Sound Design & Song Improvising w/o Controller

[DimensionX]

My goal is to not press stop and make a song from scratch without a controller. Between init patches and desired sound, I design in a musical way as if it were a performance, similar to how a djing selects songs between songs except Im making the songs that im switching between. Another key is to let it repeat too long that it gets boring unless its catchy.

I basically start with an init patch in any synth and get a melody or chord progression in a short loop (for performing practice) and then match either or with either.

Then I make percussive sounds in a synth and start creating a rhythm.

Then I start sound designing (both in synth and post fx) and making rhythms until it gets too repetitive

The next part gets difficult to create the next loop especially so I somtimes just record the melody/chord progressions on the spot and tune waveforms but it starts to get repetitive after awhile (time to learn theory!). But of course this way you can do some waveform editing (still without pressing stop)

This is where I sometimes find my best sounds I mightn't have made in another way. This also is really good practice to get to know your tools so you can get your ideas out faster.

Im looking for any other ways I can make music on the fly as I get very bored of trying to go back to a song I created in a time and space I'm not present in anymore... Ideas/thoughts/feelings more than welcome!

[soronery]

Record everything you do. Once you've got a rhythm going for a two/three hour jam session, and are actually going through progressions etc, you can easily find an 8min chunk to cut out and edit into a track.

[AxeD]

Pretty much how I make all my music. It's going to get repetitive though, because
you don't have enough control over the DAW if you want to keep everything going.

[SaveMidnight]

Honestly I feel Like that depends on your DAW. That doesn't sound that difficult on Ableton or Reason, but it might be a pain in Reaper or Pro Tools.

[SaveMidnight]

Honestly I feel Like that depends on your DAW. That doesn't sound that difficult on Ableton or Reason, but it might be a pain in Reaper or Pro Tools.

[fragments]

You are looking for a new way to do this w/o a controller just using a mouse? I mean besides recording while you are doing this or doing things in a different order I'm not sure how different you can make the process w/o changing the input method. Honestly playing in things live via some kind of "instrument" is going to be the biggest game changer according to the process you describe...at least IMHO... even if "playing the instrument" is live tweaking knobs for synth parameters...

[topmo3]

I didn't get anything tbh

[nowaysj]

Im looking for any other ways I can make music on the fly as I get very bored of trying to go back to a song I created in a time and space I'm not present in anymore... Ideas/thoughts/feelings more than welcome!

Consider this, my unknown dimension: as we practice our craft and art, we develop abilities. Much has been discovered and disseminated about neural plasticity. Most recently I've absolutely confirmed this for myself. My musical imagination has expanded greatly. It is an ability I never had before. Perhaps other people have always had this? I'm trying to understand this now. But I can hear and remember sound now in MUCH greater detail, like I can remember the actual recording. I can image the sound. It is like I'm listening to cd audio in my head now. This is an ability, I promise you, I did not have before, but after much time spent very precisely listening, I've developed this ability. This has been prelude for the following point:

You can work towards developing your ability to expand the time and space of your consciousness to include multiple sessions. Through concerted effort, you can expand your ability to get into that particular groove again. Once you can do this, you can invest more in your song making. You can execute greater musical/sonic thoughts and visions than you could if you avoid these challenges and merely keep your abilities of concentration at a flaccid 2 hour session.

Think on what difficulty is: a cliche: pain is weakness leaving the body, but this is true for many things. We are the plastic animal. We can expand our abilities into anything we desire through concerted, sustained, and actually onerous work. Obviously, no one wants to work. We'd all love to wake up to a massage, maybe a little bouncy bouncy, a warm bath, a gourmet meal, a saunter into the studio in our silk robe to press some buttons and kick out the most amazing jams, all in time for our mid morning nap... but you will actually achieve absolutely nothing if you proceed in this manner, if you don't confront the challenges that face you. If every time you are confronted with a challenge, you opt to avoid the challenge, looking for parallel, less onerous solutions, you will never develop your abilities. If, instead, you square up to the challenge, and you surmount it through concentration and difficulty, and do so again and again, those challenges will become your abilities, everything difficult that you've learned to do will be your strengths. You will do and make greater things than if you simply looked for alternatives to the work.

I'm not saying this in condensation, I'm saying this to myself. There are parts of music making that have always been difficult for me, in fact, I'm an extremely unmusical person, like I mentioned, I've only recently developed my musical imagination (see http://www.amazon.com/Musicophilia-Tale ... 1400033535 by the way for a discussion of musical imagination). But for the past 15 years I've been avoiding learning the keyboard, the PRIMARY interface to daw/electronic music. I hate the keyboard, and I hate the music theory that lies beneath it. Honestly, such an archaic and duplicitous system for understanding music... I really feel a totally new system of understanding could come about to describe the same underlying principles in a consistent, more readily apparent manner. But beyond that, and as it stands, the system is the system, and I've hated it, and been confused by it the whole time, so have sought parallel solutions, I've avoided the conflict. TO MY DETRIMENT. I've not achieved what I've wanted to achieve because of my inability to play keys. Wasted so many years. I get the sense that you are young. But I promise you, time is short, we have far less time than we think we do, and learning these abilities takes a great amount of time. In looking at people who achieve musical success (not popular success, but actual musical expressiveness) they almost always start out young, and practice A LOT at what they do.

In the beginning, bouncing off of challenges and moving around is a great way to develop a map of music making. There are many ways to make music, and until you've moved around much of it, it doesn't make sense to marry issues you're not really committed to. But once you've moved about for a time, and developed your map of music, SQUARE UP AND WORK.

[fragments]

Im looking for any other ways I can make music on the fly as I get very bored of trying to go back to a song I created in a time and space I'm not present in anymore... Ideas/thoughts/feelings more than welcome!

Consider this, my unknown dimension: as we practice our craft and art, we develop abilities. Much has been discovered and disseminated about neural plasticity. Most recently I've absolutely confirmed this for myself. My musical imagination has expanded greatly. It is an ability I never had before. Perhaps other people have always had this? I'm trying to understand this now. But I can hear and remember sound now in MUCH greater detail, like I can remember the actual recording. I can image the sound. It is like I'm listening to cd audio in my head now. This is an ability, I promise you, I did not have before, but after much time spent very precisely listening, I've developed this ability. This has been prelude for the following point:

You can work towards developing your ability to expand the time and space of your consciousness to include multiple sessions. Through concerted effort, you can expand your ability to get into that particular groove again. Once you can do this, you can invest more in your song making. You can execute greater musical/sonic thoughts and visions than you could if you avoid these challenges and merely keep your abilities of concentration at a flaccid 2 hour session.

Think on what difficulty is: a cliche: pain is weakness leaving the body, but this is true for many things. We are the plastic animal. We can expand our abilities into anything we desire through concerted, sustained, and actually onerous work. Obviously, no one wants to work. We'd all love to wake up to a massage, maybe a little bouncy bouncy, a warm bath, a gourmet meal, a saunter into the studio in our silk robe to press some buttons and kick out the most amazing jams, all in time for our mid morning nap... but you will actually achieve absolutely nothing if you proceed in this manner, if you don't confront the challenges that face you. If every time you are confronted with a challenge, you opt to avoid the challenge, looking for parallel, less onerous solutions, you will never develop your abilities. If, instead, you square up to the challenge, and you surmount it through concentration and difficulty, and do so again and again, those challenges will become your abilities, everything difficult that you've learned to do will be your strengths. You will do and make greater things than if you simply looked for alternatives to the work.

I'm not saying this in condensation, I'm saying this to myself. There are parts of music making that have always been difficult for me, in fact, I'm an extremely unmusical person, like I mentioned, I've only recently developed my musical imagination (see http://www.amazon.com/Musicophilia-Tale ... 1400033535 by the way for a discussion of musical imagination). But for the past 15 years I've been avoiding learning the keyboard, the PRIMARY interface to daw/electronic music. I hate the keyboard, and I hate the music theory that lies beneath it. Honestly, such an archaic and duplicitous system for understanding music... I really feel a totally new system of understanding could come about to describe the same underlying principles in a consistent, more readily apparent manner. But beyond that, and as it stands, the system is the system, and I've hated it, and been confused by it the whole time, so have sought parallel solutions, I've avoided the conflict. TO MY DETRIMENT. I've not achieved what I've wanted to achieve because of my inability to play keys. Wasted so many years. I get the sense that you are young. But I promise you, time is short, we have far less time than we think we do, and learning these abilities takes a great amount of time. In looking at people who achieve musical success (not popular success, but actual musical expressiveness) they almost always start out young, and practice A LOT at what they do.

In the beginning, bouncing off of challenges and moving around is a great way to develop a map of music making. There are many ways to make music, and until you've moved around much of it, it doesn't make sense to marry issues you're not really committed to. But once you've moved about for a time, and developed your map of music, SQUARE UP AND WORK.