So now that you know what to expect to learn from this course, I wanted to create a first lesson that
would appeal to both beginners and advanced musicians.
So in this lesson, we're going to use a free online tool to start creating our own video game music
immediately.
Let's get started.
So go ahead and open up an internet browser.
And the easiest way to find this is just to go to Google and then type in beep box, beep, beep beep
box.
And then the first one will be the link.
So it's beatbox that SEO.
You go ahead and click that, and that will open up this page where you can begin creating your own
video game music.
Now you might look at this and not quite sure what to expect.
And if you are a musician and have worked with a dog before a digital audio workstation, this might
look a little bit familiar.
But let's go ahead and walk through what you see on the screen.
One thing I want to point out is that you can access this on your PC, Mac or on your phone.
So the first thing you probably notice is the middle of the screen.
They have all of these blocks.
So each one of these blocks represents a music note.
Now, a music note is simply a pitch and a duration.
So it's basically frequency of sound in the air and then how long that sound lasts.
So if I go ahead and click this bottom block, you'll notice it's going to create a sound.
So that created a note, and each one of these blocks that you can click on is another note, so I can
go ahead and add another note there.
And now I have played two notes at one time.
Yours might sound a little different than mine, and that's because your instrument might be different.
So every time you go into beatbox, they change the instruments for you.
And I really enjoy that because it gives you different instruments and different color palette to work
with when you start composing.
So if you want to change your instrument, just go ahead over here and just change.
It sounds like a grand piano.
So now that I've changed the instrument, I want to go ahead and listen to these couple of notes that
I've already produced and appear on the right hand side.
You can just hit play and that will play the sample.
So you notice that that line was going across as it played the note.
So you're probably familiar with the idea of rhythm in music, and there are pulses or beats for the
rhythms.
So each one of these lined up is a pulse or a beat.
Again, you can think of it as your heartbeat or something like that.
It's a steady beat that will be kept.
So if I go ahead and add another note right here, that will be on the next beat.
So if we go ahead and count one two three four five six seven eight, so that means this track has eight
beats.
And so that means that I could create eight pulses here.
So let's go ahead and do that.
So I'm just going to go ahead and create those impulses and let's go ahead and play this.
So that gives you an idea of the note and the pulse.
So if you want to change the note, the first thing that you want to delete this, delete this one.
So I would just click it and that would delete it.
So if it's not bright blue there, then that means it's deleted.
And then let's say I want to do this instead.
OK, so now let's go and listen to that.
OK.
And so now I can go ahead and change any of these notes to what I would like.
Let's go ahead and do something like this.
And again, the nice thing about this is you don't need to know any music theory yet, and you can just
start playing around with the notes is going to play with this.
See what this sounds like.
This first last night, I just wanted to show you the notes and then the pulses.
And then a couple of basic settings.
So one thing I want to point out before we go any further is that everything you do here can be saved
and you can either go up to the top.
And the link basically saves all of the information in this.
So you could I could go ahead and copy and paste this into a new browser, and it will save my entire
work that I've done.
So that's really nice.
You don't have to download anything or install anything.
You can just copy and paste that link and then you have access to your song.
You can keep editing it.
That's the first thing you can also.
Another powerful thing with this free tool is that you can go up to file and you can export your song.
And so we're going to be doing this later so we can start with this and then we can export it as a way
for how that's just a sound file or an MP three or a mini file and so many file.
But that's going to do is take this information and we can use it in a different digital audio workstation
and keep working on the tune there.
The other main preference I want to point out is that right here in the preferences, you can go ahead
and click many of these to show them.
But the first one I want to start with is just show the piano keys.
So this here is called a piano roll.
I basically just, you know, a visual representation of the notes on a piano and the pitches.
And so now you can see what notes we're actually working with.
So we work on a C, D, E G and A.
If you're musical, you know, that's a pentatonic scale.
If you're not, it's just a scale that has five notes.
So we're just working with five notes, you know, so we go back to the C.
And the reason of a set at that is because the scale here is on easy.
And so we're going to jump into that into the next lesson, and we're going to continue with the song
settings and then how to create different textures with the music in beatbox.
So I thank you and I'll see in the next lesson.