Making music as a non-musician

1. How the hell do I make music?

When I started this project, I had honestly completely forgotten that I’d eventually have to do music. I mean for the longest time, I was just trying to get things to work, and when I finally did, i was like “oh fuck I need music”.

 I ended up taking on the task of making the music myself instead of buying it, I just felt it would be more personal. It was okay if it was a bit shitty, it was mine after all. After like a day’s worth of attempts, I realized I need an actual keyboard to play the things I wanted, so I bought the cheapest one I could find.

It was fun to start the process. I played the keyboard as a kid; I was never really that good, but I did like it. I started thinking about what kind of music I wanted to make, but I realized what the answer would be quite quickly: piano music. The person the break-up was with was a pianist, and in addition, I had in the starting screen used the imagery of a piano, so it would just make sense for piano-music to be the centre of the music in this game.

Here’s the issue though: I don’t know how to play the piano. I knew how to play the keyboard in its most basic form, which is: melody with your right hand, and striking chords with your left hand. Piano music very often forces you to play two separate melodies with your two hands. And yes I tried, but I was... absolute garbage.

But it’s the age of computers, so I was able to find a work-around. I started with just doing the base melody, which in most cases was with my left hand, recorded that, and then let that play in the background while I then proceded to play with my right hand, with some melody that I thought fit with the base melody. This made the music I was making extremely limited in what I could make, because in most piano-music you can shift around quite a lot and make interesting dynamics... but it was something, and it was something that was enough for this project. In my next post, I think I'll talk about the songs or whatever you can call it one by one and kind of go through the process of making them.