Chapter 21 of 21 Writing music ≈ 45 min 6 exercises
Your own track
The final chapter: your whole track, a checklist and a guide to the studio. We check the track, play over it, export a MIDI file for any DAW and a WAV for your friends, and finish by building a month of practice from your own results.
In this chapter
- check your track on five points: key, form, roles, bass with the kick, an ending on the tonic
- play over your own track and hear which notes belong to the key and which are strangers
- export the track as a MIDI file, open it in a DAW and know what is in it and what is not
- render the track to WAV and send it as a link
- draw up a month of practice aimed at your own weak spots
At the start of the course the Notebook was a blank page with a "Record" button. Then it gained note values and a tempo, a beat, a bass, chords, synth sounds and a form. If you have worked through the course in order, your track is in there: the tune you wrote in chapter 18, the chords and bass from chapter 19, four tracks with sounds of their own from chapter 20.
This chapter works differently from the others. There is hardly any new theory in it. There is your track, a full-screen studio and a list of things to check before you play the track to anyone. Each section looks into your actual Notebook, tells you what is good and what needs fixing, and opens the right panel of the studio. At the end you take the track away as a file for any music program, and a month of practice to go with it.
If the Notebook is empty or you have come straight here, press "Example" on the map below: Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" goes into the Notebook with a beat, a bass and chords. It shows everything this chapter talks about, and you can replace it with your own track afterwards.
The studio, full screen
Here is your whole track: four tracks, with the bars running left to right. The melody and the bass are drawn as a small piano roll, the chords as letters bar by bar, and the drums as dots: large for the kick, medium for the snare, small for the hi-hat. Grey bars are the ones where a track is silent. That is the form you put together in chapter 20.
Press "Full-screen studio" and the whole Notebook opens over the chapter. At the top are the tempo, the time signature and the key, and below them the melody, the bass, the chords, the drums, the mixer and the export. It is the same Notebook that lives on its own page, just closer to hand. Change something in it, the tempo for instance, and close the studio with the cross or the Esc key: the map has already changed. Every widget in the chapter reads the same Notebook from your browser.
Now press "Listen" and hear the track from start to finish without looking at the screen. Be honest with yourself: where did it get dull, where does something stick out, where did you wish it would end? The checklist below looks for the same things, only with numbers.
The checklist
Five points, five things the course has covered one at a time. Each is checked against your Notebook right now. A green tick means everything is in place, a yellow exclamation mark means nearly, a red cross means it needs fixing, and an empty circle means there is nothing to check. Under the points is a "Listen" button, and the points that fail also have "Fix in the studio", which opens the right panel.
The checklist does not judge taste. A track with all five points green can be dull, and a track with a red cross can be excellent: you learn the rules so that you can break them on purpose. But if the cross is somewhere you broke nothing and simply did not look, fix it.
Key
The widget takes every note of the melody, the bass and the chords and works out what share of the sounding time falls inside the scale of the key set in the Notebook. Long notes weigh more than short ones: a passing sixteenth outside the key is barely heard, while a whole note is heard for the entire bar. Nine tenths or more turns the point green. If strangers turn up, press "Listen": they play one by one after the tonic chord, and you can hear how they stick out.
Sometimes the tune is honestly written in one key while the Notebook is set to another: everything is in G major, say, but C is selected at the top. Then every F♯ counts as a stranger. The widget tries all 24 keys the Notebook knows, and if one fits noticeably better, it offers it with a single button. "Undo" reverses the change. A major key and its relative minor share the same notes, so what tells them apart is where the bass starts and where the tune ends: the note the track comes to rest on is the tonic.
Form
Three signs: the track has at least eight bars, something repeats, and something changes. The widget looks for a repeat in the melody by comparing bars in pairs: do the notes start at the same moments, and are they the same notes? Contrast means bars that are unlike each other, or a track that comes in and drops out with the form. The eight bars of question and answer you wrote in chapter 18 pass this point by themselves, because the answer begins like the question. If a repeat is found, "Listen" plays the two bars one after the other.
Roles
Rhythm, bass, harmony and melody are the four roles from chapter 20. This point checks that all four tracks are playing and compares their registers: if the middle of the bass lies less than an octave below the middle of the melody, the two jostle in the same frequencies. The bass often lies two octaves lower or more. In the "Ode" the gap is 28 semitones.
Bass with the kick
The kick and the bass are one idea said by two instruments: a hit at the bottom and a note at the bottom. When they start together, the low end of the track sounds tight and solid. When the bass keeps landing just off the kick, the low end goes loose, even if each part is fine on its own. The widget counts how many kicks start a bass note, but only in bars where both are playing. Half or more turns the point green. Press "Listen" and you hear four bars of nothing but kick and bass, which is where their bond is clearest.
Ending on the tonic
The last note of the melody, the last bass note and the last chord all land on the tonic, at home. The widget checks all three, and one more thing: whether the last note of the melody falls in the last bar. If the tune finishes two bars early, it falls silent while the chords and the beat play on into nothing, and the listener cannot tell whether that was the end. When the last note of the tune is not the tonic, the "Last note to the tonic" button moves it to the nearest tonic. If you do not like it, press "Undo".
Test your ear on this. A cadence plays, then a single note. If it is the tonic, the phrase is closed. On any other degree you are left feeling that the next note is somewhere close.
Now play the most ordinary ending there is: the second degree, then the tonic, held long. That is how the "Ode" ends too.
A bar of count-in, then play at 84 BPM: E, D, a long D, a short C, and C for the whole of the second bar.
The checklist checks your actual Notebook: change something in the studio and the points are worked out again. Green means "nothing forgotten", not "good". Whether it is good is for you to decide, listening to the whole track.
Play over it
A track is also an accompaniment. Set it looping and play whatever you like on top, on a MIDI keyboard, the computer keyboard or the screen. The "Without the melody" box takes your tune out so that you can play in its place. That is how musicians learn a solo over a backing track.
The highlighting shows two things. The scale of the track's key is lit faintly: any of those keys will sound at home. The notes of the chord playing in the current bar are lit brightly, and they change along with the chords. A solo sounds firmest on the bright keys, freer on the pale ones, and foreign on the unlit ones. After every note the widget says what it was, and if it was a stranger, it names its two nearest neighbours in the key: in major and minor every out-of-key note is a semitone from notes that belong.
Strangers are not mistakes. A good solo sometimes brushes against one on purpose and moves straight on to a note of the key, and you hear it as an edge. A bad one stops on it. Play for a minute and look at the score underneath. If "in key" is below eighty per cent, play only the lit keys for a while, then only the bright ones.
You can also train telling a note of the key from a stranger on its own. The tonic chord plays, then a single note. Is it in the key or not?
Many DAWs have the same thing built in: the piano roll highlights the notes of the chosen scale, and a MIDI effect such as "Scale" moves stray notes to the nearest ones in the key. It is handy, but it is better to train your own ear: there will be no hints in a live solo.
Why a song gets stuck
Right at the start of the course we asked six big questions. We began answering the last one in chapter 18. Here is the second half of the answer.
In chapter 18 the answer was at the level of the tune: a motif of three or four notes that repeats and changes, a question and an answer that begin the same way. Now look at the whole track. It is made almost entirely of repeats. A beat in the Notebook is literally one bar played round and round, eight times in the "Ode". The chords go round in a circle. The bass repeats its figure. The tune comes back to where it began. Repetition lets you guess what comes next, and what you guess right is pleasant to hear and easy to remember.
You can see this in a picture. Below is a repeat map: each cell compares two bars of the tune. The darker the cell, the more alike the bars. Along the diagonal each bar is compared with itself, so the diagonal is always dark. Tap a cell to hear its two bars one after the other.
The map of "Ode to Joy" is ruled with parallel diagonals: bars 5, 6 and 7 repeat bars 1, 2 and 3, and only the ending changes. Switch on "No repeats" to get eight bars of random notes from the key in assorted rhythms. The dark cells off the diagonal vanish, the map turns into an even, pale ripple, and the tune becomes a string of sounds you will not remember even the second time. The "A step up or down still counts" box also treats as alike the bars where the same shape starts on a different degree of the scale. That is the sequence from chapter 18, and the ear hears it as a repeat.
Repetition is half the recipe. The psychologists Kelly Jakubowski, Sebastian Finkel, Lauren Stewart and Daniel Müllensiefen asked 3,000 people to name their earworms, the songs that most often got stuck in their heads, and published their analysis in 2017. They compared the hundred most frequent earworms with a hundred songs that had done just as well in the UK charts but were never named. On average the earworms were faster, and the overall shape of their tunes was the most common one in pop, such as rising in the first phrase and falling in the second. But inside that ordinary shape there was something unusual: in the authors' words, "unexpected leaps or more repeated notes than the average pop song".
A song gets stuck when it is easy to guess and yet has one place you cannot guess. Repetition gives you the first, a small surprise the second. In your track the beat, the chord loop and the question and answer take care of the first. The second is your decision.
The MIDI file: what goes to the DAW
The Notebook lives in one browser. To carry on with the track in a real studio, such as Ableton Live, FL Studio, Logic, Cubase, Reaper or GarageBand, you take it there as a MIDI file. We looked at what that file is in chapter 3: the same MIDI messages a keyboard sends, only written down together with their timing. But why does every program understand it?
Below is your track turned into a file, with a breakdown of what ended up inside. The first fourteen bytes are the header: the letters "MThd", the length of the header, the file format, the number of tracks and the number of ticks per quarter note. Then come the tracks: a name, an instrument number, a volume, and the note on and note off events.
The left column is what arrives in the DAW. Every note, with its pitch, start and length. The velocity of every note. The tempo and the time signature, the first events in the file. The volume of each track. Swing arrives as notes that are already shifted: the file does not know the word "swing", but it does know that the second eighth came late. And the instrument number: at the start of each track there is a program change message (in the table in chapter 3 it is the byte Cn) with a General MIDI number, such as 81 "Lead 1 (square)" for a melody with the "lead" sound and 39 "Synth Bass 1" for the bass.
The right column is what stays behind in the browser. Above all, the sounds themselves. Your patch, with its two waveforms, filter and envelopes, does not go into the file: a MIDI file holds no sound, only instructions about what to play. A General MIDI player puts its own instrument under that number, while in a DAW the track usually arrives with no instrument at all. It stays silent until you assign one, or it plays a default piano. Compare for yourself: press "As in the Notebook", then "As from the file". The second time you hear the same notes, read back out of the file that has just been built, but with one plain sound for every part. The rhythm, the notes and the dynamics are the same. The character is different.
You have sent a friend the MIDI file of your track, and they have opened it in their DAW. What will they most likely hear differently from you?
The timing of each note and its velocity are written into the file exactly, but there is no sound in it, only a General MIDI instrument number. What sound stands behind that number is up to your friend's program. So in a DAW the sounds are chosen again, while the notes and the dynamics stay yours.
Since velocity travels in the file, you need to have it under control. Three levels: soft, medium and loud.
The sounds in a DAW you will have to choose by ear, just as you chose them in chapter 20. You already recognise the pad, the bass, the lead and the pluck from that chapter. Here are five other presets of the course synth, without labels.
How to open the file in a DAW. In Ableton Live, FL Studio, Logic, Reaper and GarageBand you can drag a .mid file into the project window or bring it in through Import. Each track becomes a separate MIDI track, and the program either takes the tempo from the file or asks whether it should. Then you assign an instrument to each track, a built-in synth or a drum sampler for the track on channel 10, and the track sounds again. If you want the same sound as in the Notebook, open your patch in chapter 2 and copy the settings onto the DAW's synth: the waveform, the filter cutoff, the envelope. The MIDI file does not speak that language, but you do.
WAV: the whole sound
A MIDI file is for whoever will finish the track. Whoever is going to listen needs sound: a file that plays the same in any player and on any phone. For that the track is rendered: the computer works out how all the parts sound together and writes the result to an audio file.
Choose how many times round to go and press "Render". The Notebook renders the track with the same synth you hear throughout the course, but not in real time: the browser can work the sound out "in its head" without sending it to the speakers, and that is quicker than the track lasts. Instead of going to the speakers, the sound goes into a WAV file. Microsoft and IBM described the format in 1991, and everything opens it. Inside are numbers: 44,100 values a second for each of the two channels. That is the sample rate, the same as on a CD. Each number takes 16 bits, which is 2 bytes: that is the bit depth.
That gives the size: 44,100 × 2 channels × 2 bytes is 176,400 bytes a second, about 10 MB a minute. The widget works it out in advance from the tempo and the number of bars, and after rendering it shows the real file, its waveform and its loudest peak. Zero decibels here is the loudest number that fits into 16 bits. A peak below zero means nothing is clipping.
"Ode to Joy" in the Notebook lasts about 18 seconds. How many times bigger is its WAV file than its MIDI file?
The MIDI file of the "Ode" is about 1.7 KB: a few hundred events of three or four bytes each. A WAV of the same seconds (plus two seconds for the sound to die away) is about 3.4 MB, because it records every 1/44,100 of a second of sound. That is the price of a WAV sounding the same everywhere.
A link to the track
There is a third way, with no files at all. The Notebook is a couple of thousand characters of text: notes, tempo, sounds. They can be compressed and put straight into a link, after the # sign. Whoever opens the link sees the Notebook page, which offers to load the track. Press "Make a link": the widget builds it, unpacks it again and checks that it gives back the same track.
The browser does not send the part of the address after the # to the server: it stays in the browser of whoever opened the link. So the track is stored nowhere but in the link itself, and the site needs to know nothing about it. The catch is that the link is long, and the more notes, the longer it gets. A short track fits into a few hundred characters, while a long one with busy parts can run to thousands, and then a file is safer: the "Save as a file" button in the studio.
Your tune at tempo
The last exercise of the course is the most personal one. It takes the tune from your Notebook and asks you to play it at its own tempo, with the metronome, after a bar of count-in. You wrote it, you have heard it dozens of times. Now play it with your hands from start to finish, without stopping for mistakes. If there is no tune in the Notebook yet, the exercise uses the opening of the "Ode".
If the tempo turns out too fast for your hands, that is normal: many tunes in the Notebook were drawn with a mouse, not played. Lower the tempo in the studio, do the exercise, then put the tempo back and do it again. The notes in the Notebook do not change: the tempo is a single number for the whole track.
A month's plan
The course ends, the skills do not. Ten minutes every day on the trainers usually does more than an hour once a week, and everyone's weak spots are their own. The widget below looks at your results: which trainer levels you have passed, which tasks you get wrong most often, what you have not opened for a long time. From that it builds four weeks. The first three go to your three weakest skills, the fourth to everything mixed together and a second track. Each day has two trainers of five minutes each, and the seventh day has a task for the Notebook.
Every trainer in the plan is a link to it. Tick off the days you have done: the ticks are kept in this browser. The plan is worked out again as your results grow: what you have got the hang of moves down the list, and a new weak spot rises. If you do not know where to start a day, the trainers page has "Today's warm-up": the three trainers you have gone longest without opening.
The most useful task in the plan is a second track from scratch in half an hour. You wrote the first track over twenty chapters, and every decision in it was new. The second will show what has become habit: the tonic at the end, the bass with the kick, a repeat and one surprise.
What next
You can now do what the course began by promising: write a tune, find chords and a bass for it, build a beat, give the parts sounds from the synth, check the track, play over it and take it to any studio as a MIDI file. There is no wall ahead any more, only roads.
A DAW. Open your MIDI file in a real program. GarageBand is free on the Mac and the iPhone, and the others have trial versions. Everything you saw in the Notebook has the same name there: tracks, piano roll, quantising, velocity, mixer.
A synth without limits. This site has Modular, a modular synth in the browser, where the oscillators, filters, envelopes and LFOs of chapter 2 can be patched together with cables in any way you like and a MIDI keyboard plays the lot. It is the next step after the course synth: there you build a sound from nothing.
A studio in the browser. The Studio is a bigger version of the Notebook: as many tracks as you like, a piano roll, instruments from Modular, mixdown and export to WAV. A good place for your second track.
The plan. The four weeks above, and the trainers every day. And when the track is finished, send the link to whoever told you that you have no ear.