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Music Making Resources
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.
ABLETON LIVE NOW HAS A FREE 90 DAY TRIAL. I highly recommend trying Ableton if you do not already have a preferred DAW. It's one of the most widely used Audio programs for live performance, and has the most streamlined and approachable interface of any professional audio program. It's probably the most fun to work in.
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)
Normally these are "VSTs", which is a proprietary format synonymous with audio plugins. The built in virtual instruments for Reaper leave a lot to be desired. It's probably the biggest weakness of the program - making music in Reaper just isn't very fun unless you put in a lot of time to learn and modify the workflow. Getting some virtual instruments can make it much less painful. These are some virtual instruments that I use a lot:
AUDIO HELM -- a subtractive synth with some effects, sequencer, an arpeggiator, and some semi-modular options
GRACE -- a good sampler
Dexed -- a difficult but powerful FM synth
[TAL Noisemaker]( -- another subtractive synth
VCV -- a free modular synth that you can use as a plugin or route to your DAW
AlterEgo -- a vaporwave favorite that lets you do musical text to speech
Valhalla Frequency Echo -- gives you some nice weird sounds to mess around with, makes things wild
[GlitchMachines Hysteresis and Fracture] -- another "mangler," these kinds of effects are used a lot in sci fi games like Prey
You can honestly look up "best free virtual instruments" or "best free [insert effect here]" and get a lot of good stuff. I recommend sticking with brands that make paid plugins as well, as they will probably be around in a few years to update their stuff!
Here's one such roundup that I reference a lot: https://blog.landr.com/best-free-vst-plugins/