I popped onto GameDev.net today and spotted John Hattan's review of Musicshake, a free-to-use music composition tool. It's rather reminiscent of FL Studio, but I never could figure that one out... mostly because none of the instruments seemed to fit. [lol] Musicshake is a lot simpler though, and John compared it to a Strumstick in easiness. I really have to agree. I downloaded Musicshake and it got me started with a randomly created tune from a genre of my choice; I picked Techno/Electronic. I played around with the interface a bit to get used to it, and it's really simple.

To test the waters as I went, I picked instruments that sounded good and messed with the pattern grid and chord selection. It's a bit of trial and error when selecting instruments, but the selection box helpfully adds tags to the left of the instrument names showing what type they are, i.e. [Melody], [Chord Harmony], or any of the others out there. I didn't have to worry about writing a melody, because Musicshake's chord selector for each bar generates one for you. The chords look like wavy lines above the columns, and one would assume that depending on how high or low the line is at a given point in the bar, you get a certain note. But I don't know terribly much about how this thing was made...

The end result was two [Melody]s, two [Chord Harmony]s, and two [Rhythm]s (one with a reverb/normalize tone) combining into a really rather nice and atmospheric tune... so I dubbed it "Atmosphere". Click Here to take a listen.







Also, how do you get the blasted image to center itself? align="center" and style="float:center" don't work. [oh]

EDIT: Thanks, Gaiiden. [grin]