MusicDevelopments

themixtape · Post by **themixtape** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 1:43 am

Chris here (the crazy, hyper tutorial video guy).

Just wanted to give a big thanks to Attila to making one of the most useful, fun, and groundbreaking softwares to ever exist. I also want to thank him for helping me out, giving me freelance work (manual updates, tutorial creation, custom Phrase creation, etc). All I do for a living is music... I teach it (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards), and I do freelance stuff like this. It's a great living. I wish more people were interested in my original music and I wish I could tour, but being as I haven't put out a vast majority of original music, I guess it's to be expected.

Anyway, I also wanted to thank all of YOU for making this community awesome... and really bringing RC to the forefront of independent music creation software. I think it's only going to get better and better, in the future.

Attila and I have worked closely on features added, and ways to make the program more functional. We have never Skyped or talked on the phone. Strictly email, and through this forum. I have no idea who he is other than text on a screen. But he's a great guy, and I truly appreciate his artistry.

I always use RC as a chord progression sketchpad... playing around with chords, seeing which ones sound good together (then often transferring them to guitar)... it's fun just clicking around in the Chord Selector, and seeing what works. Also, I use the Melody Generator almost always. Always trying to figure out a way to make it sound more human, or generate more "pop" or "alternative"-sounding melodies. Melody has always been the bane of my existence. I love it in music, but in my original stuff, I do my best, but always feel my melodies fall short, of what they have the potential to become. I'm an experienced songwriter, but not melodically. It's always been one of those things that I adore, but also hate... because I feel I'm never as good as all the wonderful, perfect music I listen to. But the MG definitely helps me get unstuck, almost 100% of the time.

I just love this damn program. As I update the manual to 2.83 (working non-stop, almost... since Friday), and as we transition to the MusicDevelopments site and the Wiki for RC (which is definitely a better idea than a PDF... easier to update, and in real-time).... I'm just excited about what's to come.

I'll share a little feature requests I've been buggin' Attila about for about two years now:

1. Somehow having a "midi learn" and "trigger" feature... like Ableton... using keyboard modifiers... to trigger Phrases, to try out ideas before Filling the tracks with Generators. Basically "playing" your composition in real-time before you write it in (Ableton Push is great for this, for the most part). For example... say you make CoolPhrase1 through CoolPhrase20. Those are your main. It would be great to say, have these triggerable on the first 20 keys of your MIDI keyboard... and then, like... 7 keys in a different octave could be chords I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi, and vii0... so you can hold the 7 "diatonic chord" keys and modify the Phrases to fit the chord... like, say you hit C1.... it plays CoolPhrase1. Then, you hold C4, it plays it as Chord I.... then you hold D4, and it morphs the Phrase into the ii chord (Dm in the key of C).... you guys know what I mean? It would be great to have a "GRID" feature or something... and you can drag the phrases into cells, that are midi-mappable (kind of like the way a Sampler works)... and then the modifiers could be chords you specify, or the basic diatonic keys. SO useful, right?

2. Idea Tool - giving you the option (as I wrote in the manual)... to generate up to like 64 bars of a song/Composition... and being able to make an Idea for a piece of your Composition (for example, bars 17 to 20)... but not losing any of your track configurations, etc. So much potential, here.... but yeah, it needs to be a little more flexible. Like "I need a 4-bar part, quick!" and bam... there it is, wherever you want it. But without killing your instruments on the tracks, or start a new Composition.

3. An easier way to insert a LOT of bars, into a Composition. Right now, I believe we can only insert beats. That takes forever if you want to create a 180-bar composition. I usually don't want to do the mental math... I'd rather work in bars. "Create new Composition - Enter Total Measures ____" or something. It helps a lot, especially in VST mode.[/b]

So yeah, that's about it... just wanted to thank Attila again.... what a brilliant program. It had a rocky start, but I reached out to Attila sometime in early 2012, saying "so much potential here, but crashes constantly! Would you like me to do some bug-testing?" And basically, Attila wrote back, saying he'd appreciate it... and we've been working together ever since. Such a nice guy! And I really appreciate that he likes my music and my YouTube stuff/passion, etc. It makes me feel really appreciated, and important, as I basically feel like I work for MusicDevelopments, even though I just kind of help him with random stuff whenever I can. I feel like I'm a part of his team.

Really, I think we all feel like we're a part of MusicDevelopments... ya know? He's that nice and quick to respond to forum posts and bug reports, and we're all that helpful and constructive. It's like the MusicDevelopments collective. Pretty awesome.

So, thanks again!

-Chris Caulder
http://youtube.com/chriscauldermusic
http://oustedrecords.com
http://oustedrecords.bandcamp.com

forrestlong · Post by **forrestlong** » Tue Feb 10, 2015 2:48 am

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your excellent work to make RC’s capabilities more understandable, and to provide feature ideas that are very exciting. Cannot wait to see the Wiki. (And, hoping Attila will implement your 3 new features soon.)

Thanks,
Forrest

musicdevelopments · Post by **musicdevelopments** » Tue Feb 10, 2015 8:15 pm

Hi Chris,

thank you for your kind words and for being so enthusiastic! Your contribution to the manual and videos are invaluable.

Yes, the program had a rocky start... I made a mistake to release the first version too soon, but I needed feedback from real composers after several years of development. RC v1.0 was very buggy and missing lots of features. Still there were a few people who believed in it (I still remember the first customers by name!) and I needed some positive feedback not to stop the development, when you are not sure if it makes sense what you do.
RC is 5 years old, but it is still young, at about 20-25% of its life cycle. The to-do list has about 200 entries of features and bugs to fix...

About the features you requested:
1) this is a bigger task, but it will definitely be added after v3.0...
2) the Idea Tool will be rewritten for v3.0 this spring/summer. I am excited about this. The current Idea Tool was just an experiment, I was not sure how many users would use it, and how useful it would be. Now I know how to make it better and more flexible.
3) this will be added in the next few days for the next beta version

Thanks!
Attila

themixtape · Post by **themixtape** » Fri May 01, 2015 6:16 pm

Just giving another shout to Attila--

Thanks for all the great features and changes in the latest beta! I love how all the note divisions are equal across the board... makes things so much easier to understand, especially for those of us in the western world.

The scalable "manual editing" window is also AWESOME.

Harmonizing a melody (the newest big feature).... all that stuff. GREAT feature... so insanely useful and can really spark a lot of good ideas... sometimes a generated melody is great but you just can't find the right chords underneath. That alone is so amazing.

I'd like to do some new videos soon, of the Harmonization feature, and some of the new additions to RC. I've been very busy but I'm definitely trying to get it going, after I finish a lot of other things I need to finish.

Thanks again Attila, for all your great work, and thanks to this great community of RC users... you guys are awesome!

yellukhan · Post by **yellukhan** » Sat May 02, 2015 1:55 am

Hi Chris,
i don't know how did i miss this topic, since Feb. 9 ..
i can't say much about "1" but i think a lot of people would love it.
2- absolutely +1 , waiting v3

3- just checked

, was already here.

finally:
Thank You!

musicdevelopments · Post by **musicdevelopments** » Sun May 03, 2015 12:33 pm

Hi Chris, Yıldırım,

yes, this is an amazing community, with great ideas and incredible creativity. Although there are always plans for what features come next, feedback from RC users is more important, and I handle them as higher priority than planned features.
I am afraid 3) is not done yet. The good news is that after 2 days of intensive work, the new VST plug-in started to work on OS X, and this means the promised features will be added next.
Thank you for your support!

Attila

yellukhan · Post by **yellukhan** » Mon May 04, 2015 7:22 am

uhm what did i miss

musicdevelopments · Post by **musicdevelopments** » Mon May 04, 2015 11:58 am

I think what Chris meant was a quick way to create a new composition by telling the program the number of bars, bars per line, lines per part.

themixtape · Post by **themixtape** » Mon May 04, 2015 10:10 pm

All of that would be awesome, but especially just being able to input a maximum number of bars.... quickly and easily.... like 100... just input a field and BAM, 100 bars in RC. Especially good in VST mode.

musicdevelopments · Post by **musicdevelopments** » Wed May 06, 2015 10:12 am

This was added today:

Question: is it necessary to use "Quarter Notes" here? Or "Beats" is fine?

Thanks,
Attila

yellukhan · Post by **yellukhan** » Wed May 06, 2015 10:52 am

probably ill use only Bars but just in case Beats is fine imo.

tonedef71 · Post by **tonedef71** » Wed May 06, 2015 10:02 pm

musicdevelopments wrote:This was added today:

Question: is it necessary to use "Quarter Notes" here? Or "Beats" is fine?

Thanks,
Attila

"Beats" is fine.

I would actually prefer if we could insert both "Beats" and "Bars" at the same time; afterall, one could simply leave one or the other at zero, if both are not needed:

To allow the number of "Beats" and "Bars" to be specified concurrently, the range of the "Beats" picker control should probably be enforced to be between zero and the maximum number of beats per bar (as allowed by the time signature specified in the header for the bar to be added to; or as allowed by the time signature specified for the composition).

musicdevelopments · Post by **musicdevelopments** » Thu May 07, 2015 7:34 am

Thanks for the replies.
Yes, Tony, it is very logical, I can't believe this did not occur to me, but I will leave it as it is now.

dsan@mail.com · Post by **dsan@mail.com** » Thu May 07, 2015 1:25 pm

Considering the logic of adding beats as relevant to time signature, will it be just as logical to add a choice to change the time signature when using "Insert Bars" ?

BTW - this is a really good idea - "Insert Bars". Thanks for thinking up this one

MusicDevelopments

KVR Audio

Thank you, Attila, and all you guys