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Software for Your Musical Instruments?
kko asks: "After looking for tuning software for my newly-acquired violin, I stumbled upon Tutor, which is an nifty violin tuner that also helps in developing your intonation and quick reading skills. What software have you used to aid your instrument practice, and how has it helped (or hindered) you? If you are an instructor, what do you think of instrument software in your student's learning process?"
There is no need for software if you practice, and practice well.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Open source, GPL, Sourceforge.
Use it to for banjo tuning, along with finger position charts, basicly as a universal pitch pipe.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I have never improved faster than when I recorded myself.
It is much easier to identify your mistakes when you can just listen to yourself play.
It is also fun to take a break and record some origonal song ideas.
I used to play guitar a lot when I was ~15. Sometimes I would play for 10 hours straight until I was bleary eyed. It was only deep in a jam session that I thought my skills really progressed. Now, 15 years later, I started tooling around with Garage Band on my Mac. I got an M-AUDIO FastTrack USB to see if I could do some simple overbubbing. Sure it was fun but I've come to the conclusion that software assisted authoring is and always will be inferior to just playing your heart out. The spontanaiety of humans so much more interesting. Computers don't imitate art very well (unless maybe you're mixing techno or something mechanical like that).
I've found software that allows me to slow down a recording to be very helpful when I'm trying to learn music by ear. Audacity is the one I usually use, but there are many others.
I use a combination of winamp and the chronotron plugin for learning and practicing songs on guitar. That ability to adjust pitch and tempo allow me to learn complex/fast parts really quickly.
Auralia can help with ear training (intervals and such), and Musition can help with learning music theory. I have used them both once to try them but never fully used them. Their normal use is for teachers to have students use to record their progress, but you can use it solo. When I took a music theory class we used a program called Finale to compose music, however it won't very much help with learning how to play an instrument.
:P
I play guitar and for the most part I do not use software to aid in practice. I have tuner software (Enable Encore) that I can plug into which I occasionally use, and music composing software (Guitar Pro 5, G7, and Finale).
When beginning with an instrument it's best just to practice reading music manually. In the case of guitars, that would mainly be tabs. Guitarists much prefer tabs (finger positions on six lines for the six strings) when learning music as chords can contain many double notes and would look messy on a staff.
Anyway, with violin, you'll be reading staves. I'm not sure how much you know so I'll to to help a little: violins use the G clef, so the lines on the staff from bottom up are E, G, B, D, and F; and the spaces are F, A, C, and E. The strings on the violin from biggest to smallest are G, D, A, and E. Practice by saying a note and playing it, then move onto reading simple songs and playing them. I'm not used to fretless instruments so I have no idea how hard that is.
I doubt my advice there helped, but as for the software part: There isn't much that will help you learn how to play an instrument. It's best just to read music and practice playing it until you get the muscle memory that will assist you in both playing faster and playing with less thought.
No existe.
If you are just beginning to learn an instrument, take the low tech approach and don't mix the computer into it at all. It will only distract you and waste your time when you could actually be learning the instrument. Or if you feel that you must use software to help develop your tuning and intonation skills, then break it up into "with computer" and "without computer" sessions. Honestly, the way to learn an instrument is to become intimately familiar with it, and you won't get that by fiddling with a computer.
This guy's the limit!
There is only one piece of software for me. PureData. Basically it's the Open Source version of Max/MSP and Reaktor. It is an amazing visual programing environment that lets you create anything. Although it started life as a music tool it now includes video processing and interfaces to every kind of GUI and input device like tablets and cameras. Stuff like Csound was always too academic for the normal user, actually writing code to make your music is too time consuming, but PureData allows you to just throw down sample players, filters, granulators, build your own sequencers. And if you don't like whats there it has a very clean C interface to write your own DSP externals as new modules. I built my own multitrack studio in PureData so I can record guitar and overdub samples. Now it has a growing community and overlaps with the Max users since patches are exchangeble between the two. It also has a OpenGL interface called Gem which means you can produce music videos from your music, or music from your animations in the same package - perfect synaesthetic playground.
It took a while for me to really grok what it was all about, not an easy learning curve. To start with you just get a blank sheet on which to begin adding objects. But after a few months I threw away Cubase, Logic and sold my external effects pedals to go Pure.
How do you get to Carnagie Hall?
Practice, practice, practice.
Seriously. I'm an amature musician, I've played piano and percussion (all percussion, mallets, tympani, drumset, all of it) for the better part of 14 years, and I've found that just playing as much as possible is the best way to improve yourself. You know if you're playing well or not, you don't need a computer to tell you that. Quantity gets quality, and there's no shortcut to just sitting down and practicing for hours and hours.
www.earmaster.com is a great resource for ear training. I've been using it intermittently for a few months, and my sense of pitch has greatly improved. I'd recommend it for anyone just starting to learn an instrument.
It is also fun to take a break and record some origonal song ideas.
What original song ideas? Didn't you know that the industry already owns every possible melody?
All I would use software for is tuning (not even a proper tuner, just a MIDI sequencer and a file that plays an A, and only because I don't have a metronome), Recording (rarely) and some music typesetting or printing. As for recommendations for software I would look into Lilypond (http://lilypond.org/web/) for typesetting, and Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) for recording and tuning (if you don't have a metronome). And as a previous poster said, you will not be using this stuff during a "normal" practice session. You would print music off of Lilypond, and once you have tuned up, you will have no need of audacity unless you are recording which will not often be the case.
For actually practicing, I suggest getting Audacity. Though while it is a piece of shite for serious recording purposes, if you open up an MP3 with a difficult guitar passage, you can slow it down, figure it out, then practice along with the music making it faster and faster until you get up to full speed. SlowCD works good for this too.
When you write songs, it helps a lot to have a multitrack recorder with you. For the love of god, do not use Audacity for this purpose. Use Ardour, which is about a million light years ahead of Audacity in terms of stability and usability. I can't believe this program isn't more well known. Ardour Ardour Ardour. Use this as a scratchpad to test out ideas, melodies, harmonies, and then you can even use it to make your finished product.
The only other software that might be useful is tuning software, and I'm not aware of any available for Linux.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
http://www1.ocn.ne.jp/~tuner/tuner_e.html
TUNER_E
free universal tuning software/metronome.
There are a lot of great programs to aid you in your musical quest. Programs such as Practica Musica for ear training. There are a number of other shareware and freeware programs to help you.
For Piano, there are a lot of great programs. And they are ruthless. They hook up to your MIDI keyboard, and will evaluate every little detail of your performance.
For other instruments, it's really valuable to actually get together with a teacher. They can point you in the right direction. It's well worth the time and money. You can learn theory, and get your ear to hear things with software. But, to learn how to move the bow, or blow into an instrument, you really ought to get some REAL lessons. You can hear, and see how it is done, and ask questions, and if you are doing it wrong, the teacher will tell you.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Oh, I forget to say something about Smartmusic. They are really trying to get into the computer learning with instruments. The latest version has Wynton promoing the "Jazz" selections. Whatever.
There are lots of problems with Smartmusic. First, the interface. It's terrible. It is my biggest complaint with the program. Second, the "Jazz" section does not let you print out anything. Third, when you play with it, say if you are a drummer, it lags behind on the screen. On my Mac Mini it couldn't refresh at the start of a bar the same time the music was. Fourth, the sounds. Cheezy. Big time. Fifth, it's a subscription service.
Other gripes about "Smartmusic" is the "follow" feature. So, you are supposed to hook up a mic to the program, and it will "follow" you. Or it can follow you (you can override it). It never works right, and doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of having backgrounds? If I want to do a Bach Sonata, I don't want the Harpischord to slow down with me.
On the plus side, they have a TON of songs on it.
But seriously, on the Jazz thing, if say you were a drummer, are you really going to have your computer right next to your drum set? And be able to see the screen? And you can't print out anything (except for a few classical free pieces). Stupid. Who really practices looking at their monitor?
MakeMusic, Coda, or whatever you guys are calling yourselves this month, get the interface and the sounds fixed. And let us PRINT something.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Just record yourself playing. You don't even have to play it back half the time.
You need to make sure you are really listening to each note you play.
Recording will really help your intonation as you will hear every mistake including ones you never realised you made. You'll then be able to listen for and fix them next time you play.
I've always used audio and midi sequencers, and more recently something called Broomstick Bass (http://www.bornemark.se/bb/) which takes the hassle away from making different styles of bass track.
Anyway the general idea is that if you're playing in a band, you lay down a track in Ableton (or another midi sequencer) which matches what the band is playing, and practice along to that.
The difference between 8 hours of actually practicing the whole song, and practicing your little part is astonishing. It helps you keep time (e.g. you could practice at several different speeds) and is more exciting than a metronome.
The best thing about this (especially if you're using Ableton Live) is it's trivial to record yourself and lay the audio of you playing over the track. Using this method it's possible for a band to record a master without ever meeting each other.. crazy stuff..
Enough of me sucking upto how great Ableton Live is.. Ta.
The poster wrote, "newly-acquired violin". New in what sense? Completely new? Or just a replacement or something?
I ask because I have a (possibly) related question: at what age is it too late to try to learn a musical instrument? About 20 years ago my parents forced me through a few years of piano lessons. To this day the best piano performance I've seen involved a baby grand piano, a trebuchet, and a couple hundred pounds of pyrotechnics.
That said, now at age 30, I really wish I'd had some kind of real exposure to the violin when I was younger. But now I am old and slow. And when I flip through the phone book looking for music lessons, it's all geared towards young kids. So as an old phogey, I presume it's just too late for me, right? I mean, where the heck does a non-kid start, if anywhere?
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
The only software I use is TuneLab Pro and TuneLab Pocket (for Pocket PC) available at http://www.tunelab-world.com/. Trial versions are available, and may work for you. I have heard that some professional piano tuners use this on a laptop. The program lets you calibrate to the tones produced by NIST on WWV or WWVH and their telephone line (303) 499-7111. See http://tf.nist.gov/stations/iform.html for more info.
On a piano or fretted string instrument notes like C sharp and D flat are the same frequency. On a violin you may well find that a C sharp is a few cycles per second higher than a D flat. Unless you're trying to play along with a piano or a fretted instrument, in which case you may need to "cheat" on your fingering.
Even if you start with the standard of A=440 cycles per second (Hertz) or halves or doubles thereof, the frequencies of the other 11 notes may vary depending upon in which key you are playing. You should take care to understand whether the software is saying what you think it is regarding the pitch (frequency) of particular notes.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
- Sound editing: Started w/ CoolEdit Pro, moved to SonicFoundry SoundForge, now I use Audacity/Win32.
- MIDI/composing: Cakewalk! It came w/ my sound card.
- Track editing: SonicFoundry Acid.
For Linux:- Sound editing: Audacity!
- MIDI/composing: Rosegarden
- Track editing: (haven't tried/looked into it)
[sort of offtopic]If you play the electric guitar, you should try to find a recording of Paganini's 5th Caprice. It's kind of an etude for violin; I used Audacity to slow it down (it's all 16th notes at upwards of 200bpm or more) and figure it out on guitar. Jason Becker has a great 1987 video out there of himself playing it when he was about 17. After two years, I'm still not even at two thirds of the original speed (little more than half maybe), but I haven't found anything more fun to play if you like fast guitar solos (and just play for kicks). I've been playing electric guitar for about 11 years now, and this is far and beyond the most challenging piece ever.
Incidentally, using Audacity (or similar) to slow down your favorite guitar solo and then using Cakewalk (or Rosegarden) to tab it out is a great way to learn how to play it. Especially since almost 100% of the tabs I see on the Internet are wrong (true for everything, not just the 5th Caprice). Not to brag or anything, but this is also how I learned the Comfortably Numb solo, Hotel California solo, Stairway to Heaven solo, Hendrix/Little Wing (whole song), Paradise City solo, Top Gun Anthem solo, and a bunch of others (this is not bragging because I never thought I was good enough to learn any of these, especially after looking at tabs on the web
On (another) side note - if you are in the market for a guitar effects board, I reccomend getting one with a digital output. If you have a SoundBlaster with a LiveDrive (a front panel that gives you more audio connectors such as optical in, RCA in, headphones w/ volume and 1/4 din connector, etc.) or a similar card with S/PDIF input you can hook it right up, and everything after the effects board stays digital. This gives you stereo choruses, reverbs, amp/cabinet models, phases, etc. w/out having to buy two guitar amps (again if you just play for fun). I actually don't own a guitar amp anymore; I just have a halfway decent used stereo on both my front and rear PC channels, and it sounds better than any amp I've ever heard (but will NOT match the volume of a drumset, and is not suitable for jamming w/ others or live stuff - once again, I just play for me)
[/sort of offtopic]
Using software and this hardware setup, I have made my practices at least 100% more effective, and at least 1000% more fun. I highly reccomend it over keeping the two in seperate worlds.
Now, normally as a self-respecting computer geek, I would advocate putting a computer into any situation you could possibly jam it into. However, in this case, avoid it. You are playing a violin; this is a classical, traditional instrument, best learned from experienced, qualified and capable tutors. You are not playing with some kind of synthesiser, or an electric guitar. Introducing computers into the equation is only going to complicate things and distract you from the long hard work of becoming technically proficient on your instrument. You should develop tuning for yourself, not rely on a computer to tell you whether you are sharp or flat. Ear training is of massive importance on a real instrument like a violin; and looking on a computer screen to tell you the answer instead of learning to work out yourself how many cents you are off-pitch is not going to help you. Buy a pitch pipe; or if you have a piano, use that to play a pitch, then match it exactly on your own instrument. Take lessons if you can afford them. Nobody is more technically messed up and deficient than the self-taught string player. Hell even Charlie Parker and Miles got lessons when they had the money.
Software and music (by music I mean classical/jazz/traditional music; that which has history and infrastructure in the form of universities etc) do not mix IMHO. I am a BMus Composition major (along with my compsci major; so don't accuse me of not liking computers ^_~) and a lot of first year students come along and want to use Finale or Sibelius to compose. Finale/Sibelius are NOT composition tools; they are (very poor, btw: use Lilypond, it's open source and better output than anything else I've seen) music notation tools, so you don't have to give the performers your own messy inaccurate handwritten notation. The first thing first years get told is that to compose, use a pen and paper. Don't rely on MIDI playback to tell you what you just wrote; it won't tell you shit. If you want to be a composition major you should be good enough to tell what something written on a piece of paper sounds like for yourself, without hearing it. Much of the same goes for learning an instrument. Use of a computer will only distract you from the task at hand. The only use that I would recommend of computers is using for (as I mentioned before) notation. But this has little to do with music, and much more to do with publishing.
In short, put down your laptop and look up a professional strings tutor, one with a BMus in performance if you can.
The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers
You need a teacher to learn the violin. I know this isn't a direct answer to the question about software, but since nobody else has mentioned it, I hope you know that you need a teacher to learn the violin. before i can talk about software, this must be said.
anyway, i don't know about specific software packages, but i use a midi sequencer to make some things that i practice along with... simple stuff like a 3-octave scale that i play along with in every key, or scales in broken 3rds. i change the tempo depending on what i want to focus on.
there is only the door, the door, the door.
Line 6's Guitarport made me pick up the e-guitar again after many years of not playing. (It unfortunately also made me boot into Windows again).
The problem with the e-guitar is that to get the sound you want for many rock styles, you need to crank up your amp. Effect boxes help, and may be fine for practice, but you never get that sound of a Marshall at 10.
Guitarport is a cheap little box with a DSP that is plugged into the USB port. The software lets you choose from a wide variety of preset digital models of famous amps and effects (and you can save your own edits), and you can listen to it over headphones or your stereo at reasonable volume, but still sound "real".
The software is very easy to use, and you can purchase Rifftracker separately, which gives you drum tracks (sampled, and with "human-like" variations, not robotic drum machine tracks) to play along to, lets you record and arrange etc. It is not really useful for serious recording, but is very easy to use and lends itself very well to practicing guitar (instead of fiddling with the PC).
Line 6 also has a professional line of digital effects, amps, and guitars, but they are more expensive, and are not that great IMO for practicing/playing just for fun.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Throw away your tuning software and learn to use a tuning fork. Once you get good at that THEN you can use an electronic tuner. Electronic tuners should be used for convenience (e.g trying to tune an instument in a noisy environment), not because you can't tune your instrument without them.
As for learning to play an instrument like the violin, forget software. Find a violin teacher and get some lessons. It will be a much better use of your money because:
a) they know what they are doing and will adjust their teaching method to suit your ability;
b) they will correct your mistakes - if you get into bad habits learning to play by yourself with the aid of software, you'll never fix them;
c) you will get the chance to play with your teacher - the best part of being a musician is playing with other people. And maybe your teacher will offer to get you involved in other musical groups like orchestras.
There are many other good reasons for having a teacher - there is only one good reason for using software (if there is no teacher locally available to you).
I speak from experience - I studied the viola for 15 years (insert viola jokes) and I know that there isn't a piece of software in the world that would have been better than the various teachers I had.
I give individual clarinet lessons to a large number of students and i am continually looking for new material and methods in order to give them the best and most interesting experiences.
If you go into a music store, you'll notice that there are a great deal of 'playalong' cds included with books at the moment - although playing with a cd isn't what i would call learning to be a musician.
Why?
I come across a lot of students who can't *read* music. When it comes down to it, learning to read music notation correctly can give you the most enjoyment in the long term. Sure, it might be hard work - but if you ever want to play in an ensemble it will be very useful. It also opens up a whole new world of music available to play.
That said, technology certainly has its place and the cd's are really very useful in the situation where i can teach the student *how* to use them for maximum benefit. If you haven't got a teacher - get one! But then i would say that wouldn't I?
As some other posters have mentioned, the ability to record is brilliant. I take my notebook to all lessons and where appropriate i'll record my students playing and let them critique their own performance. Being a musician is as much about listening as playing. This also means I can collate their best performances over a longer period and burn a cd for them to take away.
I'm also working with a company in Australia who are developing instrumental teaching software and it is taking some old ideas to new levels. The cd playalong concept is at work here, although now we are in front of an everyday pc seeing music notation, hearing a band, orchestra or piano accompanist and actually playing inside the ensemble. On top of that, the software is calibrated to listen to your playing and let you know how well every note is played. Are you in time? Is your intonation good? Feedback that is genuinely useful to a musician of any level.
Just in case you didn't see it the first time - I work for this company, so make what you will of it. Or you could just try it out for yourself: http://inthechair.com
Oh, and to the poster that was advocating the quantity for quality technique. I'm wary of playing for long periods of time purely for the sake of doing lots of practice. If you are going to be the best you need to learn how to do the most practice in the leanest time. Playing for hours on end is sometimes fun, usually painful and often plain stupid.
It's called gtkguitune, I play bass and acoustic guitar, and I can tune way more accurately with my computer and guitune than with any of my tuners.
As a professional multi-instrumentalist with 17 years experience and having completed a masters in a topic relating to computer music (intelligent music performance systems), here are a few basic things I've found helpful on the computer side:
Use the computer as a tool to improve your playing but make sure you have good technique or you'll spend a lot of time relearning bad habits, private lessons from good teachers are essential when you begin.
Music, Games, Media Art and Programming
There are a lot of good comments here and a lot of good points of view, it is very good to learn to do things without the computer, but on the other hand don't feel bad using tools to help either.
:) I use garageband for this mainly where i'll just pick a drum pattern, or percussion pattern and use that to play/practice too.
One of the best uses I have found is for playing to drums instead of just a click or metronome. It may be personal preference, but I jus fint it much more comfortable for me Live drums are even better, but its not that easy to always have a wiling drummer around to for youto practice too
Ducky
I bought it because it's all that was available where I was shopping, and this thing is worthless. It basically plays a MIDI file that YOU HAVE TO PROVIDE, and determines how accurately you can play it. That's it.
I use APTuner 3, and that includes tuning Pianos. For guitars specifically, I usually use Guitar Pro's built-in midi playback where you set note and octave, and it plays the tone back pure so you can tune up/down directly to it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I've been a amateur drummer for 25 years, and have tried a few software packages, but here are the ones I actually find useful.
Under Windows, for overdubbing wav and midi I mostly use Cakewalk (warning: link contains annoying self-playing music). I use the cheaper Home Studio. They have a real product differentiation problem as Sonar is the expensive product, and then they market or bundle cheaper versions that may cover your needs just fine (its hard to tell from the product descriptions which features are grayed out). I use Cakewalk because the Windows drivers can be used in a very low-latency mode, and I always have a Windows laptop kicking around. I have not liked the scoring side of Cakewalk.
Also under Windows, I have used Sibelius (version 3 and 4). It is a phenominal scoring program that produces great looking sheet music. This is the only thing I do with a PC that I think is really better than without the PC. If you score with a program that plays back what you've written via midi, you can correct many mistakes on the fly. Sibelius is unfortuately still phenominally expensive for my uses, and I've never purchased it (nor has anyone I know).
Under linux, the equivalent of Cakewalk is Rosegarden. It is very impressive at the moment. Building it is a royal pain for me. It doesn't use your standard autotools driven make, it uses Scons (not in my distribution). Scons requires a Python module that's not available in the stable version of Python. Hey, people writing free software can use whatever they want, its just a shame some people won't try their product because of the barrier to entry. I've had latency issues with Rosegarden + JACK which I think can be sorted out but I have to decide if I want to run the tools as root or pull in the whole SELinux overhead + realtime module (no different than Cakewalk in Windows -- it does not work well as non-admin). Rosegarden's scoring is coming along but not quite there for me.
For scoring under Linux, I'm using Lilypond. Lilypond is phenominal, but many won't like it because its markup-based (like writing Latex). You have to go through the compile cycle to view what you've written, and dump midi to hear it. Fortunately for me, rythym section music is very repetitive. The quality of printed music it can produce is unmatched. I'm sure more programs will start using Lilypond as a processing back-end.
I use digital guitar tuner, for doing nasty tunings quickly and easily, and Jesusonic. Jesusonic doesn't exactly help with learning to play, but it can add a bit of motivation when you can get your crappy guitar sounding really good for free.
My favorite metronome software happens to be theone that I wrote -- Weird Metronome. It's probably the most versatile software metronome that's available, at least among the free and open source options. It's actually more versatile than even more commercial programs. It lets you create a measure of practically any length, use a tempo anywhere from 4bpm to 1000bmp, and define your own beat emphasis using nine different percussion instruments that you can choose from the MIDI standard library of about 50 instruments. I wrote it because there wasn't any software available that could handle the weird rhythms in Balkan music (for instance I play one song in 22/16 with note groupings of 2223222322).
And the kicker? It's also one of the smallest pieces of sofware available for this kind of thing, with the zip file coming in at just 24KB. Anyone who plays music near their Windows computer should check it out.
Apart from that, I'd recommend the various tempo/pitch adjuster plugins available for Winamp. I use them all the time when transcribing or learning a song for which I don't have the sheet music.
-David
Check out n-Track Studio for recording (Windows only, but a great shareware program with a great maintainer) and Noteworthy Composer for composition.
n-Track is a great alternative to the home recording software big boys (Cubase, Sonar, etc.)--much cheaper than the full versions and much more powerful than the "lite" versions. You'll be doing some pretty fancy stuff before you run into limitations with n-Track.
I haven't really kept up with the world of composition software, but back when I was interested in it, Noteworthy Composer was the only program that had sensible keyboard-based input. To do anything with Finale and other programs I'd tried, I had to click to change the note duration, click to add ornamentation, click on the staff to add a note, and so on. Noteworthy Composer gives you a cursor on the staff and there are easy keyboard shortcuts for the most common actions. Pressing Enter inserts a note at the cursor, holding down Ctrl adds the note to the current chord, +/- change note duration, arrow keys do the obvious thing, and you can use alt with the arrow keys to move up/down octaves on the staff or across measures. I tried several other programs, but this interface just felt way more natural and efficient than anything else...
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Like I say in the title, I've played for 13 years. The best tools to learn are 1: your ear, you've got to be able to tell if you're on or off tune. Not everyone can do it. It's discriminatory, but not everyone has an ear sensitive enough. And I never listen to music from a portable player to keep mine intact.
2: a metronome. It's cheap (somewhere around $5 or $10) and lets you adjust the tempo as you need it.
3: time. You've gotta practice over and over and over and over again. There's no two ways around it. It gets repetitive, and neighbours might start throwing things at you, but that's the only way you'll get better.
4: a teacher is almost quintessential. A book cannot look at your stance and tell you if it's right or not. It can't tell you if you're doing all the variations properly either. Or teach you vibratos, or tremolos, or pizzicato techniques.
My advice: don't try to use a computer for learning music. The web is a great tool to find scores, but not to learn music. Music is done by live things, interaction between people, be it that of a teacher and his student. Don't try and denature music, it's really not worth it.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
I'd definitely encourage getting comfortable with at least basic music theory and sight-reading as part of learning any instrument. Not because you'll need it right at the beginning... but it's the sort of thing that's simple to learn gradually, but pretty painful when you hit the wall later and want to absorb it all at once.
Musition and Aurelia are okay, though aging a bit and not cheap. There are similar resources available online for free.
And now, a bit of shameless self-promotion:
I run a website with free music theory exercises and explorations of music theory concepts. Requires Java 1.1 or above.
Feel free to send me feedback through the site or here.
Musictheory.net is another site I recommend fairly often, with Flash-based music theory lessons and some exercises. EMusicTheory (my site) focusses on drills, not tutorials, so when students are having trouble understanding the concepts in the first place I tend to send them here.
If you don't have a teacher, get one. Take a portable cassette recorder with you to your lessons, and record them for playback during the week. Develop good practice habits: 30 minutes/day consistently is better than 8 hours on Saturdays.
For computer stuff, the only thing I use is a collection of music in PDF files; for about $80, I was able to replace a $10,000 collection of sheet music and etude books. Otherwise, I haven't bothered with computer stuff, but that may be because I was a professional violinist long before there were any personal computers.
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I'm just reading the original question again.
I'd never recommend the software, videos, books, etc. that purport to let you "teach yourself" whatever instrument. They simply can't compete with a decent human teacher, who can notice that your arm is way too stiff, that your thumb in your bow grip is wrong, etc. etc. when you first do it -- not after you've done it that way for months so that it's ingrained.
There's also software for helping you out with your pitch while playing, etc.. I wouldn't bother (you can talk to your teacher about this as well). Playing along with a recording, and just playing for your teacher will give you better feedback.
Anything else? Oh yeah -- don't get sucked in by the bevy of sites out there offering to teach you perfect pitch (usually for a surprisingly high price), a skill that will instantly turn you into a master musician. Perfect pitch isn't much use except as a party trick (because how hard is it to bring along a tuning fork or pitch pipe?), or if you're singing atonal music (not likely)... and it can actively screw you up in some cases. Focus on good relative pitch (intervals, etc.) instead.
Anyone know of software that plays a pitch and shows where it is on a staff (or sliding scale), then you try to match that pitch and it shows where you are in relation to the source? I saw some software like that at a music teaching school about a year ago. I'd love to get my hands on something like that so I could hone my vocal pitch better.
The computer adds an unnecessary layer of concentration to a practice session.
It may even distract from the lesson at hand.
I use the computer for students to print lessons and to multitrack songs for graduation from a bloc of lessons.Each student ends his semester by recording a song.
I recommend that unless you are a MIDIot,keep off the computer during practice.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
To my humble ears the tones produced by the Guitar Port sound very good and are quite varied. The basic sound of the guitar will always be present, it won't magically make your guitar sound like Vai's or Van Halen's. Even so, I was very surprised that my les paul copy sounded so very good through the guitarport.
I only play at home, just for fun but after starting recording my own playing, I really noticed my playing getting a lot tidier and consistent. That is a plus that I wasn't expecting. Ironically, the unique selling point for me was the ability to play music half-speed without changing pitch. I never use this feature.
2B || !2B
If your issues are less related to the specific instrument and more to sight-reading and general theory, I'd recommend notation software. Coda's Finale Notepad is a free, someone limited version of the Finale notation package. I prefer Noteworthy Composer which is very accessible for people less versed in theory, while Brahms is a good Linux package. I've found that writing music is one of the best ways to learn how it works, and being able to play it back quickly, either through ALSA, a MIDI keyboard or Windows software synth allows you to experiment easily with notation and theory.
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
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I wrote this back in 1997:
http://www.unpronounceable.com/interchart/
It's in Java and runs in your browser.
- Dave
1. Take a tuning fork, pitch pipe, or metronome with an A440 setting. Remember that note in your mind. If you are playing in a group with another instrument, tune to the same source. If that other instrument is something that cannot be easily tuned (piano, organ, etc.), tune to that instrument rather than another source.
2. Tune your A string to that note.
3. Bow across the A and D strings. Tune the D string until it is a perfect 4th.
4. Do the same across the D and G string, then the A and E string.
No software required. It shouldn't take you more than a minute or so, unless your pegs are being stubborn.
That is the way my dad has been tuning his violin for as long as I can remember; he has been playing for something like 45 years. It is also the way I tuned my string bass in high school, except that is tuned by 5ths. I would imagine something like a guitar would use a similar method.
/usr/games/fortune
Give "In The Chair" http://www.inthechair.com/ a go - the interface is much nicer than smartmusic, and it uses real recordings (sound+video) rather than MIDI. It is still quite an early stage product, so the quantity of available music is still small, but it's growing pretty fast. And the timing is mostly pretty good (ok, I admit it, I did the timing so I'm completely biased)
Printing sheet music is always going to be an issue with these programs because of the music publishers - anything copyrighted can only be printed if you pay them the price for a printed copy.
The whole issue of how these kinds of computer programs are used in learning music is still in its infancy - there are the "ear trainers" and the "sight reading trainers" and even the "teach you to play" packages, but possibly one of the best things that software can offer is simply help with practice. As a couple of other posters have noted, the main thing you need to do is to practice. For a lot of people, having something like In the Chair that gives you some interactive feedback (and video accompaniment) while you're practising is going to help make that practice more interesting. And the feedback can help also because it gives you a pretty unbiased response about how you're performing (as long as you remember that the computer doesn't have very good ears so isn't going to be perfect in its assessments)
Because there are different schools of thought in music. Some people tend to lean more towards the improvisational/spontaneous aspect of music, others lean towards composition, which is slower, more methodical. Computers are great tools for composition for the same reason a word processor is great for writing: Its faster, and easier to edit than composing by pen/paper, enabling the creation of elaborate, detailed works.
Improvised music on the other hand is more like having a conversation, especially in jazz which often consists of players calling and responding one by one in solos.
As a musician who writes (and listens) to electronic music, I've always felt that there is great potential for "soul" in computer music, since you are theoretically hearing almost _exactly_ what the composer intended. Obviously different people have different ideas of what constitutes "soul" or "spirituality" in music. (Off topic, LOTR contains a LOT of electronic music mixed in with the orchestration, not surprising considering the composer's past works like Videodrome.)
the dialtone on your phone is 220hz, which is A
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Seriously, unless you have a very small computer, you're not going to sit it on your stand. If it can't sit on your stand, it's pretty much useless. Get a small chromatic tuner and a metronome. Korg makes a decent all-in-one box..
All of the posts pushing you toward a tuning fork are fine as far as they go, but the visual feedback you receive while working on the bridge end of the fingerboard is valuable.
Also, I play in a couple of ensembles, one of which tunes to A=442 instead of A=440, so when working those parts, it's especially valuable.
Oh, and the metronome is way more important than the tuner. It's the most useful tool you can buy. Ignore those 'just listen' posts -- most drummers can't play in rhythm. It's hard. You need a metronome.
(playing 23 years)
Also, I have learned a lot by playing with great musicians, especially about improv. That's something you just have to feel.
All that said, I currently use Cubase SE.
Rock on,
david
BitWorks Music - odd tunes for odd times
BitWorksMusic.com -- odd tunes for odd times
Spoken like a true Musician. However, just as you are a true Musician, there are people who are "true producers", "true arrangers", "true composers" etc. whose talents only display themselves not when playing your heart out, but during careful deliberation and consideration.
For me, cubase provides such an environment :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I'm a professional jazz piano player, teacher, and composer. A MIDI sequencer like Garageband, Cubase, or Logic really comes in handy once you learn to use it (and you no longer have to spend your practice time figuring it out). In the study of Afro-Cuban music it is necessary not only to learn syncopated rhythmic parts, but to fit them together with other equally syncopated parts in an ensemble setting. Having the sequencer play one of those parts while I practice is incredibly helpful. My laptop has almost replaced my metronome. Similarly, before I bring a difficult new tune to my quartet for rehearsal, I often put a skeletal version of the bass and drums into Logic so I can practice it beforehand and work out any kinks. And if I've got players on the gig who don't read so well, I'll send them a midi file ahead of time. I've also got about 1G of fakebooks in PDF on my laptop, which sits nicely on my baby grand.
Amazing Slow Downer, for Windows and Mac OSX.
:)
Windows: http://www.ronimusic.com/amsldowin.htm
Mac OSX: http://www.ronimusic.com/amsldox.htm
Dorky name, but GREAT software! I'd call it "indespensible" when it comes to learning, practicing and transcribing music.
I transcribe complex guitar music, occasionally from live concert recordings. Being able to slow down a passage to tiny fraction of orignial speed (20%!) while preserving pitch is essential to hearing the phrase and understanding the component notes. ASD also lets me play along at low tempo, then gradually increase the speed as I learn the parts and confirms I have the correct phrasing and voicing. Plus ASD can play a passage in an endless loop, then save those loops with a meaningful label ("fast run before bridge", "minor transition", "harmonic triplets", "pentatonic run", etc.) Great for making the part "stick" in your brain.
Another useful feature: Musicians at "live" concerts may be tuned slightly off pitch, I can adjust the pitch up to a440 or adjust the pitch up/down to match my instrument if I'm feeling lazy and don't want to retune.
I play the violin. I used to use a metronon/tuner to tune the violin, but now I use the accompanist's piano. I also use a tape recorder. And a teacher is a must for beginners.