<\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nSo I’ve been learning about music. It’s a big topic. It’s probably just as big and complex as graphics programming, although it’s a little more gratifying because it probably won’t take you a couple of years to produce a single piece of work. <\/p>\n
I’ve been hammering away on my own, making tons of crappy little tunes. I throw a lot of them away. (Most of them are stupid or boring or just don’t work.) But once in a while when I think I’ve done something good I upload it to my Soundcloud<\/a>.<\/p>\n I’ve found myself getting stuck in a musical rut. My skills and knowledge have hit a plateau and all my stuff is starting to sound the same. All my stuff is built on a nice neat grid and each part is played by exactly one instrument that clearly begins and ends on rigorously enforced borders. I build my songs on top of predictable repeating chord patterns where each chord is of the same length. I’m becoming very mechanical. Actually, I guess I just started out being mechanical and I’m failing to break out of it.<\/p>\n This is the point where a reasonable person might seek out a teacher or mentor. But personal interaction is slow and I’m stubborn and set on learning everything on my own. To be clear, I’m not saying this is always the most optimal<\/em> way of doing things. But it is the most convenient. (Also the best way of turning the project into blog posts.)<\/p>\n So my plan is to take some game soundtracks that I love and try to emulate their style. If possible, I’ll get the MIDI version and tear it apart to see how it was constructed. <\/p>\n A MIDI file is just a collection of notes, with no sound data. Stuff like, “Push middle C really hard for 3 seconds, now push D4 gently for one second”, or whatever. The notes are divided into channels. The midi file says what instrument the channel is using (French horn, acoustic guitar, grand piano, bongo drums) and then what notes to play on each channel. But it doesn’t say how those instruments should sound. That’s up to your soundcard to figure out. <\/p>\n It’s a bit like web pages: The same raw HTML will end up looking a little different on Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari. And someday that HTML might look completely different on some browser in the future. On the upside, it makes the data very compact. Raw HTML text is going to be incredibly tiny compared to a screen capture of the webpage, and a midi file – being just a collection of button-presses – is really tiny compared to an MP3 of the same music.\n<\/p><\/div>\n So my plan is to:<\/p>\n So that’s the project. My first subject is the Doom soundtrack. Now, it’s widely known that the Doom soundtrack is very heavily influenced by the metal tracks of the day. Some people even say the songs are rip-offs. And when you compare them side-by-side<\/a>, the similarities are pretty striking.<\/p>\n I dunno if I want to call these tracks “rip-offs”. Especially since the whole point of this project is to do the same dang thing myself. I’m moving into a brand-new glass house, so now is a terrible time to start throwing stones. <\/p>\n But whatever. This is a good place to start, because the Doom songs are kind of simple, the MIDI files are freely available, and I’m already familiar with the material. So let’s focus on one song and see what we learn: <\/p>\n\n
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