Tools of the Composer

[TheMelodyMaker]

I couldn't help but notice that I'm not the only one on these boards that writes music, and there's no better subject to bring up than the tools that we use to go about doing it! ^_^

Personally, I can't play music; although I can still pick out a tune on piano/keyboard if I have to. When I write, I just pound it all in with the mouse one note at a time (with the occasional copy & paste). For MIDI music, I create the initial file with Cakewalk Home Studio 8 and give it the final touches with WinJammer Shareware. Converting to wave format is done with Winamp via its DirectMusic interface, and final touches & MP3 conversion are done in GoldWave.

So, the question for our other musicians: what tools do you use to write music?

[shooraijin]

*hangs head*

Because I'm such a cheapskate and can't afford Cubase, I create MIDI files in Virtual PC using an old Win 3.1-era MIDI sequencer. It creates them on a virtual shared drive that I can pick up on the Mac OS X side and play through my Yamaha keyboard using QuickTime/Core Audio and Mighty MIDI over a Mini Macman serial->MIDI interface.

One thing that's fun is creating my own drum kits. I ended up MIDI-capturing the beat in reverse from the Yamaha on the Mac to get the note values, and then made up my own drum kit and beat to paste in.

[TheMelodyMaker]

I create MIDI files in Virtual PC using an old Win 3.1-era MIDI sequencer.

Do you use Ballade for Windows? That was the first MIDI sequencer I had and it wasn't bad. However, while it worked great in Windows 3.1, it stopped working properly in Windows 95 and beyond in that it wouldn't play music in the program itself; I had to temporarily convert to MIDI format to hear how it sounded as I went. It got frustrating after a while so I had to look for other options. (Too bad Dynaware discontinued Ballade after the version I got.)

[shooraijin]

No, it's part of the Presentation Partner suite. I just ripped the MIDI sequencer out of it and use it separately. However, Virtual PC has horrid MIDI support, so I just drop it into a "networked" drive (really the Mac's home drive), and play it out through QuickTime.

On the C64, I use a sequencer/tracker called VoiceTracker 2.6 which generates IRQ-driven music you can import just about anywhere. It does a pretty good job on a fat snare (short of using an actual sample), and has a good selection of instruments and effects. Using it is much like programming, however (you enter a pattern, and then use a score view to put that pattern into a particular voice and timing slot). There's tools like ROCKMON by the USA-Team that have digi-snares and digi-drums, but they require "prohibitive" amounts of memory and are somewhat more difficult to use.