My first LMMS song =]

[GENO]

Okay, this is Geno of sound mind and body. Not trying to be spammy or anything, but lately I've been thinking I might try and educate myself on how to use some of the tools for making flash animations and games and maybe try my hand at them one of these days. (I'm using the free stuff for now, since the commercial software is EXPENSIVE as hell.)

Anyway, the past few days I've been downloading and trying various freeware programs for making your own music or just plain drum beats. I tried a lot of different ones, all cool in their own way, but if you're interested in making your own tunes on a program that's relatively easy to learn but is still flexible enough to let you get creative, you guys should check out this freeware music maker called LMMS. Best one I've found so far:

Download.cnet.com Link

I just finished my very first song using the program, and I posted a Megaupload link to the MP3 if anyone musically inclined wants to offer feedback.

Here's an early screenshot of the song's skeleton in the LMMS program. There are more tracks and tweaks than this in the final cut:



Most of the picture shows the different instrument tracks on the general mixer, but you can see the keyboard screen with little green dots behind it. That's how you actually go about creating your notes and stuff. No need to plug a keyboard into your comp or anything (although it can apparently do that, too.)

And here's a megupload link if you wanna download the MP3 and give it a listen (3.26MB)

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VX1IW6OO

I wasn't sure what to call it, so I called it "Last Chance" just because it makes me think of a really dramatic finale-type level in a game where a player has to race against time and/or defeat an enemy and/or overcome an overwhelming obstacle while everything they've worked for dangles by a thread. No fear, just determination, running straight into harm's way with one fist pumping in the air, that sorta thing. You know how it goes.

Anyway, I hope you  like the song, if you decide to check it out. And I hope you like the software, too, if you decide to give it a try.

[bucksavage]

I got this the other day after seeing you mention it here, and so far it is pretty cool, thoguh i must say, the little music I have made so far isn't that good.  I might post it up here though, maybe you can use it to make something Geno.

[GENO]

I got this the other day after seeing you mention it here, and so far it is pretty cool, thoguh i must say, the little music I have made so far isn't that good.  I might post it up here though, maybe you can use it to make something Geno.

Well not anytime soon, considering that my desktop PC decided this morning it wasn't going to turn on anymore. I'll have to get that figured out first.

I will say, though, that once I began playing around with more of the other instruments, I did encounter a lot of gripes with it. The one thing that was annoying me the most was how many of the instruments and synth effects weren't set to standard tuning by default, so whenever you tried to sync up two different instruments (e.g. an electric bass synth with a piano synth) you would get dissonant chords even though the notes SHOULD harmonize. There are ways of going into each instrument/effect's settings and manually adjusting the pitch and detune levels, but it's a huge pain in the ass to have to sit and manually tweak the two sounds for three hours when you're just wondering what the instruments sound like together and aren't even sure if you're going to pair them up yet.

I just don't get it. Why would you give a man an orchestra of untuned instruments? It is beyond inconvenience.

I really liked the sound of the "full choir" effect, though, and I was working on two songs since this last one though: a sort of temple-ish hymn-ish "ooh ahh" choir sort of thing and I also took a stab at a more pop-sounding song with a bit of funk bass. Not sure if they'll be recovered, though. If I ever get this damn thing up an running again, maybe I'll post anything else I come up with.

Thanks for checking it, though, Buck. Figuring out the program okay? It's got a lot of nice functions, but some of them I only stumbled onto accidentally. It took me a while to just figure out how to do simple things like copy/paste note segments correctly or how to get a note to hold indefinitely.

[bucksavage]

Hope you get your pc up and running again.  My stepmom's went down last week as well, hd crashed, and I've had a couple die on me too.  So I understand where you are coming from.  Hope you can recover the data you lost. 

I only recently found out how to stretch notes to a full 4 bar length.  never found out how to make them longer though.  What songwork I have done is mostly a beat, with different cymbol/snare/other percussion mixed into it, as well as some reversed hihat which sounds neat when paired with unreversed hihats.  I've been mostly compartmentalizing the tracks so far, making each song track other than melody a separate beat/baseline track so I can tweak them and not have to go though a ton of notes to fix stuff. 

[GENO]

Hope you get your pc up and running again.  My stepmom's went down last week as well, hd crashed, and I've had a couple die on me too.  So I understand where you are coming from.  Hope you can recover the data you lost.

It's cool. I back up all my most important stuff on an external. Still, I lost some game saves and freeware programs I'll have to DL again if I can't get it back.

I only recently found out how to stretch notes to a full 4 bar length.  never found out how to make them longer though.

It sounds like you're talking about selecting full notes from the dropdown menu on the piano roll, but if you have the piano roll open and you're using an instrument that can sustain really long notes (e.g. an electric guitar, violin, brass instrument) you can hover the mouse over the right tip of the green bar symbolizing your note and you'll get a <-> cursor. You can use it to click and drag only the edge of the note (instead of moving the entire note), stretching it as far as infinity, if you feel like it. It only works for some instruments, though. Some instruments effects only play quick notes by default, so even if you drag the note bar to infinity, it will still only play a quick, short note.

What songwork I have done is mostly a beat, with different cymbol/snare/other percussion mixed into it, as well as some reversed hihat which sounds neat when paired with unreversed hihats.  I've been mostly compartmentalizing the tracks so far, making each song track other than melody a separate beat/baseline track so I can tweak them and not have to go though a ton of notes to fix stuff. 

Sounds good. Yeah, being able to keep everything separate really helps a lot with the editing. Another thing I found that helped save me time was that I would take a part of the song I wanted to repeat and only play through the sequence once and save it as a short segment, but I would position the notes between the measure on the piano roll in such a way that when the last note ended, it would immediately loop back to the first note again and sound like it was looping into a repeating song. I would make every part of the song like that and then just copy paste stuff around. So for example, if I was using just a steady bass drum thump, I would just open the piano roll, insert four thumps, and close it. Then I would copy/paste the four-thump chunk over and over again in the drum track. Being able to copy/paste things you want to loop makes it easy to throw down the basic gist of your song pretty fast, plus it lets you edit, delete, or move small segments of a track without worrying that you're going to eff up the entire track. If I goofed up something I was tweaking or my idea just wasn't working, I just deleted that one little bit, then copy/pasted the original back in its place using one of the other untweaked bits on that track.

Sounds like you're having fun with the drums. If you really like playing with drum loops, you should check out Hammerhead: http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/

It's a lot smaller than LMMS, and all it does is drum loops. But it loops your beat infinitely, and it lets you tweak and edit the drum loop while it's playing without any performance hiccups, not to mention it's INSANELY EASY to use. So if you're trying on your DJ shoes. ;-)

[Darkside]

this is a pretty cool program, i must have played around with it for 2hrs last night when i first got it.

its really easy for me to make drum beats, but i do know a thing or two about drums so its not that hard. however, its pretty difficult to get the instruments to do what i want. i don't know how to change single pitches, i just know how to change the chords around and maybe throw a arpeggio in there. it would have been cool if they added scales, but i suppose if i figure out how to do the single pitches i can just add the scales in myself.

though also pretty cool track there geno, kinda weird that the main theme sounds like a riff that i wrote already, kinda cool.

[bucksavage]

@Geno: What you mention about dragging the right side of a note in the piano roll, is how I do it, but I just have never tried doing that for more than 4 bars. 

Also, I fiddled with the tune the last few days and I have some sorta melodic arpeggios and some rave choir segments now, and a few other things as well. 

@DS:  The pitch can be altered in at least one way I can think of.  Left click on a intrument track in the main area, you know, where you have the tracks arranged, or on the baseline editor, and a little menu thing should appear.  A toggling doohickey (like my technical terms? lol) wheel thing in there to alter pitch and should be the middle control, right under where you can enter a title, or change the title of the track. 

[GENO]

@Geno: What you mention about dragging the right side of a note in the piano roll, is how I do it, but I just have never tried doing that for more than 4 bars. 

Also, I fiddled with the tune the last few days and I have some sorta melodic arpeggios and some rave choir segments now, and a few other things as well. 

@DS:  The pitch can be altered in at least one way I can think of.  Left click on a intrument track in the main area, you know, where you have the tracks arranged, or on the baseline editor, and a little menu thing should appear.  A toggling doohickey (like my technical terms? lol) wheel thing in there to alter pitch and should be the middle control, right under where you can enter a title, or change the title of the track. 

Speaking of that little menu that pops up... actually depending on which instrument or effect it is, you get a different menu that lets you tweak different things. (All of them have at least volume and pitch, though, I think.) But one cool thing that I found on some of the instruments---especially the piano and piano synth--is that you can open that menu and tab over until you get a page that has a "chords" section and an "arpeggio" section. If you turn on the green light in the chords section, any regular note you place on the piano role becomes the chord version of that note instead. For example, if you place a single G note on the piano roll, the program automatically turns it to a G chord. You can select the type of chords you want to use from a drop-down menu (e.g. minor, major, 7, sust, etc).

Underneath that is arpeggios. If you check the green light for arpeggios, any note you place will automatically play an arpeggio of the chord you selected (e.g. Gmaj, Gmin, G7, whatever) until the note you placed ends. You can also choose whether you want the arpeggios to go up/down, down/up, or random.

I never used the feature in a song, but it was really cool, and it has tons of chords and scales to choose from. The only thing I couldn't figure out is how to get an instrument to change chord types. For example, if I place a piano track and set that track to play major chords for any note I place... how do I turn around and place minor chords? It seems as though you can only set it to one type of chord at a time, which seems silly, so there must be a way to mix up your chord types, I just didn't figure it out before the comp died.  =\

[bucksavage]

I was gonna post my song up here as a link, so does anyone have a bead on a good FREE, no hassle uploader? 

[GENO]

I was gonna post my song up here as a link, so does anyone have a bead on a good FREE, no hassle uploader? 

Megaupload has always been my favorite. Lots of people like using Rapidshare, but I think that one's got too much bullshit. All of them are a little annoying in their own way; you just have to find the one you hate the least. For me, that's Megaupload.

[bucksavage]

Ok then, gonna try to get a link ready and post it here later tonight. 

Try this link, it should be good for only 10 d/l's though, it's a free rapidshare link. 

http://rapidshare.com/files/400572446/poop.mmpz.html

[GENO]

Ok then, gonna try to get a link ready and post it here later tonight. 

Try this link, it should be good for only 10 d/l's though, it's a free rapidshare link. 

http://rapidshare.com/files/400572446/poop.mmpz.html

Thanks for the upload, Buck, but I think you uploaded the song file for LMMS, which requires LMMS to read it. Any way you could export it as an MP3 and upload the MP3 version? (If I remember, you should be able to create the MP3 by going to File -> Export. It'll have a bunch of quality options, but I experimented with them, and the default seems to sound the best, so you can just keep hitting okay until it creates the MP3.)

[bucksavage]

Yeah it was a LMMS file.  Will get to uploading a new file but so far the program is only letting me export as either a .wav or an .ogg file, and even as a .wav, the file was 65 megs, way too huge to upload with my dial up net.  gonna fiddle with it to get the filesize lower. 

[GENO]

Yeah it was a LMMS file.  Will get to uploading a new file but so far the program is only letting me export as either a .wav or an .ogg file, and even as a .wav, the file was 65 megs, way too huge to upload with my dial up net.  gonna fiddle with it to get the filesize lower. 

Ooh, that's right. It does only export as a wav. I used my converter to get my MP3. My bad. Hm... not sure how you could get the filesize lower then. Wavs are huge by nature. Not much chance of getting one down to MP3 size unless you convert it.

If you want it, this is the program I used to convert: http://download.cnet.com/Switch-Sound-File-Converter/3000-2140_4-10327491.html

[bucksavage]

gonna d/l it tonight.  will try later and post a new d/l link soon.