I downloaded this and played around with it a little.
I’m a little skeptical of something that ditches traditional music notation for piano roll, doesn’t offer any ways to reorganize sections of your song, and then gives you a bunch of tools for key signatures, modes, polymeter, and microtonal music. I’m trying to think of a programming analogy—it’s like checking out a new programming language that has dependent types, higher-kinded types and monads, and a borrow checker, but no strings or integers.
It’s really easy for those of us with analytical, mathematical minds to go diving into the more esoteric parts of music theory. Set theory, microtonality and alternative tuning systems, esoteric scales and cataloging all these different scales—but then you fuck up the basics or miss them completely. I noticed that the “major” scale is only available under its more esoteric name, the “ionian” scale, and then there are five different versions of locrian to choose from, not counting the ones outside 12-EDO.
Even with all these esoteric features, there is no such thing as, say, Eb. There is only D#. As programmers, we really want to normalize all our data so that it’s represented in exactly one way, but as a musician I like having both sharps and flats around. They’re convenient and make the music easier to read.
This is a neat tool for playing around with scales and tunings, but it seems like absolute hell to try and write music this way.
Isn't usage of a piano roll pretty standard for DAW tools such as this? I'm sure the more sophisticated tools can take a piano roll and generate sheet music for you, but I'm fairly certain the editing generally happens in a piano roll view
I don’t think this is recognizable as a DAW, and the page doesn’t call it a DAW either. It’s a sequencer.
It’s not like a lack of a score view is awful, it’s just that it’s part of a pattern of missing tools that would be useful to people interested in composition. Like how there’s no such thing as a key signature (only scales), and you can’t reorganize parts of a song, and the chord tool uses a bunch of sometimes-correct names for chords so the tool can fit in with the scale. And then after you choose a chord, the name is gone. You can’t see what chords are already in the song. And there’s no flats.
People prefer piano roll, or score, or switch back and forth between both. The score is not just an artifact for printing books on paper, it’s a useful tool for reading music quickly. Piano roll is a lot more intuitive but it’s slow to read and falls apart when you start working with larger or more complicated stuff.
The people who want to “compose” music tend to gravitate towards the DAWs that have built-in scores anyway, like Cakewalk or Logic. That’s not universal by any means, it’s just kind of an average trend. Just like the people who call themselves “producers” tend to gravitate more towards piano roll. I put “compose” and “produce” in quotes because they’re somewhat arbitrary labels.
I keep going back to analogies—like, you walk into a kitchen, and there’s a sous vide wand, a centrifuge, and a Pacojet. But there’s no sink.
Or you go into a machine shop, and you see a six-axis CNC machine, but no calipers.
You're vastly overstating the importance of score editors/sheet music to the average user
Ableton, FL Studio, Reason account for the lions share of DAW usage and don't have them. I follow the feature requests communities around these closely and have never seen anyone request that
Reason is notorious as having some of the worst piano roll UX among popular DAWs. I see far more complaints about the piano roll in Reason than any other DAW, so perhaps it is not a good example here. I have Reason, and I just choose to use it for sound design, so I don’t have to deal with the UX issues.
Majority of DAW users are not thinking about their activity as “composition”. You can ask people whether they are a songwriter, producer, or composer, and I bet that the people who call themselves composers are much more likely to use something like Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools, or Reaper.
I think that it’s wrong to focus too much on the score functionality anyway. There’s just not a lot of tools in this product to help with songwriting. You can’t plug in standard chords easily, or change chords that you’ve added. You can’t rearrange song structure easily. The scales have weird names. I don’t know how to put in non-diatonic chords without changing the scale.
It’s expected that Ableton and FL Studio users don’t ask for notation. It’s not something useful to that user base, and if they wanted notation, they would probably just switch to one of the DAWs that has it, like Logic, Cubase, or Pro Tools. Reason user don’t ask for it because they just want to stop using Reason as a DAW altogether, and use Reason as a plug-in to a better DAW.
I have a hard time understanding what “an average user” is. Sure an average user of ableton live prefers a piano roll, and an average user of musescore prefers sheet music.
The title of the post is about composition. This can also mean different things. Is it for a band leader to get new ideas structured? Or is it for composing recorded parts? Very different things.
I'm a composer and if I happen to want to make sheet music, which rarely happens, I just open Musescore.
Most of the time I'm in bitwig, recording things in real time and editing things around, I barely use the midi roll.
I don't find the sink analogy apt. It's more like a grill. It's something specific that you might want to go to, and if you do, then you go there and you do that, outside the kitchen.
Score editors seem to be uniquely difficult. I remember some discourse to that effect when Reaper snuck one in to a random release. As you probably know, notation is a complex written language that evolved over centuries. Trying to represent it in code in a way that translates between views (piano, MIDI, etc) is hard even for people with the resources and knowledge to make it happen. Reaper took a long time to get it right even with that.
Yeah, a long time to get it right. But I also remember the sequencers of the 1990s, which gave you a really primitive score view, and it’s still useful. I would put up with something primitive in a composition tool, because I’m going to export it to a dedicated score editor if I want a score.
You can get pretty far with just a couple features. Like, a setting for how much tolerance you want (no 32nd notes here), an option to split voice by MIDI channel or something, and a button to switch between enharmonics.
I don’t think a score view is critical, it’s just one of many missing features here and for some reason a lot of people are focusing on it.
i think this one is more a sous-vide wand and only that, without trying to be an entire kitchen... if you want the 12-edo piano-roll with friendly markers, just use something like Ardour, Bitwig etc.
I have to agree on this one, I really dislike when enarmonically equivalent but extremely uncommon names are used. The key of D# has not one but two double-sharp notes (F## which is actually G, and C## which is actually D). In addition, it includes two more sharps that are enarmonically equivalent to natural notes (E# and B#, equivalent to F and C respectively). It is just an incredibly hard key to reason about.
Last time I used Garage Band, it had a traditional notation / sheet music view.
There's software I use (Reason) that doesn't have this, and piano roll or even things like Digital Performer's direct midi event list editor are one variety of really effective tools, but in my experience, anytime you end up working on a piece that might eventually need collaboration, lacks of notation will end up being a stone in your shoe.
Even in tempered music theory, calling a note a sharp or a flat generally depends on the scale.
For eg: Bb major uses:
Bb C D Eb F G A Bb
while A# major uses:
A# B# Cx D# E# Fx Gx A#
(x indicates double-sharp)
Despite all the notes being exactly the same on a tempered instrument.
Creator must just not be a musician. For a composer, for a pianist, for a violinist, for a singer... etc D# and Eb are distinct things. There are extraordinarily few contexts in music history where their difference is irrelevant, such as some Schoenberg pieces but for literally anything else even for 99% of atonal pieces the difference has some kind of relevance to musicians.
> doesn't offer any ways to reorganize sections of your song
I find thisfeature very refreshing and liberating. Sure, having patterns or other blocks you can copy and move around makes life easier but too easily you might end in a trap of repetitive, schematic composition. Without patterns it is more natural to experiment with less orthodox stuff as you literally don't have any boundaries. I feel it every time I switch from Ableton or Milky Tracker to improvising with my Korg gear.
Like, I want to be able to insert a new section, because I realize that a transition is too abrupt. Or I realize that I want to swap the order of two sections.
Section arrangement tools are not just about duplication. Like, the main point of cut and paste in a word processor is so you can rearrange things, not so you can have two sections of your document that repeat each other exactly.
Also, slightly off topic, but the YouTube channel[0] linked on the footer has some very interesting 19edo music. Although I was aware of microtonality, I had never checked it out. It sounds unstandard yet amazing
Good stuff indeed. (Can't even imagine doing that in standard notation, either!) Bell-sounding is a great choice for stuff in unusual scales. (A large part of the bell's charms are the inharmonics.)
Cool, I'll give it a try! I think these kind of sequencers can be really powerful, but as always the effectiveness of the tool depends on the ability of the wielder.
I link to some other software in this category below. It is nice to have an open source alternative.
It’s got to be different depending on your goals. Do you want to join a local jazz band? Go the singer / songwriter route and hit up open mic nights? Set up a bedroom studio and put out breakcore tracks? Write classical choir pieces? Just keep in mind your goals when you’re studying, so you don’t end up, like, stubbornly slogging through counterpoint for four months and hating every moment of it, only for you to forget it all because you want to write rock songs.
There are a few resources I point people to on YouTube as an intro:
There’s the Reddit r/musictheory FAQ: https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/wiki/index/ First question is, “I'm new to music theory, how do I start learning? What are the best textbooks/websites/apps to use?”
> stubbornly slogging through counterpoint for four months and hating every moment of it, only for you to forget it all because you want to write rock songs.
Counterpoint is a great ingredient to progressive rock à la Gentle Giant.
That brings us to the nature of innovation: applying a technique in a novel way or in a market where it was unknown.
I like to watch YouTube videos like those of Adam Neely [1].
Rant: I imagine reading a novel, in which every paragraph came with an additional author note/explanation of the actual meaning. Clearly leaving room for interpretation and ambiguity is part of the enjoyment of reading or even writing that book.
This is to say, if we are going to make music, we don't necessarily need to constraint it to any particular theory or rules on how it should sound, which chord should come after the previous, etc.
On the other hand, some theory can go a long way in making the music understandable, like sharing a language with the listeners, and to collaborate with other musicians. It is a balancing act.
A lot of tutorials/books that say they are about "music theory" are really just about "music notation". Actual music theory (why is the major scale arranged the way it is? Why do chords often have neat frequency ratios? Why are there 12 semitones in an octave?) you have to dig a bit deeper, these are quite good:
I’m a bit curious; why are musicians so much against putting note names on their keyboards? It’s like having a computer keyboard with no letters marked on top.
One reason might be that music is (to some extent) translation invariant in a way text is not: you can play the very same music starting from anything from C to B. Those 12 versions will sound different but not that different. Note names might be distracting when you are focusing on that abstract structure?
I guess because that's just how it has always been. Once you learn that C is the key with two black keys next to it it becomes easy to memorize the others
I’m a little skeptical of something that ditches traditional music notation for piano roll, doesn’t offer any ways to reorganize sections of your song, and then gives you a bunch of tools for key signatures, modes, polymeter, and microtonal music. I’m trying to think of a programming analogy—it’s like checking out a new programming language that has dependent types, higher-kinded types and monads, and a borrow checker, but no strings or integers.
It’s really easy for those of us with analytical, mathematical minds to go diving into the more esoteric parts of music theory. Set theory, microtonality and alternative tuning systems, esoteric scales and cataloging all these different scales—but then you fuck up the basics or miss them completely. I noticed that the “major” scale is only available under its more esoteric name, the “ionian” scale, and then there are five different versions of locrian to choose from, not counting the ones outside 12-EDO.
https://github.com/helio-fm/helio-sequencer/blob/develop/Res...
Even with all these esoteric features, there is no such thing as, say, Eb. There is only D#. As programmers, we really want to normalize all our data so that it’s represented in exactly one way, but as a musician I like having both sharps and flats around. They’re convenient and make the music easier to read.
This is a neat tool for playing around with scales and tunings, but it seems like absolute hell to try and write music this way.