Music Making Resources

Resources and Tutorials for Music Making:

I taught a short unit on music making for AUDIO FOR DIGITAL GAMES If you look under Week 11 of the readme you'll find some resources and an example Reaper project.

Some free (or free-ish) programs for music making:

SUN VOX - a free, small, program that runs on everything, including Palm Pilots. You can input notes live, or use a tracker-style interface for making songs. Here's a good, digestible tutorial series

BOSCA CEOIL - designed by Terry Cavanaugh (of Dicey Dungeons and Super Hexagon fame), this is a simple-ish sketchpad that's designed to be beginner friendly. It definitely has some limitations for importing and exporting, but is still pretty good for getting ideas down.

REAPER - Quickly becoming the DAW of choice for Game Sound Designers, due to it's flexibility, extensibility, and low cost ($60 with an honor-system trial version). The built-in plugins aren't spectacular, but with external scripts it can have functionality similar to Protools Ultimate at less than 1/12th the cost.

I don't personally love it for making music - I'd recommend starting in Sun Vox or Bosca Ceoil, then use Reaper to make your beatmap Midi file (which we will cover in Week 6)