Dobro,
What's a melodica? Are you perhaps referring to the saxaphone sample? All of the instruments were sampled on this one. The drums were fruityloops and various other samples, and the melodic instruments I found at the website I mentioned above (they're free, check em out!). "Monday" has live trombones in it.
Right now I'm just sort of experimenting. Fruity Loops is horrible for this sort of thing. Doing chords is a big fat pain in the butt. What I'm working on though is just creating multiple rythyms and melodies that work together. Like in this one there are three (well, two and a half) melodies and at 2:13 I combine them all into one. I really like doing that. Sometimes it just happens to work out, kinda lucky like....but it's also cool to create one complex melody part and then strip out sub-melodies from it. I don't really know what I'm talking about...I just click a bunch of buttons and the computer makes noises.
CMiller,
There's no key to becoming adventerous, and I certainly don't even feel adventerous. It's just that a) I've become very bored with music in general and b) I've keep in contact with people who I think are amazing. When I hear something at drstawl does for instance, it really makes me want to try something new and completely foreign. When I hear something that ametth does, it really makes me want to try to create nice warm melodies. And when I hear something that S8-N does, it makes me want to write something with a lot of power. Finally, I always have Ed listen to my mixes with the goal of eventually having him say, "welp, that sounds about as good as it's going to." and so on...
CyanJaguar,
Thanks very much! Again I'll just say that I used the samples from the site mentioned above. They're just raw wave files. I don't have any soundfont capability or anything like that. I'm not even doing MIDI, it's all just programmed. I'd like to get a MIDI keyboard. Last night I had this weird dream that I was at some Walmart-type store and they had all these MIDI keyboards for $20, but they only had 5 keys. Not sure what that means
I'm trying to finish up work on "Monday" and "Tuesday." I think people will be semi-suprised at the difference from these last two. Basically I've had three songs come up in the past two weeks since I've been better, plus one song from a couple weeks before that. Lots of variety in style I think. It was my new years rant resolution to try a bunch of different stuff.
Slackmaster 2000