I’ve always wanted to be able to make music, something at least, and now with LLMs venturing into such unknown territories has become so easy.
What’s a DAW?
daw = digital audio workstation. Now I spent a bit of time looking at all the options but anyone that DOES NOT know what a DAW is should start with LMMS. I was unsure at first but looking at how simple and stripped it is, it makes for an ideal start.
LMMS
installing
I had some issues with what I got from arch repos so used the appimage instead.
ramblings
A song would have multiple components; what I made was very trivial and it had these
the first one that I added was a kick. clicking will open a beat/bassline editor
the sounds I dragged from the leftmost panel → “My Samples”
and then you click squares to select when it gets triggered.
( ignoring timings for now as that should be part of the music theory )
next was chords where I used triple oscillator with only one osc ( osc1 ) enabled aka having volume ( rest were making it too noisy )
clicking the “chords” text would open the instrument settings ( first window )
clicking the bar on right to add a piano roll would open that ( second window )
I also to enable all note labels ( it’s not so by default but is an option in settings ) otherwise the piano keys have only Cx marked.
Then was bassline in a similar manner. Actually it was the bassline that I added first and then the chords.
Next was lead where I used a different instrument plugin ( nescaline ).
This was basically it, chatgpt had made all the decision on what instruments on what instruments and what chords so it’s not like I really did anything here BUT having been through it, the interface doesn’t feel alien anymore, which was the point of the whole exercise — and I got a “first track.mmpz” out of it!
next plans?
next would be getting some knowledge on music theory at least otherwise I’m just blind here; again I got this from chatgpt which seems like a good start to it
learningmusic.ableton.com