Post by howard on Dec 21, 2016 14:21:36 GMT
Hi Folks - In college, I was a decent folk/rock guitar player and could play and sing well enough to "get the girls". The height of home music technology then, was sound-on-sound multi-track recording, which never worked out like I hoped, but was fun to play with. A sad, but exciting recent event was the passing of a fellow college musician who I had been out of contact with for decades. It turned out that I had notes on a few songs he had written that his children had not heard of, so I decided to get the songs out of my head and onto paper/audio file. This is a lot harder than I anticipated since I have no formal music knowledge. It still feels like I am trying to write limericks in high-school Spanish, but I am having a lot of fun learning, and the tools are amazing.
Being a retired software engineer, my approach is heavily computer based (Windows). One necessary direction is "notation" - normal musicians use staffs and clefs (and semi-demi-quavers), but ABC notation is more intuitive to me, and seems to have sufficient power to handle tunes, lyrics and chords, and the ability to convert into other things. Sound output starts with Windows built-in midi capabilities and I was able to find a wrapper for my preferred computer language - a 20 year old version of Pascal (Delphi). I pretty much derived the basic midi tutorial information by trial and error, but I wish I had found this forum first - would have saved a lot of pain. At present, all I am using are channels, voices and noteon/noteoff, but this is a very powerful group of capabilities, and will take me a long way.
I can see that the virtual instrument/soundfont direction has promise for improved sound quality, but I have not gotten beyond the built-in capabilities of Windows - even that level can provide amazing results.
One of my goals is to make my computer a better guitarist than I ever was, and I am not far from that after only a few months of work. I have no plans for turning anything into a "real" software product - writing software is just how I can see that I have learned something.
Thanks for the information jump-start. -- Howard
Being a retired software engineer, my approach is heavily computer based (Windows). One necessary direction is "notation" - normal musicians use staffs and clefs (and semi-demi-quavers), but ABC notation is more intuitive to me, and seems to have sufficient power to handle tunes, lyrics and chords, and the ability to convert into other things. Sound output starts with Windows built-in midi capabilities and I was able to find a wrapper for my preferred computer language - a 20 year old version of Pascal (Delphi). I pretty much derived the basic midi tutorial information by trial and error, but I wish I had found this forum first - would have saved a lot of pain. At present, all I am using are channels, voices and noteon/noteoff, but this is a very powerful group of capabilities, and will take me a long way.
I can see that the virtual instrument/soundfont direction has promise for improved sound quality, but I have not gotten beyond the built-in capabilities of Windows - even that level can provide amazing results.
One of my goals is to make my computer a better guitarist than I ever was, and I am not far from that after only a few months of work. I have no plans for turning anything into a "real" software product - writing software is just how I can see that I have learned something.
Thanks for the information jump-start. -- Howard
