Making Music

Mira Stone

GD2

4/9/2012

Research Paper 2 - How to make music

I listen to music all of the time and I don't know what will I do if I don't have music to listen to. I love listening to music for inspiration, relaxation, partying. But listening to music doesn't have the same effect as making music. Traditionally music has been made by manually playing the instruments and recording the melody in a studio. The modern and more popular way of making music is digitally, on the computer. Many instrument playing software has been created in recent years to help musicians make music on the computer. Some of the most professional and widely used music making programs are Pro Tools, Cubase 5, Reason 4 and Fl Studio. My favorite one is Fl Studio because it is very easy to use, has a lot of options and also produces very professional sounds.

Making music in Fl Studio is easy because the program itself has a lot of instruments but if you want to get a more unique and better sounds there are many free and buyable VST's and samples. Before one can start using the software a person has to learn the interface which consist of four main parts which are the channel window, mixer, playlist and browser. The music composing is done in the channel window where all the instruments are displayed. The different instruments and melody patterns are later arranged in the playlist and once a composition is done, the musician uses the mixer to edit, mix and master the sounds.

The first thing a person needs to adjust is the tempo of the composition. Different music genres have different speed for example a tempo of a Hip-Hop beat is usually around 80-100 bpm (beats per minute), a House/Electro beat's tempo can be anywhere from 120 to 140 bpm. Once a genre is chosen, the musician can start making the drum line pattern by simply adding kicks, claps, snares and percussion samples in the channel window. After making the drum line, the next step is to create the melody. Once a person chooses...