Digital Music Composition

Most digital music begins at the keyboard where a composer creates the melody with supporting harmony. From there, the digital music composer follows a series of steps:

• Plays the musical score through an electronic keyboard into a computer sequencer (Cakewalk Sonar) that converts the music into MIDI tracks.
• Adds harmony and rhythm tracks.
• Selects virtual instruments sounds for each MIDI track.(Dimension Pro, Symphonic and Symphony virtual instruments)
• Edits, refines, and expands the idea,--- develop an arrangement and orchestration and works toward a finished piece of music -- this is where the music takes form as swing, pop, new age, or country.
• Records high-resolution digital audio tracks.
• Processes the digital audio tracks with Waves Digital Signal Processing software.
• Mixes down the various audio tracks into a Wave, mp3, m4a*, Windows Media Audio or Real Audio file.
• Burns a CD.
• Listens to the CD on a high quality audio system.
• Goes back to the Sonar MIDI tracks as required and make changes.

Once the digital music composer is happy with the final product and wants to share it, he or she uploads certain songs to a website where listeners can enjoy free downloads of instrumental music for your iPod, iTunes, Windows Media Player and Real Player.

During this process, a composer may end up with new age background music, swing, soft rock, classical or Boston Pops, and even an occasional touch of country. Arranging music is like going on a journey to an exotic place. It always a surprising and enlightening process. Click here to listen to free instrumental background music downloads.

* Advanced Audio Compression (AAC) M4A is a file extension used to represent the popular new international audio standard called MPEG- 4 Audio. MP3 compression algorithms tosses away some of the original audio information when a MP3 file is created whereas MPEG-4 provides lossless encoding in the same or less space. The High Efficiency MPEG-4 advanced audio coding version 2 (HE-AAC v2) has proven, and several independent tasks, to be the most efficient audio compression scheme available worldwide.