Error 420
One Thousand Club
Hey! You! You needed a piece of music for your [roleplay, impressing people, indie game, social media clout] but don't know your mixolydians from your xylophones? Don't want to hire a real musician, or actually learn music theory? Is "okay enough" okay enough for you? You've come to the right place. In one thread, I will distil everything I have learned in 10 years of musicmaking into a drinkable ichor of pretend wisdom -- not enough to make anything glorious, mind you, but following this tutorial will provide you with something, and, with enough practice, something good.
Musicmaking is the second-most unapproachable art that I know. If you can write words, you can do poetry or traditional writing. If you can doodle, you can draw or paint. If you have basic motor skills, you can sculpt. If you can speak, you can orate, and yet musicmaking eludes the vast majority of people. The reason for this is that while words and motor skills are something we are constantly working at and making use of, musicmaking is a combination of several skills that exist only in the abstract. Singing well doesn't make you good at music. Most instruments can be played with a less than minimal understanding of the mechanics of music. The elements that Western music is built upon are purely knowledge-based. Think of it like the difference between writing in English and understanding the full linguistics of English. It's not hard, but since you never need to do it in order to get by in life, you never do. As such, this tutorial will be written under the assumption that you have absolutely no understanding of music whatsoever and that your only goal is to make a song that functions.
The way that we'll be talking about it, music is made of sounds. Believe it or not, but that is actually an incredibly hot take in music theory (because it's wrong), but we don't care about the underlying systems. We just care about the sound. Sounds are arranged into pitches along a scale. Here's a quick video to acquaint yourself with this concept.
What this weirdly hot nun was talking about were the pitches that make up what we call the major scale. Every note is a specific frequency of sound, and, when you double that frequency, you wind up with something that comes to what sounds like the same note.
In Western music, we have a concept called "octave equivalency". In the hot nun's example of do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, and do, the scale started and ended on "do", even though one was higher than the other. All of Western music happens between do and do, and most of it only uses those eight tones: the major scale. American music especially depends on the major scale and its "resolved" feeling. When it's not explained to you in song by a hot nun, the major scale is actually pretty boring on its own. To make full use of music, you have to use the notes that the hot nun didn't mention: the ones in between those notes.
Moving up and down using random in-between notes and normal notes can be fun, but it isn't always pretty or useful. Including in-between notes and both do's, the scale spans 13 notes, but only uses eight of them. The major scale skips up two notes with the exception of two spots: between mi and fa and between ti and do. While there is a reason for this, I'm not going to get into it at the moment. The important question to ask is "what if we skipped different notes or no notes at all?". When you do that, you wind up with a different scale. For example, if you take the major scale and move mi down one note (E4 down to D#4 in the Activity 2 example), you get a minor scale (It's a minor scale, not the minor scale, but I won't get into that now). If your scale goes through all twelve notes, it's the chromatic scale.
The music you hear on the radio (rap, pop, hip-hop, country, et cetera) pretty much exclusively uses the major scale and the minor scale we just talked about. For the first piece of music we'll be making, we'll only be using one of those scales.
Now, forget I ever said anything about sound, because it's time to talk about time.
Time is the order in which events occur. That's all we need to know. Just think of time as "A goes before B, B goes before C, C goes at the same time as D". One note will always go before, after, or at the same time as another note. When no notes are playing, it's a rest. If notes play after or before one another, it's a melody. If notes are playing at the same time and are not the same note, it's harmony.
Now, let's apply our concepts of melody and harmony to pitch.
Believe it or not, but this is all of the information you need to make a song. If you play sounds of differing pitch in differing relations in time, you officially have a song. In order to make it music, you'll have to wait for a little while because it's now approaching 4 AM and I need sleep. I'll be continuing this later, if you have any questions, now would be a good time to ask them.
Musicmaking is the second-most unapproachable art that I know. If you can write words, you can do poetry or traditional writing. If you can doodle, you can draw or paint. If you have basic motor skills, you can sculpt. If you can speak, you can orate, and yet musicmaking eludes the vast majority of people. The reason for this is that while words and motor skills are something we are constantly working at and making use of, musicmaking is a combination of several skills that exist only in the abstract. Singing well doesn't make you good at music. Most instruments can be played with a less than minimal understanding of the mechanics of music. The elements that Western music is built upon are purely knowledge-based. Think of it like the difference between writing in English and understanding the full linguistics of English. It's not hard, but since you never need to do it in order to get by in life, you never do. As such, this tutorial will be written under the assumption that you have absolutely no understanding of music whatsoever and that your only goal is to make a song that functions.
The way that we'll be talking about it, music is made of sounds. Believe it or not, but that is actually an incredibly hot take in music theory (because it's wrong), but we don't care about the underlying systems. We just care about the sound. Sounds are arranged into pitches along a scale. Here's a quick video to acquaint yourself with this concept.
What this weirdly hot nun was talking about were the pitches that make up what we call the major scale. Every note is a specific frequency of sound, and, when you double that frequency, you wind up with something that comes to what sounds like the same note.
Here's the Szynalski Tone Generator. Essentially, it's a tool you can use to feed in a frequency and it will play you back the audio tone. When you open the page, it will be pre-set to 440 Hz, which is pretty much right in the middle of being uncomfortably high and inaudibly low. Try hitting PLAY and hearing what it sounds like. If you change the frequency to a higher or lower number, you'll find that it will produce a higher or lower pitch. Technically, the tone is "more frequent" and "less frequent", but we all call sounds that are "more frequent" and "less frequent" higher and lower respectively.
Now that you've played around with it a bit, reset the frequency to 440 Hz. In a separate tab or window, open up the same page, but change the frequency to 220 or 880, half and double 440 respectively. Play the two tones at the same time or alternating and you'll notice that they almost sound like the same sound. If they don't, you're probably tone-deaf, but that's okay, you only need to know that they are the same note, even if it doesn't sound like it to you.
(While you're at it, just play around a little bit with playing two tones at once. An especially fun one is to play two very close tones like 440 and 441 at the same time. A not-fun one you shouldn't do is to put your speakers on full blast and play a pitch above 17,000. You won't hear it, but every cat and dog within a quarter-mile of you will. )
Now that you've played around with it a bit, reset the frequency to 440 Hz. In a separate tab or window, open up the same page, but change the frequency to 220 or 880, half and double 440 respectively. Play the two tones at the same time or alternating and you'll notice that they almost sound like the same sound. If they don't, you're probably tone-deaf, but that's okay, you only need to know that they are the same note, even if it doesn't sound like it to you.
(While you're at it, just play around a little bit with playing two tones at once. An especially fun one is to play two very close tones like 440 and 441 at the same time. A not-fun one you shouldn't do is to put your speakers on full blast and play a pitch above 17,000. You won't hear it, but every cat and dog within a quarter-mile of you will. )
In Western music, we have a concept called "octave equivalency". In the hot nun's example of do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, and do, the scale started and ended on "do", even though one was higher than the other. All of Western music happens between do and do, and most of it only uses those eight tones: the major scale. American music especially depends on the major scale and its "resolved" feeling. When it's not explained to you in song by a hot nun, the major scale is actually pretty boring on its own. To make full use of music, you have to use the notes that the hot nun didn't mention: the ones in between those notes.
Open up that tone generator again if you've closed it. Next to the frequency number, there's a little box with a music note in front of it. It should say A4 if the frequency is 440 Hz. Clicking on that box should pull up a menu of boxes with similar letter-number combinations from A0 up to B8. Clicking on one of these boxes changes the tone to that note. Play C4. It should sound a fair bit lower than A4. Now, play all of the darker boxes in the same row as C4 (they should read D4, E4. F4. G4. A4. and B4). Move down to the next row to play C5. There's the major scale, just with letter-number names instead of the ones the hot nun used. The notes the nun didn't use are in the lighter boxes.
Moving up and down using random in-between notes and normal notes can be fun, but it isn't always pretty or useful. Including in-between notes and both do's, the scale spans 13 notes, but only uses eight of them. The major scale skips up two notes with the exception of two spots: between mi and fa and between ti and do. While there is a reason for this, I'm not going to get into it at the moment. The important question to ask is "what if we skipped different notes or no notes at all?". When you do that, you wind up with a different scale. For example, if you take the major scale and move mi down one note (E4 down to D#4 in the Activity 2 example), you get a minor scale (It's a minor scale, not the minor scale, but I won't get into that now). If your scale goes through all twelve notes, it's the chromatic scale.
The music you hear on the radio (rap, pop, hip-hop, country, et cetera) pretty much exclusively uses the major scale and the minor scale we just talked about. For the first piece of music we'll be making, we'll only be using one of those scales.
Now, forget I ever said anything about sound, because it's time to talk about time.
Time is the order in which events occur. That's all we need to know. Just think of time as "A goes before B, B goes before C, C goes at the same time as D". One note will always go before, after, or at the same time as another note. When no notes are playing, it's a rest. If notes play after or before one another, it's a melody. If notes are playing at the same time and are not the same note, it's harmony.
Now, let's apply our concepts of melody and harmony to pitch.
Open up that tone generator again if you've closed it. Take the dark box notes between A3 and A4 and just play random notes one at a time at random lengths. Sounds like just about nothing, doesn't it? Now, play the following notes, with each note all taking the same length of time.
C4 A4 G4 F4 G4 F4 D4 C4 A3
If you play them with each note at the same length of time, you'll likely recognize the melody. If you're tone-deaf, then know that it's the first few notes of the traditional tune best known as "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean". Playing those notes in a different order will create a different melody, even if it sounds similar.
C4 A4 G4 F4 G4 F4 D4 C4 A3
If you play them with each note at the same length of time, you'll likely recognize the melody. If you're tone-deaf, then know that it's the first few notes of the traditional tune best known as "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean". Playing those notes in a different order will create a different melody, even if it sounds similar.
Believe it or not, but this is all of the information you need to make a song. If you play sounds of differing pitch in differing relations in time, you officially have a song. In order to make it music, you'll have to wait for a little while because it's now approaching 4 AM and I need sleep. I'll be continuing this later, if you have any questions, now would be a good time to ask them.
