I know we have a lot of great musicians here at Allegro.cc, and I'd like to know what you guys do when you write/compose a song. I don't know much about music, and I can't play any instrument, but I'd like to try to make some music for my project. So I'd like to know what kind of programs you use. Like I said, I can't play any instrument, so I'd be doing the whole process on my computer. So I'm looking for any free programs that I can use to make a song from scratch. What do you use?

I play the piano and compose music, so I may be able to advise.

The first step is to be able to tell what makes good music and what makes bad music. Supposedly we can all do that, although the UK Pop Charts clearly suggest otherwise.

The second step is to be able to understand what makes good music. It comes naturally to me now, but I have one or two recordings of myself playing the piano at the age of 7, and they sound horrible! I knew something, but not enough. I must have gained my understanding of music gradually over time, but I was too young to really be aware of the process.

There is definitely some benefit to classical music training. I had piano lessons, and I was taught music theory along the way. Although I don't think there is a formula to writing music and you just have to get to the point where you can visualise what you're doing, music theory is thought-provoking and would probably help you figure out what's going on much more quickly.

If you do decide to learn an instrument, the piano is a good choice because you can experiment with chords very easily. For me there is no substitute for a real piano, but for your purposes a cheap electronic keyboard would probably be fine. I think my parents were paying £20 an hour for my piano lessons, but that's bound to vary depending on who's teaching you.

For the time being, a free program you could experiment with is ModPlug Tracker. It is user-friendly in some ways, but the underlying concept is rather hacky (not surprising given it has its roots in the days of the Amiga). I find it quite tedious. Another free program, but one only available for Linux, is Rosegarden. That one edits MIDI, offers you a 'piano roll view', where x is time, y is pitch and notes are represented as horizontal bars, and also offers a 'notation view' which uses traditional musical notation. Again, this is where classical training comes in handy, and bear in mind that musical notation has been developing for centuries and is a very good system. I prefer it to piano roll by far. There are many Windows programs similar to Rosegarden, but no free ones that I know of.

If you do read musical notation (or can learn) but don't have any kind of MIDI input device, then NoteWorthy Composer (not free but quite cheap) isn't bad. It can be a bit limiting when you start getting fussy about things like note volumes, but I have managed to write complete, rounded pieces of music with it, which I can then export as MIDI. It works exclusively with a notation view and has a very good (PC-)keyboard input system.

At the very least, get some 'keyboard experience' by playing with Allegro's 'miditest' program in the tests/ directory I seem to recall it has a piano keyboard at the bottom and you can click notes to make them play. Once you're familiar with the layout of that keyboard, you'll find that ModPlug Tracker constructs a similar layout on the PC keyboard which you can use to input notes. (It may not do that by default: set the keyboard layout to Impulse Tracker's and it should.)

Let me know how you get on.

Yeah, Anvil Studio is awesome and should provide all you need in terms of creating MIDIs.

I would love to go beyond MIDIs though. I've been contemplating buying TASCAM GigaStudio for a long time now. The trouble is that it's very expensive. Anyone know if it's worthwhile?

It would be great to be able to create music of the quality of the stuff on OC Remix. Anyone know of any forums for getting started with mixing your own stuff?

There are some good tutorials on gamedev.net, especially for beginners!

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1010.asp
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1061.asp
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1178.asp
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1268.asp

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=51

I haven't the slightest idea of how to make music if one doesn't play any instrument. Or I do have, but it is hard to explain in terms that don't relate to the process of playing an instrument. When I did the song to my [advertise]Blub & Blob game, which is on the Depot now[/advertise] I had this idea of a Calypso tune. My hands started to play a bongo or conga rhythm. When I started to think about harmony, my hands were like hitting the chords F - Bb - C7 - F on a keyboard. Some well known Calypso songs crossed my mind (Jamaica Farewell, Island in the Sun, If You Need a Calypso, Glorious Kingdom...) and because I only wanted to make some game music, I never bothered to avoid stealing from any of these. Then I thought I should add lyrics to the music, mainly because the music was Caribbean and the theme of the game was Space. The lyrics kind of explain it all. I didn't make the chorus part of the song until I had the idea of the Space Bar, where "all the fancy people meet".

I made the midi on my mac using a keyboard and Micrologic Fun, a great free midi sequencer program. At this point I thought of the arrangement. A standard drumset for the rhythm section, steel drums playing the harmonies, a trombone playing the lazy melody and a simple electric bass playing the bass line. Two trumpets join in the chorus. I would have played with the pitch wheel to slide the trombone, but I thought it might only cause midi clogging. As I said it is difficult to explain what the different instruments should play. A bass simply should play like basses are supposed to play. I've never played steel drums, but I think they play something like what I played on the steel drum track. Finally I made some adjustments on Anvil Studio on my Win machine.

Well, the result was not very typical game music. But I have on my Mac some Ambrosia or Sierra games with this kind of music. Bubble Trouble and Monkey Shines have something like this.

Since I had lyrics for the song, too, I wanted to record them. This I did with Audacity. A midi player played the midis into one track. I copied the track and transposed the track a major sixth down. Then, while playing the transposed track, I sang the main lyrics on a new track. Then I deleted the transposed track, transposed the lyrics track a major sixth up and mixed it with the original instrument track. Then I recorded two chorus lyric tracks, which I transposed an octave up. So the final mix has this bartender that sings the main lyrics with a slightly squirreled voice. And Blub and Blob that join in the chorus with their fully squirreled voices.

First of all: Music is an art form, and as such, it comes with centuries of craftsmanship, a lot of which you will eventually have to learn (although you might be lucky and do a lot of things right by intuition). I'd say knowing an instrument is not necessary, but it definitely helps you know what you're doing.
Then, software. If you are willing to spend some money, and aren't afraid to learn a bit of music, then I'd recommend one of the classic studio programs: Logic (abandoned for PC, but the latest PC version, 5.0 IIRC, should do for your purposes), Cubase (comes in several packages from cheap to expensive) or Cakewalk. These are the pro midi/audio packages, and they have the advantage of being efficient, high-quality, flexible, and very complete. All of these programs support midi and audio combined in one project, plug-in effects, audio editing, extensive midi support, and a lot more. Each one of these programs, combined with good plug-ins, is all you will ever need. On the downside, they are expensive, and you need to work a lot to get a grasp on how to use them well - simply because they're so powerful.
Magix Music Maker is a similar program, with reduced features and a dummy-friendly UI. It requires less knowledge of music theory and sound engineering, but that comes at the cost of reduced power.
Then there are free programs for more specialized tasks. Trackers compose music from existing samples only; they are sort of a sampler and a sequencer in one package. There are plenty of free MIDI sequencers around; downside here is that most of them are midi only, so you can't use them to record vocals, for example. For audio, Audacity seems to be a good package. It's basically a multitrack audio recorder, under gpl. Finally, you need to pack your song into the desired format. If you want MIDI or tracker music, you don't have to do anything, of course. Otherwise, you need to mix down your project into a single wave audio file (.wav or .aif, for example). How you do this depends on the software config. Logic, cakewalk and cubase can mix softsynths directly to audio tracks; a midi program must be combined with an audio recording program in order to produce audio data; and in all cases, you have to mix the multitrack audio into a single stereo track.
Then you transform that into mp3 or ogg or whatever you want to use, but I guess the choice of software for this is rather obvious.

The elite Skale Tracker.

Its like the blender of the music world. (the opensource holy grail of creative goodness) The only way to become pro in it is to use it. Your going to need some samples to actually make songs though. (there are huge collections of good samples out there for free, I cant remember any links off the top of my head though)

But yeah, just find some trackers, experiment and do tutorials (learn learn learn), then choose one you like and just go go go (practice practice practice ). And soon u will be makin some sweetass techno/metal/whatever.

Fruity Loops is very good too, esp for the beginner musician in all of us. Although it does cost teh ca$hy.

You dont really need expensive equipment to compose good music. (For the most part, it all comes down to your skills you develop over time) I know a lot of pros who have switched almost totally to software synth. Although ya, keyboard/mixer/whatever can help

I wish that I could transform my whisteling into music notes. I can whistle pretty good. Note that this is not meant as a joke, it would be great. How would I go about doing that?

I will! Great, hope that it works. I really need something free though, I haven't got the cash to spend on hardware. But I will look around.

I have no experience dealing with audio so for me it would be easier if I found some ready made application. If I felt that I could "whip up" such an application within a short timespan I would do it, but I don't think I've got what it takes.

I did soms Googeling, no free programs though. And no examples with whisteling, I'll try one of them out though later this week. It might be something for me.

HammerHead is a nice drum machine. I have used it a bit in the past, it's pretty easy for us musically challenged people to create something decent. But it will just be a drum loop. Might be of interest to someone though.

Why would you need a capo/bar chord for A minor...? o_O

Just thought I'd throw this out: Acid XPress is a free version of Acid (non-demo) that is almost fully functional. If I remember correctly, the only things really missing are the wave chopper and some of the stereo effects. XPress should be fine for most casual users.

Also there's a ton of loop libraries for ACID (google) and most of them are fairly inexpensive as long as you avoid buying them from Sony.

Anyways, you can get Acid XPress here:
Acid XPress

And what percentage of non-guitar-oriented rap, electronica, and new age is decent? Even Aphex Twin's new stuff (Analord) is beginning to sound cheesy. There are plenty of great traditional bands out there, it's just your fault for looking for them on top 40 radio.

Besides, I thought we were talking about video game music, and I think acoustic guitar in a game sounds mighty cool.