I’ve been wanting to try my hand at creating electronic music on my computer for years, but, having made the decision over 10 years ago to limit myself to free open-source software (including operating systems), there hasn’t really been many tools to suit my very limited knowledge in this area. There are apparently several really good tracker/sequencer applications available, but I’m apparently too stupid and non-musical to operate them.

This morning I decided once and for all that I was going to try to make something vaguely resembling music, and that I was going to do it entirely with Audacity. The following (really shabby) “composition” is made entirely from the first 11 seconds of the Guns and Roses song Sweet Child of Mine, mangled and manipulated with a whole slew of Audacity plugins. Audacity is a lot clunkier than I’d like, meaning it’s pretty difficult to get tracks lined up perfectly, so there’s a lot of trainwrecking here and there, but I’m relatively pleased with it as a first attempt. I do realize that this is just several looping samples over top each other, and that I’m not really “composing” anything here; I’m mainly just trying to get the feel for Audacity and working with multiple tracks.

Only My Child (2:24 mp3)

Defined tags for this entry: music, remix