What is the best free music making software? « General Music Discussion « Forum

I, too, would like a donut.

So lately I’ve been stuffing GXSCC with about a billion MIDIs and making 8-bit versions of them, and I realized that it was really fun. Then I realized: “It’s fun doing this. But… I want to try making my own songs!”

And so here I am. I’m sure this has been asked before, but what would be a good, FREE music program to get me started? Keep in mind I’ve never really made a song before besides the Gravity Falls theme on piano. Any ideas?

“Corr… a giant Ice Key!”
“I know where I’d like to stick that…”
“KAZOOIE!”

Superbanjo65

Well if you want to make 8-bit music, Famitracker is an excellent place to start.

It gives you total control over nearly everything the NES’ sound chip can do, and more. I’ve been using it on and off for a few years now and love it.

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the police theres no food or water here

VGMM (Video Game Music Maker) is also free, if you like the FM sound of the Sega Genesis

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I, too, would like a donut.

I do doing enjoy 8-bit, so thanks for the suggestions! Any thoughts on normal music makers?

“Corr… a giant Ice Key!”
“I know where I’d like to stick that…”
“KAZOOIE!”

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I think the software you want really depends on what kind of songs you want to make and what you want the software to do.

For basic composition, I like using Finale. The free version lets you compose for eight staffs, which is pretty sizable, and you can pay for the full program to use as many as you want. I like it for working out four-part harmonies, basic melodies, etc. It’s crap at exporting MIDIs though- most of the default sample instruments sound kind of awful.

For recording stuff, Audacity is your best bet. It’s good at recording multiple parts and exporting to weird file formats. I also use it to clip out specific parts of songs and such. Highly recommend.

For chiptunes/sample music, I highly recommend OpenMPT (ModPlugTracker). The software has a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s very powerful and lets you make music out of any music sample you can get your hands on. It’s pretty good at repeating beats and song structures, and I like it a lot.

For sound editing, I use FMOD studio. It’s not really geared towards music composition/editing (it’s meant to be used in a video game for special sound effects when you walk into different rooms and stuff), but it can be used that way. The problem is that it doesn’t let you save your work as an MP3 or WAV or anything- you have to record it from your sound card, which can be a little bit of a hassle. It might come in handy for when you get the hang of some other programs, though.

I’ve been tinkering with the demo of REAPER lately. It does a lot of the same stuff as FMOD studio and more, but it is a paid program. The demo might be worth checking out, though- it’s pretty powerful, and easier to use than FMOD in a lot of ways.

In the end, I think it really depends on what kind of music you want to make. For chiptunes, Famitracker or OpenMPT is probably what you want. For live-recorded stuff, you’ll want Audacity and at some point FMOD/REAPER. You may want to invest in paid software at some point, depending how seriously you take this. If you don’t care about sound quality and just want to compose, Finale might be all you need. It just
depends on what you’re looking to do.

Hope that helps!

Best of luck!

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I, too, would like a donut.

Wow, that’s very helpful!

Thank you! I’ll try some of those out to get the hang of it.

“Corr… a giant Ice Key!”
“I know where I’d like to stick that…”
“KAZOOIE!”

Going with what RadicOmega said, OpenMPT would be your best bet for music composition. You can load in a soundfont from pretty much anything (i.e. a specific game) and get right to composing game music. Here is an example of something I composed in OpentMPT a year or two ago.

But if you’re just getting into music composition, I would highly recommend getting ORG Maker . It’s the program Daisuke Pixel Amaya used for Cave Story’s soundtrack, and it’s incredibly easy to use. You don’t need to load in any soundfonts or work with any restrictions (like in Famitracker), so you can jump right in to composing something with an 8-Bit-ish sound. Here are two songs I composed in that.

And then of course, there’s Famitracker. I’d recommend getting the hang of OpentMPT before you dive into that, because it’s a very limiting program and requires you to work within the audio restrictions of the NES. But if you use expansion chips like the VRC6, you can pull off more robust tunes like this.

Anyways, good luck with the composition, and I’m really glad you’re moving on from GXSCC! I absolutely hate that program.

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I, too, would like a donut.

Heh, was confused with the other programs. Excited to give ORG Maker a shot! Thanks!

“Corr… a giant Ice Key!”
“I know where I’d like to stick that…”
“KAZOOIE!”

Yeah, it’s definitely an overlooked program for beginning composers. It was the first program I ever used to compose music, and it gave me the chance to churn out a few terrible songs before I felt confident enough to use other programs and share my stuff online.

And as an added bonus, since it’s the program used for Cave Story’s music, you can load the Cave Story soundtrack into the program and learn to form baselines, melodies, drum tracks, etc.

deviantART | Mother: 25th Anniversary Edition

I, too, would like a donut.

Oh, wow, that’s awesome! I didn’t know you could load up Cave Story’s music.

I just made my first song ever. It’s too terrible to share here, but this is a program I can understand! Thanks, DDP!

“Corr… a giant Ice Key!”
“I know where I’d like to stick that…”
“KAZOOIE!”

While I can’t testify to its quality firsthand (I’ve kind of been sticking with FL for a while) you may want to check out the free Reaktor 5 player and it’s twin, Mikro Prism for a start with digital audio production.

That’s probably the best free program I can recommend, although there are tons of others out there. These kinds of sequencers will streamline you into the world of professional grade software.

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I’m pretty sure Gooie doesn’t have a Mac, but if anyone else does, you don’t need to look further than what’s already been packed in. GarageBand will get the job done. Though apparently now the cost to upgrade to the current version is $5… Which admittedly isn’t bad for a DAW as fully featured as GB… but still…
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Personally, I use FL Studio, and while it does have a free demo that allows you to export your work as WAV, MP3, or OGG, it won’t let you save your project until you purchase one of the full versions, which means you have to start from scratch every time you close the program.

That said, I’ve heard LMMS is a good, free, open source alternative (available on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux) that operates fairly similarly to FL Studio, with both piano roll and step sequencers for inputting notes, multiple mixer tracks for routing your instruments to give them different effects, and support for VST plugins. There’s definitely a learning curve to harnessing all the audio processing power it provides, but once you get used to how the software works, you can make some really cool stuff with it.

JSesentaYCuatro

Also Bart has a subplot about Giygas or something.

If I may jump in here, I’m quite interested in learning this stuff too, and you guys have given some pretty interesting sources. However, are there any good ones that can do symphonic stuff, like with orchestras and whatnot?

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Lotus: Finale which Rhyselinn mentioned earlier can do 8 scores of ‘orchestral’ MIDI-ish instruments for free. In a similar vein, I’ve used MuseScore in the past — it’s free and can do as many staves as you want, but it kind of has some glitches in drum parts and multiple voices.

DragonDePlatino:
But if you’re just getting into music composition, I would highly recommend getting ORG Maker . It’s the program Daisuke Pixel Amaya used for Cave Story’s soundtrack, and it’s incredibly easy to use. You don’t need to load in any soundfonts or work with any restrictions (like in Famitracker), so you can jump right in to composing something with an 8-Bit-ish sound. Here are two songs I composed in that..

If you’re going to use a music creation program from Daisuke Pixel Amaya, I can also recommend PXTone Collage which I’ve written a bunch of stuff in and is pretty fun. It can be a bit of a challenge to figure it out, though, so I recommend reading at least the beginning of this manual (which also comes with a bunch of voices to put in your songs as well, which are pretty necessary to make it sound good.)

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For symphonic/orchestral stuff, if you’re talking about creating an audio file for people to listen to as opposed to creating a sheet music score to be played, pretty much anything that supports sample-based playback will work. Depending on how realistic you want it, you may need to invest in some more advanced plugins, but even without paying there are some decent sound banks available. For reference, if you think the quality of the music in Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64 is good enough, you’ll be fine without having to pay.

MIDI sequences can be easily played back using soundfonts, and many of the programs mentioned in this thread support them either directly or by allowing you to extract the samples contained within. There are a ton of free soundfonts available at hammersound.com. and sf2midi.com (although the latter does require registration). Also, for orchestral stuff, I’ve heard Squidfont is pretty decent, and it can be downloaded from here.

Modular formats like .IT, .XM, and .S3M, which can be created with OpenMPT, allow you to import samples from soundfonts as well. However, OpenMPT doesn’t support velocity layers in soundfonts, and instead of triggering them by playing a note at a different velocity, you would have to create a separate instrument and call that should the need arise.

That might be a bit confusing for someone who’s new to all this, so hopefully the following will help clear up some of the terminology:

Velocity layers trigger different samples of an instrument being played harder or softer on the same note to help it sound more realistic. For example, if you lightly pluck a violin string, it’ll make a soft sound, but if you pluck it hard enough the string will snap against the bridge resulting in a loud “crack” when it plays, in addition to sounding at a louder volume.

An instrument in modular formats (specifically .XM and .IT since earlier formats don’t support them) is a collection of samples mapped across a range of notes to increase realism. For example, a low note and a high note on a piano sound very different, and if you simply increased the pitch of a low piano note, it would sound very unnatural. You can instead use an instrument to map multiple piano samples from low pitch to high pitch and simply play using that instrument instead of having to manually select which sample needs to be played for each note. If you find a soundfont that mentions “chromatic sampling,” that means they recorded samples for every single note the instrument can play. (Instrument mapping also be used for drum kits or percussion, where different types of drums are mapped to different keys so you can play using one instrument mapping instead of having to switch back and forth between samples.)

A sample is simply a recording of an instrument or sound. For composition, it is typically a recording of a single note, but samples may also be drum loops, vocal clips, sound effects, or played phrases such as lead melodies or chord progressions.

In modular music formats, there are multiple sound channels, each capable of triggering one note at a time. When a note is triggered, you specify the pitch and the instrument,
and can optionally specify a simple effect (decimal values 00 to 64) and/or an advanced effect (hexadecimal values 00 to FF) such as note volume, panning, pitch bending, or vibrato.

The music used in Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64 tends to use a single sample for each type of instrument, so if those sound good enough for what you want to do, don’t worry about velocity layers or instrument mapping. If you’re looking for something that sounds a bit more realistic, you’ll definitely want to look for soundfonts, plugins, or libraries with multiple velocity layers and extensive sampling across the instrument’s playable range.

Hopefully I’ve explained enough to make this understandable, but if anything needs clarifying, feel free to ask.

JSesentaYCuatro

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