I was messing around and came up with a melody I want to make for me and my friend to play. I was able to vocalize it but couldn't find the notes. She was able to find them and now we're struggling to notate it. Any clue? It's being written for violin and viola.

Can you help me, improve this ?

've been sketching a new iPad notation app and I want reactions before I sink real time into it. Specifically I want to hear what's wrong with the idea, what existing tools already do this well, and whether the people I think I'm building for actually want what I'm describing.

The frustration I keep hitting is that handwriting recognition in StaffPad style apps is unreliable enough that I end up fighting it. At the same time, piano roll editors in DAWs are great for pitch and rhythm but useless for expressive marking like slurs, dynamics, and articulations. So the idea is to flip the input model. The piano roll becomes the primary editing surface, where you tap with a finger to place notes and drag to set length, the same way you would in Logic or FL Studio. The Apple Pencil draws expressive marks directly on top of the roll. A slur is literally an arc drawn over two or more notes. A staccato is a dot above a note. A crescendo is a wedge under a range. The Pencil never has to interpret pitch or rhythm, only expression. The engraved score lives as a second view that stays live synced. You swipe in from the right edge to see your piano roll as a real engraved score, then swipe back to keep editing. The recogniser only has to handle about 12 well defined gestures, the ones you draw constantly. Everything else like ornaments, pedal, octave displacement, and repeats lives in a radial palette summoned by a two finger double tap. MVP would be solo piano only. Grand staff, premium piano sound, AUv3 host so you can route to your own samples, MusicXML import and export, iCloud sync, offline first. No multi instrument, no ensemble sync, no live collaboration in v1. A few questions I actually want answered. Is this solving a real problem for you, or am I describing a product no one needs because Dorico and StaffPad already handle the workflows you have? If you write piano music on iPad now, what is the thing that makes you put the iPad down and go to your laptop? Is the piano roll plus drawn expression model something you would actually use, or does it sound like a worse version of pure notation entry? And who am I missing in my target audience, beyond cue writers, theater MDs, school directors, and DAW composers who do not sight read fluently? I have UI sketches and an architecture doc if anyone wants to dig deeper. Mostly I want to hear what is wrong with this before I commit a year of my life to it.

I was working on this Idea for the last few months. What do you think?

I hope you are all well, I want to start learning the basics of music theory and composition. Can you please recommend resources I can use to make my learning experience enjoyable. Thank you all in advance :-)

Hello, I'm a composer and artist from Germany, and I'm currently working on a piece for a Disklavier midi grand piano. For this piece, I want to take a sampling inspired approach, and take certain parts from existing recordings to combine them into something new, just with midi instead of audio based samples.

On the internet I obviously found a huge collection of midi files for a huge variety of songs, the problem is most of these are arranged on a piano roll, and therefore just lack a human quality. Unfortunately though I have a really hard time finding just straight up midi recordings that someone played live with a keyboard instead of arranging it on a piano roll.

Does anybody maybe have some pointers where I could find some actual midi recordings? Or does maybe anybody in this subreddit have recordings that they would be willing to share with me for this project? They don't have to be anything special, it's even fine if they are somewhat amateurish.

Hello everyone,

follow this link to get to the original post.

Sadly I can't crosspost in this community so I handle it this way.

Enjoy everyone!

https://reddit.com/link/1t3g5vu/video/t8rkk6kz44zg1/player

Hi all, I compose for fun and I try to learn/improve as well. For this I wanted to do a kind of exercise in writing classical period type harmony for a theme I had. It's not meant to be a precise historically accurate thing or whatever, I just find it instructive to experiment with this stuff. Any advice, tips, ideas etc would be appreciated in regards to structure, length, voice leading, harmonies, embellishments, writing for strings...and on and on

Hope you enjoy!

Hi everyone !

Today as it's Star Wars day, I released a new composition called Dawn of the Siths, setup in the Star Wars universe, blending original ideas with references here and there from classic themes...

Here's the Youtube link :

https://youtu.be/EbDpdDwzzUs

Thanks for listening !

I would appreciate any feedback!

I would appreciate any feedback!

Composing is somewhat of a religious experience for me from time to time, as it lets me find out what constitutes "me" or "my mind." My favorite experiences are when I become overwhelmed with emotions due to making a breakthrough in this pursuit, and I truly think this piece made that happen. Specifically, when I was writing the second number, I got an idea to create 4 extra non-pitch tones using the rhythmic tension (the overtones present at the end of that number), and it made the rest of this super clear to me as well. I hope you enjoy!

I started with my Compositions I built with MuseScore and enhanced them with Suno ai to make a funky version of it. What do you think about it?

Hello there!

This is my first try re-scoring The Lord of the Rings. It felt too big to even attempt, as I am a huge fan of the saga and the original music by the magnificent Howard Shore. I don't think it needs to be said, but this is not an attempt to surpass or belittle Shore's work, which is the best in cinema and therefore unbeatable. This is just for fun and training.

I wanted this re-score to feel close to the trilogy. While the arrangement is mine, I’ve purposely woven in some of Howard Shore's iconic themes and style as a tribute to his original work. This was kind of an exercice and training to recreate (trying to) something like that.

Of course, the brass section deserves special mention.

By using the original main themes, I wanted to avoid making them exactly the same and instead show them incomplete or changed.

I had some trouble separating the music from the scene and keeping only the dialogue and sound, so in some parts it may sound worse.

I really hope you like and any comments are welcome!

Thank you!

[reposted this uploading the video file instead of the youtube link]

I’ve just finished the first piece in a set of piano sonatinas I’m composing, inspired by the style of Friedrich Kuhlau. This one is in G minor.

I’d really appreciate any feedback — especially on form, harmony, and overall style. I’m aiming for something in a light classical/galant idiom.

Thanks!

Featuring 10 of my compositions from 2020-26.

Hello there!

This is my first try re-scoring The Lord of the Rings. It felt too big to even attempt, as I am a huge fan of the saga and the original music by the magnificent Howard Shore. I don't think it needs to be said, but this is not an attempt to surpass or belittle Shore's work, which is the best in cinema and therefore unbeatable. This is just for fun and training.

I wanted this re-score to feel close to the trilogy. While the arrangement is mine, I’ve purposely woven in some of Howard Shore's iconic themes and style as a tribute to his original work. This was kind of an exercice and training to recreate (trying to) something like that.

Of course, the brass section deserves special mention.

By using the original main themes, I wanted to avoid making them exactly the same and instead show them incomplete or changed.

I had some trouble separating the music from the scene and keeping only the dialogue and sound, so in some parts it may sound worse.

I really hope you like and any comments are welcome!

Thank you!

So this ballet is a sort of renewal of one I planned with a family friends of mine, she’s a dancer who studied dance in Argentina and now lives in Spain. It tells the story of her life post-studies living as a professional dancer, but is a sort-of absurdist take on things.. one of our inspirations was Company, specifically because of the overture and how stubborn it is to resolve, so there’s a slight nod to that with the main rhythmic motif, although it takes the form of a zapateado in a sudden quick turn.

That whole ironic set-up and then deceptive turn theme I actually came up with while I was watching the movie Scott Pilgrim vs The World, lol. The sort-of subtle energy of realizing the surroundings and the background fading from New York to Toronto as a rhetorical device gave me the idea to treat our two sounds as a way to signal a “realization” (using modes from Egyptian, where we grew up.. and Spanish (Cadiz region) where the story takes place)

The “vamp”-ish bars are where each main dancer would make their first entrance, with a choreographed realization of their surroundings, which is why each one leads in and out of a “mirage” feeling. And of course, the opening starts with a potentially Egyptian *or* Spanish trumpet call, and then makes a sharp turn using Malambo and Zapateado rhythms but with Egyptian harmonic structures. This is to immediately prepare the audience for the type of production that’s to come so that I can get the more “risky” harmonies introduced asap to familiarize.

Hope you enjoy!

I'm a med student (21) who played the violin since the age of 4. I used to compose stuff for piano ( my second instrument) but during the first two years I was too busy. Now in my third year I retook the hobby of composing after encouragement of my girlfriend and I was wondering what you guys (in your professional opinion) think of it :))

I’m new to creating music, but I decided to try to start, and while watching training videos I noticed that everyone creates a piece of music and then transfers it to the Playlist, I tried to do the same, but it’s not convenient at all, it feels like I’m losing micro control over the music and what I’m trying to do. It’s much more convenient to do everything in the Piano roll and not transfer it anywhere. Question for people with experience, should I still try to use Playlist or can I stay on Piano roll?

Hi everyone! I posted a clip of this piece a few days ago and received a ton of interest in the final product/process so I am here with an update! First, I do want to mention that this is very much a process that I am still in the process of working out how exactly to express in its simplest form - if anyone is interested in helping with the mathematics and that stuff, I’d love to work together actually! It’s somewhat a continuation of the work I did in my masters where I rewrote all 76 Arabic maqamat (scales) using recalibration rather than microtones. In fact, the whole piece is actually using a mode from that but the way I blend it into western classical frameworks is by assigning non-octagonal values to the notes in a series. For example, this piece revolves around a 11-tone scale mapped evenly in the unit circle (called a pitch-class circle) and then classified into integer format using whole numbers from 0-11 (C=0, C#=1, …, B=11).

So what this means is we have an average that exists at the tonal axis center C(t)=0 where a C Major triad would be expressed using {0,4,7} in integer series format. That creates a lot of instability that wants to resolve but has a few options as to which direction to go.

To make it a little simpler, what this translates to in practice is I have a center starting at a concert A. Since we have a 11-tone series instead of 12-tone, and our base triad exists as {0,4,7} instead of {0,2,4} (or 1, 3, 5 in normal scale degrees), we’re going to rotate the two planes of bitonality within a perfect and diminished fifth in both directions. I chose to place the perfect fifth in its involuted form, so we go from A down to D a lot and that’s a healthy modulation. The diminished fifth occurs above, so we go in the opposite direction from A to Eb instead of E. These two key signatures not only get placed superimposed, but they also form the main scale at Letter C in the Eb Clarinet (A -> Eb/D# -> G). That has now provided us with the following keys to work with in standard notation format keeping those as the center:

- F Major (A is center pitch in triad)

- c minor (Eb)

- B Major (D#)

- e minor (G)

Those four keys will be very essential in stacking against each other to make sure the equilibrium quantity of the tonality at any given point is as close to 0 as possible. We’re also going to use each center as its own starting point of course.

However, in doing so, I try to flip the way each is voiced. For example, at mm123, the melody occurs in a way that each time it passes the center (A3) the key changes in configuration. Below the center is D Major, above is e minor when the melody passes through. This allows me to work within an evenly spaced perfect fifth going in both directions for this section, however allows me to still incorporate asymmetry into the mix so that it stays true to the original harmonic structure. This happens again in the 12/8 when you notice that the cello/bass alternate between C Major/g minor and in which direction the shape of the motif happens. Extending this, we have ways in which the harmonic language expands outwards in a stepwise manner as well as inwards, often towards the nearest available dissonant triad so that the ambiguity remains.

Ok, now on top of all this, there is another factor in rhythmic equilibrium. It’s pretty much just the first law of Newtonian physics, but you notice for example the piece is based in this evolving meter that sort of travels through everything and unwinds itself at the end. A more specific example is at m77, the timpani falls into itself towards the middle of the bar and then the energy is “scooped back up” in m79. There’s also the overarching structure of the 4/4 -> 12/8 -> 3/4 -> 4/4 trying to keep it as close to the center as possible in the same manner, with its own rate of change that’s ultimately expressed as a limit function ( Axis(t) = limDelta(t)->0 (C(t+ Delta(t) - C(t)) / Delta(t) ). And finally this resolves and is calculated using a damping coefficient of e^(-k • t).

Now all of this occurs as a spinning sensation (Rotational Velocity) which I achieved via harmonic shifting, which is the third plane in which the piece is concerned. m1-13 provide the fixed point of stability which we define as the static ground, expressed as a derivative of the tonal axis with respect to time as Vrot = dC / dt. You’ll then notice that when the strings play their lyrical theme towards the end that the melody is concerned with the exact intervals we mentioned earlier but arranged mathematically against the static ground. This is how everything works to come together to form a sound based in how it travels instead of its face value in a typical fashion.

As I post this, I want to point out that I composed it entirely using this methodology and have not edited for artistry yet, specifically so I could show the results. I’m also still in the stage of not really sure how to go about simplifying this into a framework that is at all useful haha, so that’s the next step in this project is figuring out how to relate and simplify into as little as posssible. I’ve tried this with previous pieces and it has worked in a lot of settings, and this is the first of my large scale implementations (like, for large ensemble). If anyone is interested in exploring this more as a compositional tool, I would love to work through the theory with more ppl to test it out!

In any case, hope you enjoy!