For Rosie: My Piano Song draft - Listen on Youtube

I have created a draft one minute version of my song which I have called 'For Rosie' (in remembrance of my cat!). Comments and advice are welcome - but please remember I have never composed a song before, so be constructive!

Here is the song on YouTube:

Making Piano Music

Another goal I have at the moment is to create my own piano piece.. in memory of my cat who passed away recently. I have never composed a piece of music in my life. And I only got to Grade 3 or 4 in piano about 10 years ago!

With the help from friends, I have found there is a way to do so on my computer! After much deliberation, I decided to try Ableton as it seemed simpler than Cubase - and using the True Piano VST.

Ableton

I would definitely recommend Ableton to anyone who hasn't used this type of software before. Cubase looked a bit too professional and complex for me. Ableton is fairly straightforward or fairly simple to work out - at least for the basic standard things I have been doing such as changing settings like BPM. To be fair, there are bound to be a lot of functions that I have not used which could be useful but for a first attempt with little knowledge, I feel it is going fairly well! Unfortunately, I don't have a MIDI keyboard (yet?) so I have had to use the mouse to click to choose notes which is a much longer process.

However, as a beginner, I reckon you would get used to whichever software you choose to use. I just thought Ableton seemed simpler and I would be able to use it to reach my goal.

True Piano

This is a wonderful VST which sounds brilliant and gives you different settings (Reverb, pitch, etc). I love seeing my piece played on the virtual piano too! I would definitely recommend.

My Piece

My inspiration for this piece was Final Fantasy X - To Zanarkand and a piece of beautiful music I heard on YouTube that was made using True Piano (hopefully I can find the link later and edit the post!). However, my piece sounds NOTHING like them whatsoever. I'm clearly not a natural composer! It definitely doesn't flow as well as theirs do and some parts sound so different that I'm not sure if it sounds right or not. I don't know exactly what I'm doing wrong but I'm going to keep working at it and hopefully I will find a way to improve it! I got to a point where I wanted others to listen to it and give me some constructive criticism. However, I asked my mum...

On a scale from 0 (Children bashing random keys) to 10 (Beethoven), I would say it is a 3 currently. But as it is a personal piece of music that was intended to be in memory of my cat rather than for the enjoyment of others, it doesn't need to be brilliant as long as it is meaningful to me. And doesn't hurt the ears.

Maybe one day I will feel happy enough with it to post here... one day...