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A Novice's Account Of A First Release

 tl;dr What follows is a retelling of my journey as an electronic musician so far, culminating with my recent release of a debut EP. As the dust settles on what was an exciting few weeks, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect upon some of the things I've learned so far in the hope that some of my experiences may be helpful for others.  Learning Music From Nil I began my journey as a music maker 4 years ago, on the cusp of turning 25. At that time, I remember wondering whether it was too late in my life for me to pick up new skills, whether this hobby was a waste of time that would never go anywhere. 4 years later I can only laugh at myself from 4 years ago. I wouldn't say that I'm the best music producer, far from it, after 4 years all I've learned is that I still have a lot to learn. But I am now capable of taking ideas in my head and sketching them in the canvas of a DAW. I have a newfound vocabulary that has allowed me to join in on a wonderful community of mus

Tension And Release

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Tonal Instruments Most conventional tonal instruments, when excited, will exhibit a pattern of harmonics in the frequency domain that changes over time. Various instruments will have differing harmonics present, and the decays of those harmonics over time may vary. Consider for example, the sound of a grand piano: An instantaneous snapshot of the associated spectrum for this audio looks like the following: Inspection of the each of the peaks in the Spectrum Analyzer used ( Voxengo SPAN ) reveals that starting with the fundamental (leftmost) peak, the frequencies present in this sound include 442Hz, 884Hz, 1326Hz, 1.78kHz, 2.24kHz, 3.16kHz, 3.62Khz - there were several more harmonics beyond that but those described are sufficient.  Each of these peaks is a multiple of the fundamental frequency, 442Hz. We can observe that 884Hz is twice 442Hz, 1326Hz is thrice 442Hz etc.  As we approach the higher harmonics, we note that there is a slight error and these frequenc