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What a read! Not all of it makes sense to me since I've never taken anything greater than an introductory theory class, but having a keyboard right next to me to play with was immensely helpful. Without it, most of shakey's words would have made no sense, but I got to punch in chords and fiddle with them in different keys and it was pretty neat hearing how pleasantly "correct" they sounded. I'm going to bookmark music theory dot net and see if I can't learn something.
Also, a quick word to Meowskivich.
Wait, no, I have a lot to say to you, it seems.
First of all, I see "fobby.net" in the urls. You must be a starmen.net forumite, am I right? I'm not, but it's nice to see other Mother series enthusiasts. Anyway, that's just a tangential thing I felt like pointing out. Now, about your music.
It's all very nostalgic for me, honestly. I remember composing music very similar to this, many years ago. Somewhere in my mid-teens. I was immensely excited about making an RPG of my very own, and the easy-to-use OHRRPGCE further fueled my enthusiasm. I went and made music tracks left and right, clicking down any stray melody, harmony, or rhythm that popped up in my head, and slammed them into some midi files regardless of whether they sounded good together or not. At first, they sounded delightful to me, so much so that I felt it was worth sharing them on Castle Paradox. (I never got any peer feedback.) For a while I went without composing anything, or even listening to what I composed, and when I returned to it all I found my creations grating and unbearable. I realized what an amateur I was and erased almost all of my creations.
DON'T ERASE YOUR CREATIONS, EVER, by the way. This is the internet age, deleting something out of shame is, in this context, utterly foolish.
Original music is always a delight for me to hear in OHR games, regardless of its quality or length. It's a mark of love a creator has for his game, which he holds in such high esteem that no plagiarized tracks or public domain songs will ever be heard from it - only a truly original soundtrack will suffice. That is a noble endeavor that I sincerely applaud. By all means, keep your original music in your game, whatever it is. It'll help distinguish it from other first-timers, definitely. If you're lucky someone may come along and review it in the future and take note of it, saying something like "I like this rhythm" or "this melody fits the mood of the scene" or "this instrument was loud and annoying." Though admittedly it would be best if you received criticisms before releasing your game, but... this thread notwithstanding, there isn't really a Music subforum on Slime Salad, is there? I guess you'll just have to post your music somewhere and invite critics to come in and pick them apart.
Effort alone won't make good music, needless to say. The gentlemen above me - well, SwampTroll at least, I'm guessing about shakeyair - have years of experience under their belts and some number of years of Music Theory classes to boot. (SwampTroll, aka Jabbercat, had a hand in the making of Wandering Hamster's soundtrack, by the way.) Becoming a better composer is a bit like becoming a better artist, or a better writer or what have you. You need to practice a lot, experiment with different things, and of course, look into the past and learn from history to see what works. (As SwampTroll always tells me, study Bach, listen to Bach, analyze Bach.) It will probably take you years and years to improve, but you will improve. Which brings me back to that bold statement two paragraphs ago. Don't abandon music you've already composed, return to it, listen to it (a thousand times if necessary), try to figure out why it didn't sound good, and improve it however you can with new knowledge about music theory that you'll hopefully be picking up over the years. I'm sure if you practice and experiment on your own, you'll learn new things anyway, and when you hear about them in some music theory lecture, you can say "Oh yeah! That thing! I remember finding out about it, but I didn't know what it was called!"
To sum it all up, use what you've made in your OHR games and practice lots and lots and lots if you want to get better.
I wrote this message (almost an essay, really) because you remind me of myself as a young, eager RPG maker wanting to compose music. I get the feeling you'll be walking the same path I did and having similar experiences, so hopefully this will all make sense to you sooner or later. If you actually are young, now would be a good time to scout for colleges and universities with a good selection of music classes to take. I didn't get that opportunity, myself.
Anyway, I'll conclude this absurdly long thing by parroting shakeyair: Get a keyboard of some kind. It's the most useful learning tool I can think of.
Fri Mar 23, 2012 3:46 am 
Fri Mar 23, 2012 1:50 pm
Whoa wait, Swamptroll is Jabbercat...?
As a secondary note to Meowskivich, if you have a piano/keyboard handy, I think the easiest way to begin understanding chords is to set yourself in the key of C, and then just say that a (basic) chord in C would be any three (white) keys separated by one (white) key each. Thus the C chord is CEG, because C and E are separated by D, and E and G are separated by F. So you can sort of make your hand rigid in that 'pattern' and move it up and down the scale to get any of the basic chords in C (DFA is a chord in the key of C, and its name is Dminor, but that's not as important as hearing what it sounds like within the key of C).
Then you can try to get fancy by adding a fourth note above (or below) any of those chords to get slightly less natural-sounding chords (keeping the 'separate by one white key' idea, so something like CEGB). You can also try playing around with 'breaking' the separate by one key idea, but be aware that the result will not always be something really new, nor will it always be something very helpful:
CEG -> CEA (I'm separating E and A by TWO white keys)
But wait! CEA is in some sense equivalent to ACE (same notes, anyways) and so this is just Aminor in disguise, what I would have gotten by keeping the same separation but moving my hand up to starting on A
CEG -> CEF (I'm separating E and F by ZERO white keys)
A chord like this will give you a pretty good idea of why we tend to keep at least a one-key separation when building basic chords. Here, we don't even have a black key between the two!
CEG -> CDG (I'm separating C and D by ZERO white keys, and D and G by TWO white keys, so I've changed two separations by moving only one note)
A chord like this has a very different sound compared to anything else you might come up with using my scheme. It might sound awkward at first, but try playing the notes one at a time in an arpeggio kind of sound (maybe put a top octave C up above) and it might sound prettier to you, if you want to use it for something.
I am Srime
As a secondary note to Meowskivich, if you have a piano/keyboard handy, I think the easiest way to begin understanding chords is to set yourself in the key of C, and then just say that a (basic) chord in C would be any three (white) keys separated by one (white) key each. Thus the C chord is CEG, because C and E are separated by D, and E and G are separated by F. So you can sort of make your hand rigid in that 'pattern' and move it up and down the scale to get any of the basic chords in C (DFA is a chord in the key of C, and its name is Dminor, but that's not as important as hearing what it sounds like within the key of C).
Then you can try to get fancy by adding a fourth note above (or below) any of those chords to get slightly less natural-sounding chords (keeping the 'separate by one white key' idea, so something like CEGB). You can also try playing around with 'breaking' the separate by one key idea, but be aware that the result will not always be something really new, nor will it always be something very helpful:
CEG -> CEA (I'm separating E and A by TWO white keys)
But wait! CEA is in some sense equivalent to ACE (same notes, anyways) and so this is just Aminor in disguise, what I would have gotten by keeping the same separation but moving my hand up to starting on A
CEG -> CEF (I'm separating E and F by ZERO white keys)
A chord like this will give you a pretty good idea of why we tend to keep at least a one-key separation when building basic chords. Here, we don't even have a black key between the two!
CEG -> CDG (I'm separating C and D by ZERO white keys, and D and G by TWO white keys, so I've changed two separations by moving only one note)
A chord like this has a very different sound compared to anything else you might come up with using my scheme. It might sound awkward at first, but try playing the notes one at a time in an arpeggio kind of sound (maybe put a top octave C up above) and it might sound prettier to you, if you want to use it for something.
I am Srime
Fri Mar 23, 2012 5:38 pm
You need to be able to distinguish between Maj and Mi, otherwise you'll be getting strange chord progressions.
If a chord is written like so: C (uppercase) then it is a major chord - C E G.
If a chord is written like so: c (lowercase) then it is a minor chord - C Eb G.
So, it's always worth writing Cmaj or cmi and etc to be clear.
It's also worth thinking about the scale degrees. Each place in the scale has it's own roman numeral to identify it, and special name. In the key of C Major it looks like this:
Tonic - Supertonic - Mediant - Subdominant - Dominant - Submediant - Leading note - Octave (tonic)
And then roman numerals:
I - ii - iii - IV - V - vi - vii - VIII (I)
(vii isn't a proper minor chord, but we'll worry about that some other time).
You may wonder why this is useful, but think of it this way: if you have a excellent chord progression (say, I - IV - iii - V - vi, or Cmaj - Fmaj - emi - Gmaj - ami) and you want to write it in another key, G maj for example, all you need to do is look at the roman numerals and it will identify it for you immediately. So, in G maj you get: Gmaj - Cmaj- bmi - Dmaj - emi. It's also useful, because it tells you the quality of each chord (if it's major or minor) just by looking at the numeral.
If a chord is written like so: C (uppercase) then it is a major chord - C E G.
If a chord is written like so: c (lowercase) then it is a minor chord - C Eb G.
So, it's always worth writing Cmaj or cmi and etc to be clear.
It's also worth thinking about the scale degrees. Each place in the scale has it's own roman numeral to identify it, and special name. In the key of C Major it looks like this:
Tonic - Supertonic - Mediant - Subdominant - Dominant - Submediant - Leading note - Octave (tonic)
And then roman numerals:
I - ii - iii - IV - V - vi - vii - VIII (I)
(vii isn't a proper minor chord, but we'll worry about that some other time).
You may wonder why this is useful, but think of it this way: if you have a excellent chord progression (say, I - IV - iii - V - vi, or Cmaj - Fmaj - emi - Gmaj - ami) and you want to write it in another key, G maj for example, all you need to do is look at the roman numerals and it will identify it for you immediately. So, in G maj you get: Gmaj - Cmaj- bmi - Dmaj - emi. It's also useful, because it tells you the quality of each chord (if it's major or minor) just by looking at the numeral.
Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:04 am
Ummmmm, I made something new:
Crystal Dreams
Yar...you guys and gals think I'm improving or no? I think this sounded nice, it's a bit short.
dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x
Crystal Dreams
Yar...you guys and gals think I'm improving or no? I think this sounded nice, it's a bit short.
dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x
Thu Apr 19, 2012 10:42 am
Wow, short is right. Just 4 bars. There's really not much I can comment on, but I'll do what I can.
It sounds okay, I can't hear anything inherently "wrong" in it, but this is not something I would want to hear by itself in a video game. If it were to remain as is, looping forever, I'd have to mute the game before proceeding with it. What you need to do is build on it. Copy and paste it several times in whatever MIDI program you use and listen to it loop over and over, and come up with some other sounds to accompany it. Maybe you can come up with a longer melody that can play over what you have as it loops. As we've said earlier, this is much easier and overall better if you have a keyboard to use while listening to the loop. If you absolutely totally cannot get one, using your computer keyboard as a substitute will suffice, but it will probably not satisfy you.
Once you've built on it and picked up some momentum, try taking your sounds in a new, but similar, direction. This can be as simple as composing a new melody to put over your loop. That's pretty much one of the oldest rules / patterns / nuances / whatever of music, I figure. The Theme and the Variation.
It sounds okay, I can't hear anything inherently "wrong" in it, but this is not something I would want to hear by itself in a video game. If it were to remain as is, looping forever, I'd have to mute the game before proceeding with it. What you need to do is build on it. Copy and paste it several times in whatever MIDI program you use and listen to it loop over and over, and come up with some other sounds to accompany it. Maybe you can come up with a longer melody that can play over what you have as it loops. As we've said earlier, this is much easier and overall better if you have a keyboard to use while listening to the loop. If you absolutely totally cannot get one, using your computer keyboard as a substitute will suffice, but it will probably not satisfy you.
Once you've built on it and picked up some momentum, try taking your sounds in a new, but similar, direction. This can be as simple as composing a new melody to put over your loop. That's pretty much one of the oldest rules / patterns / nuances / whatever of music, I figure. The Theme and the Variation.