Over the past couple of months, I was burned out from many life events happening out of my control. During that time period, I did not have the capacity to much work on any open source project or my rendering engine. At any kind of mild inconvenience of a challenge, I struggled to keep my motivation up.
I needed to do something somewhat mechanical and creative, so I picked up how to read music sheets again. I grew up learning how to play woodwind instruments like clarinet/saxophone but dropped it once I hit college.
I don’t have access to woodwind instruments like before, but DAW (digital audio workstations) do exist so, I looked into software like:
However, these are paid software and I needed free and open source due to being on a budget. Luckily, I came across LMMS, which fit my needs exactly!
The software itself is intuitive to use. You click on the notes and the duration of the notes you want to play. I chose to learn how to read piano sheets and found community contributed soundfont files of grand pianos.
Learning how to read piano sheets is not so terribly different from woodwind instruments. You still have the bass and treble cleffs, but a wider range of octaves. Learning and recognizing the octaves is probably the most difficult part of the process, because I would often confuse the octave I am in. After messing around with the software blindly and going through a few weeks of reading the music sheet for Megaman Zero 3: Cannonball, I finally got the rendition finished!
I am working on my next piece, still from the Megaman Zero series, Trail on a Powdery Snow!