How to Learn Music?
I came across this among some other songs from this band a few days ago, and I’ve listened to it some ungodly number of times since, in its low-quality, home-video, Youtube form. Hopefully the fact that this has been up for ages means that the copyright police have peacefully passed it over, but I’ll take it off the blog if anyone objects. Anyway, it reminded me how awesome it would be to produce such sound.
The first musical thing I did was to try to learn the violin at 6 years old. This went poorly. It’s pretty easy to talk kids into doing things they don’t really want to do, like singing up to practice every night and take violin lessons for God knows how long. Parents don’t quite realize that kids are even worse at reading contracts than adults. Anyway, I came out pretty sure I wanted no more of that.
More recently, I’ve tried to approach the subject from a more reasonable perspective. Last summer I had some exposure to remix culture and a bit of time to tinker around with Linux audio tools and listen to some good, new stuff. So now I’m thinking a bit more seriously that as long as I’m still in college, I might as well try the band thing. I don’t quite know where to start.
Then I saw some new papers on math and music on Slashdot. For all of us technical people trying to get in on the music scene, I figure this could be quite helpful. As for the tools that I found on my summer experiments, well, those that looked most interesting are LMMS (for Linux), Sweep (also Linux) and Hydrogen Drum Machine (now cross-platform).
This isn’t like most of my other posts, because there’s no real conclusion or direction. I’ll probably see what I can do with Creative Commons licensed stuff on my computer, then learn bass, guitar or synthesizer over the summer.
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