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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

I like Ableton, but the better way to get started making music is with your voice, singing with songs that you like. Sing the melody, and also the bass and harmony parts. If you have a phone you can use the voice memo app to do two-part stuff. If you want to move up to an instrument, my favorite is the melodica, a breath-operated keyboard that is very cheap (~ $20), sounds great, and teaches the notes of a piano, and requires no electrical power to operate. In fact for some things I think the melodica is better than a piano, since in some ways it's closer to an organ with the ability to maintain and vary the sound over time.

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That's a funny instrument! I'm definitely getting one of these since I'm a terrible singer but I always have a tune in my head that I need to hum out loud.

A few ios app recommendations I'd like to make are:

- Rassel (a free and absurdly accurate pocket shaker app) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rassel-pocket-shaker/id1575364...

- Ableton Note (Best 6 dollars I ever spent. It's a really fun way to experiment with musical ideas on the go. You can even record vocals and add effects.) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ableton-note/id1633243177

Alternatively / my personal preference and hot tip: Start with rhythm. Get a practice pad and some drum sticks and a free metronome app or website and try doing single, double, quarter and triple notes (I'm naming triples later because they're an odd number and as a first-time drummer they did me a bamboozle at the time).

Then there's some exercises you can do with just paper and pens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eqLmkWOU6A

A really versatile, affordable and fairly compact percussion instrument you can start off with as well is the Bodhrán; you can make some really great beats with it, see e.g. the opening scene of the film The Magdalene Sisters, just bodhrán and singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXFs8EL35o. Here's another version of the same song where the artist plays it with just his hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mjWhMn-VnU

Yeah, I wasted years sorta playing guitar and sorta fucking around with the computer.

I knew how to practice effectively from my years in band, but I didn't use them because I was too busy rejecting who I was in high school.

Now I'm learning piano and I've joined a choir, and I'm actually getting better at things instead of being a perpetually mediocre guitarist/singer.

It sounds like you just didn't like playing guitar?

I much prefer playing guitar to piano or a choir.

That was probably it too. I'm more wired for classical music, but I had to try to look cool in my 20s.

I had discovered that music was one of my few interests that I could actually trade for social credit.

I guess guitar is much less of a statement these days (being in a band is no longer the coolest thing to do) so the social pressure bit feels less relatable to me. I did catch the tail end of that era though so I know what you're talking about.

I never wanted to be a guitar god but I loved indie rock in the mid aughts.

What about classical guitar? I.e: Nylon stringed, Spanish guitar. I've played Beethoven and Bach pieces on one. Granted one can do that on an electric or steel string, but something about the timbre lends classical guitar to classical music. Plus it's the only style of guitar which really sees regular classical concert performance.

I do similar to this, recording to a voice notes app, but then importing the clip into my DAW, which quite helpfully visualizes an approximation of the pitch I was singing at, and using this as a template to build instrumental parts upon. Usually my vocal tracks aren't in the final mix, once I've replaced them.

Good advice - no matter what you play, whether you produce electronically or acoustically, singing will help you internalize music, ready to be transferred to any sound-making object.

You can also go the route of dispensing with phones and learn to transcribe solfege into a notebook. This is something I just started exploring and while it does take practice to gain the ear to transcribe things, you can start by learning to write down children's songs like Baby Shark(do re fa fa fa fa-fa fa-fa)and gradually work up to pop melodies - and once you do that, songwriting becomes a very natural process. All the precision stuff, you can work out in the DAW once you have a general indication of melody and rhythm.

I think the solfege for Baby Shark would actually start with sol la do, or in the key of C, G A C. Because the phrase eventually ends by dropping down one semitone on the final "shark", which would end up being F# (Fi!) if you started at the root of the scale. The initial movement from G to C, or sol to do in solfege, is very common and something you spot everywhere once you're aware of it.

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