Electronic Music
Maybe the third (or fifth) try will work. I have long lusted over the desire to make music with keyboards and synthesizers, but have failed to stick with it. Is this the time it sinks in?
My introduction to modern rock and roll came some time in the 1970’s. I stumbled into the grand-daddy of progressive rock, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and I learned that the wild sounds and stylings were created by Keith Emerson, and his Moog synthesizer.
I really, really REALLY wanted to get into that space, but …
Turns out that back then (and today as well) it cost a LOT of money to play. Like buckets, and buckets of greenbacks. So I went down the route of playing guitar (not that that was any less expensive in the long term.)
At a few points in my life I dabbled with a DAW or Digital Audio Workstation like GarageBand. I think I first installed one in the late 1990’s and frankly it was not a good experience, and I never got into it.
Then I got firmly ensconced into the Apple ecosystem, and with some birthday money, I bought an audio interface so that I could record my guitar on my computer, and I used the built in GarageBand app, and boy howdy, that was just a) easy to get my guitar in (I plugged my Pod XT into the audio interface, and recorded in GarageBand) and b) holee sheeeeeeeit, there is a lot of things you can do in GarageBand, but it was neither intuitive, nor obvious.
So, apart from capturing some guitar tracks to listen to, I just drifted away, unwilling to really dig into the operation of the DAW. I am sure it was easy to use, and being a somewhat streamlined subset of the Apple ProLogic app, it was plenty powerful, but even Apple couldn’t reduce the slope of the learning curve.
Why I think this time is different
My resurgence of commitment to music got a major kick in the pants during the Covid shutdowns, leading to a few acquisitions (new amplifier, a slew of effects pedals, and recently the addition of a Line 6 Helix) that have again inspired me to dip my toe into the world of electronic music.
But there is one other reason.
The reinvigoration of my music has inspired me to learn (or re-learn) the basics of music theory. In the way back time, my guitar teacher walked me through the basics of music theory, chord construction, the circle of fifths, the common harmonies, and scales - LOTS of scales.
However, I realized that the fretboard is not convenient to learn and visualize the relationships between the notes, keys, and scales. All the advice I heard was to buy a keyboard to work through the exercises, and to see the relationships.
So, I bought a simple 25 key Midi keyboard, an Alesis V25, it has 25 keys (velocity sensitive, but unweighted), four knobs, 8 pads, and a pitch bend/ modulation control.
It was on sale, $89, and it comes with a slew of software to download.
Plugged it in, and well, hmmm, not much.
Turns out that is is not so simple to get things to work. If you are used to just plugging things in, and voilá they just work, then the ancient world of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the key to the kingdom. Created in 1981, it was from an era where computers, and musical instruments were somewhat primitive, and thus it feels somewhat kludgy compared to today’s interfaces like USB, Thunderbolt, and others that just make connecting things together really simple and intuitive.
Alas, those simple connections are not really simple. Super smart engineers have created an ecosystem that makes it seem simple, but in reality, behind the scenes a lot of handshaking, identification, queries and responses happen to make it seem seamless. MIDI is all manual, and requires the user to handle a lot of the details. Messy, but very powerful.
But what I am learning is that the software is complicated, that you have to explicitly make settings to get it to do anything. It took me a few hours to figure out how to get a sound when I press a key.
Turns out that the bundled VIP software has no sounds built in, so I had to first figure out how to add a plug-in. So, I went searching for something called a VST plugin (and free ones, cause I am a cheap bastard when I am unsure of what I needed) and grabbed a simple acoustic piano. Getting it loaded wasn’t trivial. Had to install it, and make sure it was in a directory that is scanned, and then manually open it in the VIP software.
Sidebar: The music software world is full of some of the most intrusive activation and copy-protection I have seen in a long time. I had to install a license manager for the VIP software, activate it, and then when I downloaded a trial of a plugin, I had to activate the trial to get my 2 weeks of free use.
Yikes, that is a lot of hoops, but I would suspect that there is rampant piracy of these snippets of code, and that the paranoia is important to protect their IP. Sucks, but I understand.
Finally, using the GUI, I was able to make sounds. But I still couldn’t get the system to play from the keyboard.
Turns out that I had to explicitly map the keyboard to the plugin, that is route the keypresses (that generate MIDI data sent to an instrument, or in this case, a plug in) to the Piano plugin.
Alas, I was able to make sounds. And it was glorious.
This just took 3 days of futzing around (I am busy at work, so when I was in music mode, I spent my time playing guitar.)
Now I need to pick a DAW, and learn how to use it. That will be for another post. The journey continues.