OK… Well, Answering the topic starters question & it’s not gonna make me popular… There have been all kinda ways to obtain ‘musical expression’ and an actual ‘musician’ knows what they are & can utilize these techniques in any DAW or Tracker… The problem we face these days is that someone buys ableton or FL & instantly thinks “I’m a musician now”… Nope not hardly, can you decompile a song just by listening to it or do you need melodyne or some other ‘crutch’?…
Being musical has very little to do with what soft you are using, it’s your ability but yes, some are better than others, Renoise does clever things with samples, but so does Making Waves Studio, SVArTracker has an Effect Processor where you can draw as many param curves from as many different VSTi or VST you are using and then ‘pack’ all these into a ‘cell’ with a unique command ### that you then can apply anywhere in any pattern… BeRo’s Picatune2 has quite a few ways of being musical as well, impressive piece of code except for lack of line skipping for god’s sake….
You see nobody when they obtain a sequencer or DAW spends years training their ear, they just wanna ‘make cool whatever to upload’ thus we have a problem with many tunes just being very simple but FX piled ontop… If your tune is good you need hardly any FX at all in fact best way for anybody to ‘judge’ their own music is to boil it down to simple tones & take off all FX… Does it pass muster standalone or does it sound like playskool baby-poop?
About a week or so ago I had this conversation with Benedict Roff-Marsh, many of you might know of him by name… I was talking about what I said in the last paragraph & he said that he did a video on that 4 years ago but it wasn’t very popular… Well certainly because nobody wants to hear it, doesn’t mean it’s not true… He was actually quite diplomatic about it as it seems everybody now babies their viewers as to not offend… With me I tell it as it is-
I am still a user of Cakewalk Project5 as well as using all kinda strange trackers but I can pretty much make anything ‘musical’ inside it plus it still is best for DX-DXi plugs with full automation of them plus MIDI…
But as a tip here’s what’s wrong with many tunes nowadays & there’s more bad tunes than ever before because of power computers & piling of FX-
-Too much FX!… If your tune is good it will need very little…
-Too fast BPMs with no way to ‘shape’ individual notes… It’s not how many or how fast you regurgitate notes it’s how you shape them…
-Constant 5-10-15 minutes of solid wall of sound boring as hell… Your tune should have breaks & areas of less velocity to accent the ones that do… Mariachi bands used to play tunes 15-20 minutes long thus they would ‘lose’ their audience this is why they would just ‘stop’ the tune for a bar or two, this would jar the audience back…
-Start using triplets or pieces of… This breaks up boring 4/4 looping…
-Layer simpler synth sounds to obtain your goal… Today’s ‘power synths’ are way too upfront & modulated to fit in a full mix…
-Back off on the drums… Yes, it’s an instrument anyone can play but the overuse & loudness of drums is a novice technique, learn other instruments as well…
-Working on previous, Don’t start any tune by laying down drum tracks… You are allowing the least melodic instrument to dictate the tune… In most ALL my tunes the drums come last… never, ever with my being in many bands in the 70’s& 80’s did we all turn to the drummer & say “Ok, get started & we’ll follow along”…
-Train your ear by jamming to favorite tunes, pick them out on your MIDI keyboard or whatever, after a few years you’ll be able to pick out tunes by using the ‘melodyne in your head’…
-Start using compound chords… these are 4 note or more chords which add special texture-flavor that you cannot get with basic triads & the extra notes provide more flexibility for melodies or improvisation….
Well, I could go on but I think that’s a good starter list>>>