My first ever MIDI composition

[DamTheGreat]

For my upcoming map pack, I want some custom music. I posted a thread about this in the Off-Topic forum and in that thread someone posted a tutorial video, so I learned the basics of scales. With that knowledge, I was able to create a piece. It is probably utter garbage, so I want all your criticisms and tips and how to compose something better, something worthy of being put in my map pack.

 

Here it is:

 

My first garbage ( The title is supposed to be "Interrupted Vacation" as it plays in the first level where Doomguy's vacation is interrupted by something)

 

EDIT: Here's another one:

 

No More Gum

Edited March 27, 2022 by DamTheGreat

[I Drink Lava]

You can't just write a song using one scale, there's more to it than that. Music is made up of different chord progressions and rhythms. Even one of those "learn music theory in 30 MINUTES!!!" videos would be more useful than just learning a single scale.

 

Listening to "Interrupted Vacation", I can clearly hear a disparity between the bass notes and the melody. The bass is just playing the root note of C (1) for the entire duration of the song with very little movement (only 2nd and 3rd intervals) and in a strangely out-of-sync way at that. The sixth note in the measure does not even line up with the beat, somehow. Even if your song does not have literal chords, the notes of the bassline and melody will still correspond to a chord in the scale. Now I am not well-versed in music to transcribe your chord progressions, but I can tell you that a root note of C in C Major would be for a I chord containing C, E, and G (1, 3, and 5). Also, why does the bassline go up an octave randomly on the 19th measure? Was that a user error in the editor?

 

The percussion does not line up with the bass or the melody, either. When the other percussion instruments kick in, they just play on the same beat. It becomes a cacophony of noise. Typically, you want to have the percussion layered so it doesn't all robotically play on the same beat. The most simple way of doing it would be having quarter notes (usually kick-snare), layered with eighth notes (cymbals, the various conga drums and other misc. percussion) and sixteenth notes (hi-hats and shakers).

 

I suggest you go back to the drawing board and take in more music theory lessons. Instead of randomly playing the 8 notes in C Major with no emotional resonance and the same few motifs repeated, you should start with with an actual structure. The most beginner lesson would be to use a I-IV-V progression, which in C Major would correspond to C-E-G, F-A-C, G-B-D. You could probably find a I-IV-V loop somewhere free online, then practice improvising over it by humming a melody, then transcribing that melody into notes in your editor. After that, I would listen to some music like you're trying to compose in the style of (in this case, Calypso music) and find a transcription that contains the key it's written in and the names of the chords so you can find the progression.

Edited March 27, 2022 by I Drink Lava

[DamTheGreat]

17 hours ago, I Drink Lava said:

You can't just write a song using one scale, there's more to it than that. Music is made up of different chord progressions and rhythms. Even one of those "learn music theory in 30 MINUTES!!!" videos would be more useful than just learning a single scale.

 

Listening to "Interrupted Vacation", I can clearly hear a disparity between the bass notes and the melody. The bass is just playing the root note of C (1) for the entire duration of the song with very little movement (only 2nd and 3rd intervals) and in a strangely out-of-sync way at that. The sixth note in the measure does not even line up with the beat, somehow. Even if your song does not have literal chords, the notes of the bassline and melody will still correspond to a chord in the scale. Now I am not well-versed in music to transcribe your chord progressions, but I can tell you that a root note of C in C Major would be for a I chord containing C, E, and G (1, 3, and 5). Also, why does the bassline go up an octave randomly on the 19th measure? Was that a user error in the editor?

 

The percussion does not line up with the bass or the melody, either. When the other percussion instruments kick in, they just play on the same beat. It becomes a cacophony of noise. Typically, you want to have the percussion layered so it doesn't all robotically play on the same beat. The most simple way of doing it would be having quarter notes (usually kick-snare), layered with eighth notes (cymbals, the various conga drums and other misc. percussion) and sixteenth notes (hi-hats and shakers).

 

I suggest you go back to the drawing board and take in more music theory lessons. Instead of randomly playing the 8 notes in C Major with no emotional resonance and the same few motifs repeated, you should start with with an actual structure. The most beginner lesson would be to use a I-IV-V progression, which in C Major would correspond to C-E-G, F-A-C, G-B-D. You could probably find a I-IV-V loop somewhere free online, then practice improvising over it by humming a melody, then transcribing that melody into notes in your editor. After that, I would listen to some music like you're trying to compose in the style of (in this case, Calypso music) and find a transcription that contains the key it's written in and the names of the chords so you can find the progression.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

 

A lot of what you say is way too technical for me. But what I do get from it: the bass line and the main melody have to form a chord?

 

I guess it was bound for failure, I need to watch many more educational videos on the subject.

 

I showed it to my friend and she said it was comical, so clearly it needs improvement.

[PsychEyeball]

Listened to the first song... your big flaw so far is that many notes are not timed correctly. Listen to your conga track more closely: on your first half-measure, the notes do play at the appropriate timing, but on the second half of it, the second conga note at 3:03 doesn't play at the right timing the 1/8th note would normally play. You'll want to check out your snap settings in your DAW to ensure your notes are properly timed throughout. The same problem occur with your baseline, the fifth note which plays on your baseline motif (which could be spruced up a bit since it gets repetitive quick) plays on later than it should so it's out of time. Sadly, your steel drums share a similar fate, you're attempting to play triplets at times and yet none of the notes are properly timed so it sounds really wacky.

 

Your note timings were this: 4:04:000 - 4:04:361 - 4:04:720

And they should be this: 4:04:000 - 4:04:320 - 4:04:640

 

The other flaw that stands out is you just stay on the same key the whole time. The bassline just stays on the C scale the whole time and I'm not too sure neither as to why it suddenly climbs an octave up. The melody which plays sadly doesn't really evoke any feeling to the listener either, they just feel random and they don't try to either instill happiness, sadness, annoyance or dread. Mood is a very important thing to have in music and sadly, your song doesn't evoke anything to the listener. This is where doing a key change would have helped: you could have switched your melody a little bit around without shifting the whole motif up and down several octaves. Be careful as well to not take a steel drum too low because they don't sound very good that way.

 

Second song is better timed, there wasn't obvious mistimed notes so there's already some improvement going on here. But it feels so much more repetitive, you can't just use a bar-long drum pattern and repeat it every bar. Listen to other songs, they usually have a quieter simpler motif going on with the drums, then every few bars or so they have a variation or a fill-in that leads to either the motif looping or to a new permutation of the drum track. Having some chord knowledge would have helped spice up the distorted guitar, especially when your song is just bass and guitar. Likewise though, second song do share the same compositional flaws than the first one did, everything's on the same scale, doesn't move around enough and repeats too often. I would advise against just randomly shifting up parts a full octave or two in the future. Around bar 11, I guess you wanted the distorted guitar to fade out instead of having it just drag around and cut off suddenly; use volume or expression MIDI controls if you wanna do a fade out. 

 

As a final tip, don't play every note at 127 velocity. Playing notes at different velocities will help make your tracks more human as well than create dynamics in your song. It can spruce up basslines and melodies without it being necessarily complex.

 

Good luck on your next songs!

[OniriA]

My God, this is bad..

[DamTheGreat]

1 hour ago, OniriA said:

My God, this is bad..

 

It sure is. It was my first attempt without musical theory knowledge, the only thing I knew was one scale.