PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Your Most Useful Music Making Tools

Good question.
My first goal is to replace Sting as the bassist on his next 2 albums, then to create a 5 piece band that will dwarf the Beatles in worldwide popularity

. . . now that my dry humor is done let me try to really answer this.

I started music late in life, picked up the bass 7 years ago. I'm an amateur in music and always will be. This is a part-time, past-time and hobby but one I find intellectually stimulating, challenging, fun and hopefully an alzheimer-buster. The reason I posed the question regarding useful tools is two-fold. First I'm simply curious as to what others are doing/using so I can then think about how to chart my music journey over the next months and years for the purpose of upping my "musical game". Second, I thought that this info might be of some use to others with similar goals and questions.

Regarding the first reason, here is a song that I recently composed and shared on the forum.

https://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=768050&page=1

My goal is to learn how to improve upon this and write/perform better compositions in the future. It's been pointed out that the lead guitar needs more volume and I agree.

I struggle with melody. What tool/resource can help with creating better melodies? I've tried using the Melody Maker last year in BiaB ver 2022 without much result.

How might I improve this bass line?

What tools out there could help me design a bridge for this song?

How can I improve the various keyboard voices I used?

In short, my goal is to up my game.

As an example of a possible tool to acquire, a few mentioned reading sheet music. I don't doubt that reading is a valuable skill to have and maybe one day I'll acquire it. But how could reading music help improve the above song when there was no music to read? All there is is a chord sheet, that I produced.

As I map my future path, I'm thinking bass lessons would be a good start. In other words, find an instructor that will dribble-in music theory, tab and/or sheet music and several of the other tools shown in the bar chart. And to dribble these in as required to support the larger goal of composing and playing better. Put another way, navigating this by myself will take me only so far.

Another point to make is that some in this forum may be at the end of their music journey and can't compose or play any more. Others may be on a slow decline. And still others may have reached their plateau. Still others may be on their journey upward. Thankfully, (and for the time being) I'm in this later group.

I don't expect whizz-bang answers to any of this, just ideas and perspectives.

PS> Regarding Scaler, I did a little research on it and have concluded it's a tool too advanced for my current skill level.