Handmade

Here is a piece of music which is very special to me. Do you hear anything different in this one ?. Expect for the most discerning listener, I'm sure many of us don't hear any difference in this piece. It is what it sounds, an amateur piece of music. I've to tell you how I got into this composing craze before I reveal how this was created. Last June, my friend wrote a song on Ayyappan and sent it to me for my opinion; the words were very rhythmic and I surprised him by composing a tune and singing it. In a couple of days he sends me another poem and I did a similar exercise. Within a month we actually had ten songs and guess what, we actually decided to do an album and eventually we did cut a CD. I'll write more on what actually happened to that CD.

Back to the creation of this piece. There are several ways in which you can create music. The most common method is to play the instruments and using even an ordinary keyboard you can get several different tones (instruments), but remember if it just you who is creating a piece, then you have to play one instrument at time and record each instrument in a different track.
There is another way you create music, the Ilayaraja way, you write music notation on a staff sheet and let others play it. If you cannot find musicians to play these instruments then let the "Computer" play it, provided you have notations written into a software. "Oh.. ethu thaa computer musica !! ". There are scores of software that allow you do that. And all these software also have a keyboard like interface along with the staff sheet page. The one I used is a "Demo version of Guitar Pro 4". I really like their interface, it allows you to punch in the notes and you can then can change the duration, add accents, tell it do an up stroke /down stroke (for real guitar effects) and all the other additions, so it mimics a real musician. And to cut the long story short, I punched in every single note, including the percussion and chords to create this piece. It took several days to complete this evn though it only runs for a minute or so. Once this is done the standard Microsoft software synthesizer, in-built into all windows machines, play the notes and lo and behold you got music !!. After completing this, I thought I can any write any kind of music, but it is a different story how the second piece I created, sounded almost like the first one, crashing my dream of overthrowing Ilayaraja.
There is also another way to create music, I’ll write more this, please listen to the latest piece and let me know.