Instead, you're saying, "hey, we needed a song at this point in the sketch, so I threw something together." Also, when you're writing music for a specific purpose, you're playing tennis with the net again -- having limitations (say, "we need a 2:32 song about puppies that sounds like an earnest folk song") can reduce the crippling agony of infinite choice, and be a bit more inspiring to the aspiring songwriter than, "I need to write some kind of song about something."
Begin with instrumentals.
This handily takes care of the "I absolutely hate to write lyrics" problem. Instead, you can just work your Yanni-like magic for a while, and get used to structuring music without the ego-bruising interference of trying to sing about a lost cat. (Although good songs about lost cats are possible -- c. f. "Murder Or a Heart Attack" by the Old 97's.)
Form a writing group.
Tricky, but possible. (Hey, it worked for Sebadoh.) I'm thinking this would be the equivalent of a writing group for fiction writers. You meet on a regular basis, try to bring a piece to every session, and limit discussion of your groupies' work to constructive criticism. (But how to assuage the 'cringe factor?')
Do improvisational music whenever possible
The ultimate deadline. This helped me tremendously, both to prove I could come up with something, and to encourage me by showing me that I at least wouldn't do worse than what I came up with off the top of my head.

I've created a page with my current plan for jump-starting music writing, performing, and recording in the Hideout community.

There's going to be two major components to music you put together on a computer -- MIDI, which is 'note information' entered into the computer and then translated into sounds, and audio, which you'd record to your computer through a microphone and play back.

MIDI Synthesis

MIDI is much easier to edit than audio data. It's a lot easier to change tempo, or pitch, or add or delete individual notes in MIDI than with audio. It's like the difference between editing a paragraph of text and editing a .wav file of somebody reading that text.

It's also incredibly convenient for creating good or good-enough versions of all the instruments you don't have at hand -- e. g., a giant cathedral organ.

MIDI entry is typically done with a piano keyboard, with maybe a wheel for pitch bends. A basic 30-key MIDI sequencer can be had for $100 or so. I use a properly weighted 88-key Studiologic keyboard, which I'm quite happy with.

Now, usually MIDI sequencing is built in to the sequencer that you're using. But the synthesis -- translating the MIDI playback into real noise -- is accomplished by specialized hardware or software. Many musicians pipe their MIDI output to a dedicated keyboard or sound module, and send the audio back into the mixer. This is very effective... and very expensive. I will limit myself to options that stay inside your computer -- mostly software samplers.

Some options for MIDI synthesis on your computer:

Audio Recording

(Peter): I've dabbled with using my computer for audio recording.


Here's the bare minimum that you'd need:

Now you can record audio tracks. You also have quite a bit of power in editing the results. (Much more so than if you had, say, a 4-track recorder.)
Distributing the music afterwards requires nothing more than an internet connection.


If you want more power, you have several options:

Now you have: better S/N ratio; multi-track capability; easy MIDI recording/programming.
IMHO, at this point, you have everything you need.


"But Peter, I am made of money!! How can I spend even more on this?!"

Now you have: even better S/N ratio; more micromanagerial options for 'shaping the sound'; an easier time improving the sound during the final mixdown (with the monitors).


"No! More money!!! MORE MONEY!!!"

Now you just need to move the whole thing underground, get a Persian cat, and see if Mr. Bond can get past your perimeter of cloned attack ferrets.


All of this is just improvements. Better sound. Easier editing.

Frosting, basically.

Good music transcends cheap production.
Good production can't save cheap music.


For more information, the Home Recording Page is an excellent resource for the home recording enthusiast, as is about.com.
The New York Times also has an interesting article about DIY recording.
Multimedian has guides, reviews, and all sorts of useful goodies for the would-be computer-music-tinkerer.

Procedure

So what do you actually do when you sit down to write a song?

I don't have the answers, but we need to start somewhere, so here's what I've figured out so far.

All of this is, of course, IMHO, and suggestions and emendations are more than welcome.

1. For the love of God, don't write with a conscious agenda.
This seems to be the best way to avoid pained, teen-poetess juvenalia.

Also, frankly, trying to write a song about some arbitrary theme is not inspiring, and it turns writing the piece into work. Once it stops being fun -- or at least fulfilling -- the song will go limp and die.

There are better inspirations for a song. A snippet of melody. 3? A title. A particular amp setting that makes the guitar sound like an animal being tortured to death. All of these are far, far better inspirations for a song than the dreaded, "I want to write a song about <blah>."

2. Get the lyrics out of the way.
Remember: nobody really cares what the lyrics are.

Has R. E. M. taught us nothing?!

Just scribble out some words in the appropriate rhythm, melody and (if you're so inclined) topic, keeping in mind that it's impossible to be too obvious or too repetitive. Don't let this step bog you down in self-consciousness or the song will die and you'll wander off and do something important, like wash the car or clip your toenails.

If you really want gems of poetic diction, I think you have to go with the algorithm of: 1) slave for hours over the complete lyrics; 2) pick out the two or three words or phrases that work, throwing the rest away; 3) goto 1, starting with the tidbits from 2. Eventually you accumulate a decent set of lyrics that nobody will pay any attention to.

3. Write it out in MIDI.
It's time-consuming, but I find it very helpful to write out the entire song in MIDI 4?. This lets me listen to the whole thing on the computer.

It also forces you to address all the aspects of the song that you might have ignored while scribbling chords and words on the back of a napkin -- what exactly is the vocal melody during the verses? Is there a bass turnaround before the second chorus? Are the electric guitar's chords particularly staccato? You have to put in the detail work.

4. Replace MIDI tracks with digital audio tracks.
Then I put the MIDI track into n-track and start recording proper audio for things that MIDI really can't handle (voice, guitars, et cetera). Because I suck as a session player, it really helps me to have a MIDI track specifying exactly what to play, and a bunch of other MIDI tracks telling me what the rest of the song will sound like (roughly).

5. Inflict results on friends and family.

Dial-a-Song

(I don't know what to put here. I just know that we need a "Dial-a-Song" section.)

Footnotes

1? Sound improves asymptotically as you spend more and more money. Sooner than you might think, you hit a wall where the improvements you're making to the sound are obliterated by transforming to a 128kbps mp3.

2? Again, you can quickly get beyond the bit depth of a CD (16-bit). At that point, the improvement you get from higher bit depth is just a fraction of that margin of what you can distinguish between the CD and the original sound. Apparently it is advantageous to edit at a higher bit depth and mix down to 16-bit. But then again these are the same people who say that putting a green marker line on the edge of a CD makes it sound 'brighter.'

3? As with any form of writing, it helps to always have a pencil and notepad handy, so that you can write down these little bits of inspiration that eventually accrete together to form songs.

4? I use Voyetra's Digital Orchestrator for this, mainly because it's cheap, I'm familiar with it, and it's not nearly as headache-inducing as n-track for MIDI sequencing.