This recap is late, but that about sums up 2022. It was a quiet year for me, and I mostly kept my head down due to lack of energy. 2022 felt more like a slog than previous pandemic yearsβwhether because we’ve settled into this uneasy “let’s just pretend there isn’t a pandemic still happening” funk or what, I’m not sure, but it always feels weird to be one of the only people still masking inside.
Work
With a new job, I’ve had to work a lot on resetting my routines. I have much less time now, and spend a lot of my work day in meetingsβmuch more than I had in the past, which has taken a great deal of time to get used to. I think it’s one of the many things fueling my low-level exhaustion, since I find video meetings especially tiring.
But I have settled, and for all I have too many meetings, I like my new job a lot. I’m working on projects focused on improving public services, and learning a lot from my fantastic coworkers. One of my biggest fears leaving a8c was leaving behind so many amazing colleagues, but my coworkers at 18F are just as kind, hard working, and caring.
I have a strong sense of responsibility for my work that I think was a natural progression from working on a huge open source project, to working on projects that impact huge swaths of America. I haven’t necessarily done anything super impactful yet, but even the small stuff feels like it can make a difference. I’ve always had a strong sense of civic duty, and this has only grown at 18F.
I’m likely going to be wrapping up the project I’ve been on since mid-year in the next few months, which is excitingβhopefully that project will launch later this year, and I can talk about it more. I’m also stoked to work on something new soon.
WordPress
I did such little contributing this year, which was frankly weird. I didn’t receive props for my first release since I started contributing over a decade ago. I miss it a lot, but it’s hard to muster up the energy to contribute after work and on the weekends.
I’d really love to do more work with patterns and block themes. I have some ideas for an updated WordCamp theme using full site editing, I just need to make the effort to sit down and try out some ideas to propose to the community.
I did have a chance to make it to WordCamp Montclair in NJ this summer, and spoke on designing with block patterns:
It was amazing to see community folks in person again, and I’m already excited for the next one this year.
Life Updates
The most exciting thing that happened in 2022: we adopted a new dog! Meet Noodle:
He’s a ~1 year old jindo mix from Korean K9 Rescue and he has been an amazing addition to our family. He’s curious, playful, and gets along with everyone. He’s also been a good influence on our other dog, Lemon, and is helping her come out of her shell a little bit more.
Also in life changes this past year, I finally got an (adult) diagnosis for ADHD, something I was diagnosed with as a kid and never treated for because I could, quote, make eye contact? And didn’t need it? Despite almost failing out of middle school? After 34 goddamn years on this Earth I am finally taking some meds for it, and I’ve noticed an improvement in my overall focus, concentration, and ability to actually start tasks. It’s not drastic by any means, but I’ll take what I can get. Looking forward to seeing how that evolves over the next year and trying not to mourn what could have been.
Hobbies
I’ve been doing some drawing and writing this past year, but mostly I’ve focused on improving my music skills. In addition to my regular music lessons, I participate in a weekly challenges on a music theory discord I’m in, which has been great for keeping me practicing.
Here’s some originals from the past year:
And some rearrangements/remixes:
I’ve also played an ungodly amount of Horizon: Forbidden West. Will that change in 2023? Probably not. (Though I have started playing The Last of Us, thanks to the new show!)
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I participate in a weekly music challenge where we alternate original composition and arrangement prompts. We need to submit both an audio render and sheet music for each prompt. Most people doing these challenges have traditional music training of some kind and often will compose directly in sheet music software like MuseScore.
I do not; I compose directly in my DAW, Ableton Live. This presents a bit of a challenge when I make my scores, so over the last year I’ve developed some techniques for creating scores in MuseScore from midi dumps. This should theoretically work with any DAW that allows you to export your individual tracks as midi files.
The purpose of your duplicate file is to simplify your song for export. I do this in a separate file so I don’t mess anything up in my song. A separate file is also good because you only need to worry about the note data.
When simplifying your file, you’ll want to:
Delete any unnecessary plugins so your file loads faster.
Quantize all of your tracks, especially if you played your parts directly into your tracks. MuseScore hates anything that isn’t perfectly quantized and will spit out some pretty terrible clusters of notes and rests otherwise.
MuseScore also doesn’t like it when notes overlap in the same part. If you have things like notes leading into other notes for pitch bending, either get rid of those or shorten them so there’s no overlap. You’ll notate the pitch bend directly in your score.
Note: if your specific track does need overlapping notes, you’ll need to do a lot of manual cleanup in MuseScore β sometimes that means just changing some voices, sometimes that means rewriting some sections. It’s painful, but I haven’t found a way around this yet. For example, see this before (top) and after (bottom):
Delete extra tracks, like duplicated pads, sound effects just there for ear candy, and anything that shouldn’t make it into your final score.
Finally, export each track as its own midi file.
Import midi into MuseScore
I have midi files set to open up in MuseScore on my computer by default, so I’ll usually just batch open all of my tracks and there they are, all lined up in MuseScore. I’ll do additional cleanup in MuseScore itself. Don’t worry if your tracks aren’t assigned to the correct instruments yet, we’ll deal with that later.
When you open up a midi file in MuseScore, a panel should be docked on the bottom of your screen with some settings:
I almost always uncheck “Clef changes.” And, if your instrument doesn’t use multiple staves, make sure “split staff” is unchecked. Depending on the instrument, I might also uncheck “show staccato.”
If your song is swung, use the “detect swing” dropdown so MuseScore knows how to handle your notes.
I’ll usually do a first round of cleanup in these individual midi files. It makes it easier to see the part I’m working on. If I need to pause and come back to it later, I’ll save the file as an .mcsz within my project folder, which is MuseScore’s native file format.
Some things I’ll look for when cleaning up my tracks:
Weird rhythmic translations; I don’t necessarily think in subdivisions when composing, which puts me at a disadvantage when making my score. I’ll go through and reassign the kind of note to make it read better, especially if I have a pause that’s not necessary, but just an artifact of how I was writing in my DAW.
If the rhythm is messed up enough, I’ll go back to my duplicated Live project and fuss with the note lengths to make sure everything is sixteenth, quarter, half, or whole, then re-export my midi file. I get in trouble a lot by making notes three beats long and then I end up with a million dotted notes and sometimes weird rests and it just gets messy.
Clean up or change voices, as needed.
Convert drum parts
If you have a drum part, RIP π π (jk jk). But this does get its own section because it is the most complicated issue I run into almost every week (since as a drummer, I like drums).
As far as I can tell, Live has no way of exporting drums to the correct midi channel that indicates to MuseScore that hello, yes, this is a drum part. So you’ll open up your drum midi and it’ll probably look something like this:
i-want-to-die.jpg
Yeah so that’s not very helpful.
You’ll want to do at least two things first: uncheck the “Split staff” option in the midi import panel (and optionally uncheck “Show staccato”) and click apply. Then, open up Mixer (F10) and check “Drumset.”
Now your score looks like this:
okay-i-can-work-with-this.jpg
Significantly more tolerable.
After this, I usually copy the whole piece, press “i” to pull up instruments, and search for the drumset instrument under “Percussion – Unpitched.” Then I’ll get rid of the piano from my instruments list, and paste my drums into the new drumset staff(this just makes all the future drum formatting a little less weird, and you’ll eventually be pasting it into a drumset staff anyway).
The next task is figuring out what pieces of the kit are actually playing. I’ve found some VSTs assign different parts of the the kit to different notes, so I spend a lot of time flipping back and forth between my project file and my score to match up the parts. In this case, despite what the score is telling me, the first four bars are playing kick (correct) and cross-stick (incorrect), with a two-tom fill (incorrect) at the end. The next section has a kick (correct), cross-stick (still incorrect) and now some closed hi-hats (incorrect).
This is where a lot of tedious work comes in. I’ll select each note for a particular drum kit piece, then press up/down on my keyboard until it’s assigned to the correct placement on the score. MuseScore will play the sound associated with each note so you can do it pretty much by ear, and if you’re not a drummer and struggle with any of the sounds, you can click an individual note head and the drum name will appear on the bottom of the UI:
You might have to do this for almost every note in your drum staff and yes, it sucks.
Edit: You don’t, actuallyβdo right click > select > more... > then pick the same pitch option and move them all at once!
Unless I’m doing something really simple with just a bass drum, snare, hi-hat, and occasional crash, I’ll also split my drum part into two voicings: one voice for foot parts (bass, hi-hat pedal) and one for hands. This is also a pain and takes a lot of manual work. As you split your staff into two voicings, you’ll also start getting a lot of extraneous rests. I guess it’s best practice to hide them all by selecting all of the rests (right click > select > all similar elements in same staff) and pressing “v,” but that still shows them grayed out while I’m editing my score. I find that annoying, so I just delete them.
You might find yourself with some sharp or flat accidentals still hanging around from your initial import; I select the entire staff (cmd/ctrl + a), then tap up on my keyboard, then down (to bring all the notes back into place) and it gets rid of all the accidentals.
My final output looks something like this:
Create a new score
Use MuseScore’s setup wizard when creating your score, instead of the blank file that appears when you first open the software. The wizard lets you choose specific instruments to add to your score, puts them in mostly the agreed-upon correct orchestral score order (according to my servermates), and pick the key, time signature, and tempo for your piece.
Once your score is set up, it’s pretty easy just to copy and paste your individual tracks into their respective instruments. If I forgot one or need to add/remove staves, pressing “i” will bring the instruments menu back up.
I’ll do any remaining cleanup I didn’t do in my individual midi files and then move to formatting.
Format score
As someone with no classical training, I know very little about writing good sheet music. Everything I know I’ve picked up because of these weekly challenges, whether that’s asking other folks on the server, or asking my music teacher about specific items. Here are some common tasks I do once all of my parts are in place, using the palette menu (F9):
Adding any missing braces to instruments that share staves, and brackets to group sections (like strings)
Barlines and rehearsal marks (under “text“) to denote sections
Lines like slurs and hairpins, dynamic markings for volume, and articulations (like accents) to direct players on how I want the piece played
8va/8vb for any sections where an instrument goes really high or low, in comparison to other sections. This just means “this part is played an octave higher/lower.”
Breaks & spacers to shift my sections around so nothing gets weirdly cut off or to prevent a new section from starting on the last bar of a page. 4 bars per line (or other powers of two) are generally the recommendation, and you might need to add breaks to make that work.
I have not yet graduated to being comfortable using things like repeats and voltas because I am a coward and there’s a whole lot more I’m still missing (like piano sustain pedals; how do they work?) but these tips have been enough to keep me in the 3/5 range for my score ratings each week which is at least like, a passing grade by American standards.
After that, I’ll make page style adjustments like flipping to landscape or changing the page size to fit the number of instruments and staves in my score. It’s not like anyone is actually going to print these, they’re just for practice and for show, so I can crop them however fits the piece best. I might also fiddle with staff spacing depending upon how loose or cramped my score is.
Finally, I’ll export to pdf, and boom, done! One score, ready to be uploaded to my weekly prompt.
Hope this helps anyone else looking to make sheet music from midi in MuseScore!
I’m in a music theory discord that does weekly challenges, alternating between original composition and arrangement weeks. I’ve been doing them pretty consistently over the last year.
Each week has a different prompt. Recently, we did this prompt during an original composition week:
Object theme composition prompt
We’ve composed themes for places, battles, people, monsters, love, etc. Now it is time to make a theme for an object. Some object ideas to inspire people:
– a legendary sword – cursed treasure – a wedding dress never worn – some macguffin everyone is trying to get – a magic ring
I was joking around with ryelle about ideas for my piece that week, and she suggested making a song entirely out of samples of a particular object. Which, you know, is freaking brilliant. I ended up choosing the humble pencil as my object. As I wrote in the score I submitted alongside my piece:
From the humble pencil comes magic. Writers create vivid stories, artists draw masterful pieces, and composers put song onto page. In honor of the pencil, every single instrument in this song has been created using pencil sounds β scrapes, scribbles, and taps. From synths to drums, the pencil can do it all.
Folks were like “how the hell did you do that,” so I figured I’d actually write down my process, if only so I can refer back to it later when I inevitably forget. The melody itself is pretty lackluster, but the techniques I used to generate each instrument were pretty fun.
Here’s what I ended up submitting:
“Pencil”
Sampling
I’d originally planned on recording my own pencil samples, but I ended up getting tight on time, so I opted to search through https://freesound.org/ for some different pencil sounds. They have a CC0 search which has come in handy for a lot of songs! I searched for a few different kinds of sounds, like tapping, scratching, heavy writing, etc. I figured a different range of timbres would give me the best possible starting points.
Once I found some samples, I dropped them into Ableton and started cutting them down with different instruments in mind. For example, looking for sounds I could transform into a high hat, bass drum, and snare for the drums (because of course I’m going to do drums). Those needed to be short, clear sounds, but my synth samples could be a little looser.
Processing
After cutting down my samples, I moved on to sound design and processing of each sample. This part of the process was a lot of playing with audio effects and plugins in Ableton, as well as warping and distorting the clips to create interesting new sounds.
All of the samples got really heavy-handed EQing to narrow in on specific ranges (high for my high hats, lows for my bass drum, mids for my synth, etc.). My drum parts got additional saturation and Ableton’s overdrive effect to oomph up the sounds, a little bit of reverb for resonance. I also used Couture by Auburn Sounds to create snappier transients. My snare and bass drums also got some additional sound shaping through Diablo by Cymatics.
Everything got compression β usually a glue compressor at the beginning of my effects chain and a regular compressor at the end.
To make my lead synth, I used Ableton’s stock resonator to build some harmonics into my sound and then tuned it to a single pitch using Melodyne. The synth also got some overdrive, saturation, and a bit of character from Baby Audio’s Magic Switch and Magic Dice. I also made a bass and sub-bass from the same clip, just using different EQing. I tuned those as well, and played around with some of Ableton’s pedals and the drum buss effect to accentuate the low end.
I knew I wanted to add in some ear candy, so I also took some samples and did a lot of stretching, squashing, and reversing to find interesting sounds. These also got EQ, overdrive, saturation, and a ton of compression, along with some other pedal and phaser effects in some cases. Once I felt good about my sounds, I recorded them each onto new tracks. I threw these frozen samples into Ableton’s drum rack, and sampler instrument for my synths.
I needed to do a lot of volume adjustment in my drum rack to get the different clips a little more normalized. I still don’t think it’s a super cohesive drum kit, but at some point you just need to move on, you know?
Sampler is great because I was just able to set the initial pitch for it to extrapolate everything else from, and then boom, instant synth. Both my lead synth and bass synths got additional EQing and compression. At some point later in composing, my piece felt a little bare, so I created two pad synths using the same kind of techniques and different samples I’d isolated earlier. I also added Bittersweet by Flux to each pad.
Composition
The actual composition of this piece was absolutely second to the sound design, oops. I made a really repetitive, bouncy, simple melodic line an ABAB structure with a little drum break in the middle. I used maybe five chords in the entire song, using my pad instruments.
The bass I got a little funky with. I started by duplicating my melody, adjusting the rhythm, and adding passing notes between the root notes. I wanted to bring in more bounce. Once that was done, I doubled the part an octave lower for my sub-bass.
For drums I just busted something out that played on the rhythm I’d established on the bass, then added and subtracted some notes to introduce more variation.
Once I had the actual song composed, I took all my different FX noises and scattered them throughout the piece to give it more texture. Some of the samples still sounded like pencils, so I used those to start and end the piece to establish the theme.
Mixing and Mastering
My mixing for this was pretty simple, mostly just some volume balancing and reverb (Valhalla Super Massive) and delay (stock Ableton). I also sidechained my pads and bass to my kick drum, using Ableton’s stock sidechain compression setting (honestly because I was lazy and didn’t want to configure ShaperBox).
β¨ c h a o s β¨
I use the same mastering chain for most of my songs: EQ, saturator, glue compressor, and Ozone Elements by Izotope. I struggled a LOT with finding a good preset to adjust in Ozone β the sounds in this are so weird, it just didn’t know what to do with them. Eventually I got something that mostly works okay and kind of dialed back on some other settings.
“Pencil” again, in case you want to take another listen for any specific parts.
Finally, I threw together a slapdash score in Musescore and submitted my piece! I got a pretty decent rating for the week, too:
prompt: You got an average score of 4.86 score: You got an average score of 3.67 overall: You got an average score of 4.00 Your total average was: 4.20!
Since the pandemic started, and I wasn’t able to take drum lessons in person, I’ve pivoted to learning music theory and composition. I’ve noodled with a bunch of songs, some of which you can hear on SoundCloud, but this past March I decided to work on my first EP: a collection of remixed, lofi Chrono Cross songs.
Chrono Cross has long been one of my favorite videogame OSTs, and it felt like an OST that would fit well into the lofi genre. I selected a few of the chiller songs from the first disc, grabbed some midis or the original audio to edit, and dropped them into Ableton Live. This was a good chance for me to practice adding effects, as well as mixing and mastering my tracks.
It’s been a long year. Like, a long, stressful, kind of terrifying year. One thing I learned this year? I’d created all these amazing coping mechanisms to improve my mental health, like my weekly drum lessons and band practice. Guess what I couldn’t do once the pandemic hit in March? See other people in enclosed spaces. Like studios. So, there went all my beautiful coping mechanisms.
Luckily I was able to start doing remote music lessons with my drum instructor, replacing our in-person drum lessons. We’ve been going through the basics of music theory, composition, and mixing.
Once I started writing music, we progressed from some basic song forms:
“AABA” song form exercise from April
To rearranging songs:
“Costa del Sol” but like, jazzier or something, done in June and July
To finally, my first fully composed tune. I started working on this untitled lo-fi tune in early October, knocking out most of the chords and the melody within a day, along with a basic drum part, crackly vinyl, and vocals samples from an old radio show:
First draft of my lo-fi tune from early October
Then, I spent over a month going back and forth with my instructor each week, building up some additional parts, restructuring the drums and recording my own sounds to reinforce them, and lastly adding in a sampled sound effect to bring in some impact. Finally, Max mixed all the pieces together and we went over the various plugins and techniques he used to make it sound great.
Here’s the final tune. It’s the first full song I’ve written and for now, I’m pretty dang happy with it. Enjoy!