Music of Elementia

[Alexinactive]

your first piece is decent, but not really creative. it's repetitive and static, like it isn't really going anywhere. also, the melody is a bit awkward, especially at the parts where it just switches back and forth between D and D# for a measure and a half

i noticed in the second piece you didnt stick to a key signature, which is fine if you know what youre doing. in your case though, it's hard to listen to the piece, because it sounds extremely dissonant and crunchy, while still suffering the same problem as the first piece

as for your final post, online sequencer is an excellent place for beginner musicians to start, as it's easy and intuitive to use at a basic level. once you get some experience under your belt, you might consider switching to Ardour or Reaper - both free DAWs, as long as you ignore the pop ups asking to pay

if you need some musical advice, i'd recommend heading to the chat to ask your questions. if you come at the right time, you will get them answered fairly quickly

Thank you, this was the sort of feedback I was hoping for. So I learnt something new today: melody and the importance of key signatures. I did think that my first piece was perhaps a bit too repetitive, and could use some improvement, but was decent. I also thought that it was kind of hard to listen to my second piece at first, and although it grew on me over time, I liked my first piece a lot more. Sticking to a key signature for my first piece was entirely accidental, but I now understand why it's important to do this. As I've said before, I've had trouble installing instruments for digital audio workstations (specifically Ardour, but I'd have the same problem with Reaper), and not for lack of trying. Also, I just learnt that PulseAudio fails when the CPU usage is too high, so the audio quality when I record playing the violin on midi.city is horrible; I didn't see this before because I tested midi.city's cello, and the CPU usage is low enough with the cello to not be an issue. I spent a very long time trying to troubleshoot this issue, but I just couldn't fix it.

Long story short, my idea to combine using Audacity and midi.city to compose music was a failure due to technical limitations, so I'm back to square one. Being unable to think of any other solutions, I considered giving up on composing music – perhaps even my video game project in its entirety, since one can't make a good video game without music – but your reply has given me hope: considering how fast people replied to my very first forum post, I assumed that no-one here was willing to give – if capable of giving – me any criticisms or suggestions. I hope that you and others will continue to do this; I've decided that for now, I'll use Online Sequencer to compose chiptunes for my video game project. It won't be as nice to listen to as if they sounded like non-electronic instruments, but it'll be good enough, and as Linux becomes a more popular family of operating systems, I'm sure that digital audio workstations will become easier to use for people like me in the future.