How To...
Convert Sheet Music to Madtracker
The inspiration for this tutorial is to show how possible it is to transfer music made by instruments, such as guitars or piano's, from the sheet music format to the MadTracker program. It will cover a lot of ground, the theory behind sheet music, a "crash" course in reading the music, showing how MadTracker works and finally putting it all together. There still will be a lot of areas that won't be covered by this tutorial, however, this will provide most of the much needed basics to start you off. Firstly lets cover the fundamental bit:
What IS MadTracker?
MadTracker is one of the many programs that are designed for music sequencing. These programs are known as trackers or audio trackers. They allow you to create music by using the keyboard to input chords into a line by line "table". Once played a line will traverse down the table playing all the inputted chords. For more information see this wikipedia page about trackers.
Some of the other popular programs of this type are:
- FL Studio - formerly Fruity Loops (Windows)
- Pro Tracker (Amiga)
- NoiseTracker (Atari ST)
- Fast Tracker (DOS)
- CheeseTracker (Linux)
- GoatTracker (MacOS X)
To find a much more comprehensive list of trackers for different systems click here.
If you are going to follow this tutorial then I recommend, at least for Windows users, using MadTracker because when I get to the guitar tutorials I'm going to be using VST plugins. If you are on a different operating system and would like to follow this tutorial anyway - since most trackers essentially work the same way - please find a tracker that supports VST plugins.
VST plugins?
Virtual Studio Technology - this allows the ability to import instruments and effects into the current track, which in turn gives a greater flexibility in using the tracking tool. Again wikipedia has a good article on VST's.
OK, where do I get this MadTracker??MadTracker can be found at www.madtracker.org, it's free and has a community if you need to ask questions.
Sheet Music - The Basics
There are 7 letters commonly used in musical notation, these are A B C D E F and G. These are then translated into a format whereby "boots" of varying types are placed on a set of 5 parallel lines with 4 spaces between them. These lines are the music staff and the "boots" are the notes. An example follows:
In order to represent these notes on to the bar, the notes must be placed in a certain manner. As you can probably tell, there isn't enough lines on the bar to accomodate all the notes, so this is solved by placing the notes inbetween and through each line.
In typical physical tutorial lessons, on instruments, the student is required to learn scales. In piano lessons this is C D E F G A B, also known as the Major C scale and is fundamental basics in Western music. However, not all instruments class Major C (also known as C4) as Middle C beacause different instruments operate at different pitches. Effectively, each instrument has its own playing range.
