I'm much of a music neophyte myself (I've made
this thing and
this thing, for a few examples of my skills) but I've picked up a bunch of advice through the years.
- Learn about music scales, first of all, so you get notes that don't disharmonize with each other. Two really basic scales are "all the white keys" and "all the black keys".
- Notes that are 3 and 5 steps away (in the scale) harmonize and are the basis of most common chords, they're called "thirds" and "fifths". C-E-G is the basic chord of the C scale, because C is note 1 in the scale, E is note 3, and G is note 5. Chords has different moods depending on which note is the base of the chord.
- Chord progression is based on going from one chord in the scale to another. For instance the 5-6-1 progression is used a lot in classic music to build tension and then release it (the base chord sounds the most relaxed in any scale). So in the basic C major scale, this progression would be G-B-D, A-C-E, C-E-G.
- Any note harmonizes with itself (e.g. C-5 and C-6 harmonize). This means that it doesn't matter WHICH octave you pick a note in a chord from. So you can move notes up and down whole octaves and still have harmony.
- Usually one bar of music is split into 4 beats. Notes that start exactly on a beat feel more rested and less dynamic. They carry the rhythm of the song, but it gets boring if EVERY note starts right on a beat. Depending on what you do with the off-beat notes, you can get a lot of different effects.
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- Songs need some sort of repeating structure to not dissolve into total chaos, but they get boring if you repeat a very short section over and over. Try to find ways to spice the recurring structures up: change the instrument, change the scale, change the speed, add extra notes to flesh the melody out more the second time, etc.
- Silence is a sound too. Breaks at the right place in a song can lead to some very interesting effects, and songs feel more "real" if there's little pauses for you to "catch your breath". Songs that go on with the same intensity for a long time feel exhausting.
- The drums are VERY important for the rhytm / intensity of a song. The same song can feel a lot more sped up if you have the same melody but have a drum track with twice as fast rhythm. If the song feels too intense or boring, you've probably picked the wrong drum loop to back it up.
Try going to a site like
VGMusic (a very legit site that has been around since '96) and download some MIDI files of songs you like from the classic games, then use a simple MIDI editor to study them (I personally use 20-year-old freeware
Jazz) and see how they managed to create the effects you loved. You can pick up a lot of fun tricks that way. For instance, the medieval sound in a lot of Castlevania tracks is achieved by alternating bassy notes with the main melody to create an illusion that two instruments are playing a duet.
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Also, see those screenshots above? Think of music like that, as higher/lower pitches on a timeline from left to right.
Don't think of it like sheet music.
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I have no friggin idea how people can decipher these ancient hieroglyphics, and they've always been optimized for size. Think of music like a two-dimensional structure that spans every thinkable sound on the up/down axis, and time on the left/right axis, and things get a lot easier to work with. (Visualization videos
like this can help a ton)