Tag Archives: Composing

2025-11-05

MIDI – The Ultimate Guide to Get Started

Do you want to make songs, but can’t play all the instruments needed? Virtual instruments to the rescue! And MIDI is the way you control them – what they play, and how they play it. In this video you will learn everything about how MIDI works in a DAW – especially in Reaper, but valid for any DAW.

We will cover recording, editing, instrument plugins, velocity, quantizing, humanizing, pitch bends, drums and advanced track routing. Go from MIDI curious to MIDI expert in 22 minutes and 19 seconds.

2014-04-26

Making Programmed Drums Sound Real

Even with great-sounding VST drumkits, it can be tricky to make them sound real – here are some great tips!

2013-05-21

How To Do Lead Guitar Harmonies

Having two guitars that play the same melody but at different intervals in a scale, you can create the same beautiful effect for your lead guitars that choirs use for vocal harmonies.

2013-05-06

How to Get a Great Tone from Bass Plugins

Track structure for bass tracks in Reaper

With no bassist and no bass guitar, you can still make bass tracks for your songs using a plugin in your DAW. Learn how to apply the mixing tips in the Systematic Mixing Guide bass chapter to a bass plugin to get a great bass tone.

2012-08-04

7 Essential iPhone Apps for Guitarists

Even if you are extremely busy or always on the go, you can get a lot done musically done with your iPhone or iPad. Here are the apps I use most to learn and create music.

2012-05-15

Writing Your First Song Part III: Putting It All Together

This is the third and final part of a series. You’ll find the previous parts here: Writing Your First Song Part I: Creating Riffs Writing Your First Song Part II: Recording and Arranging The Other Instruments Having recorded your guitar tracks and decided the order of the different parts you are ready to put them […]

2012-03-18

Adequacy Is Irrelevant – Anyone Can Make Music

It is my great pleasure to present this guest post from Dan Vuksanovich, who runs the site Why I Suck at Guitar: It can be daunting for an aspiring rock/metal guitarist to feel adequate these days. There was a time when a few tasty pentatonic licks might turn heads, but the rock guitar game changed forever […]

2012-03-14

Writing Your First Song Part II: Recording and Arranging

This is the second part in a three part series. You find the first part here: Writing Your First Song Part I: Creating Riffs. When you have a bunch of riffs you need to arrange them into a song. A song normally has (all or some of) the following building blocks (borrowing a bit from […]

2012-02-13

Writing Your First Song Part I: Creating Riffs

This is the first of a three part series about writing, recording and mixing your first song. I’m by no means an expert on the subject, but this will get you started. The obvious first obstacle is coming up with a song, writing the chords and notes. Composing, if you will. So where do you […]

2011-12-02

10 Great Tips from Wikihow on Writing Thrash Riffs

I found a list of 10 great tips in an unexpected place – Wikihow. Wikihow is a collaborative site with how-to manuals on almost every subject, including writing thrash riffs apparently. The tips are simple but really very good and most of them can be applied to writing music in general. Here’s the list in […]