The Beginner's Guide to Becoming a Musician

If you're looking to learn about playing, writing or recording music in some way, any way, but don't quite know where to start, this is for you.

So you want to start making music? You want to be the next Bach? Have lots of ideas and want to make a CD? Perhaps you just have a serious deficiency of groupies in your life and you want to change that? Whatever brought you here, you want to make music in some way, and doing that may not be as hard as you think. This guide will act as your starting point on your new path. Regardless of what instrument you want to play, or what kind of music you want to get into, this guide will show you how to get started, from choosing an instrument and learning to play it to composing and eventually recording.

Before you start

If you're completely convinced of your own ineptitude, or you think it is too late for you to take up the difficult task of making music, then I've got something to say to you:

You Don't Need Musical Talent to Make Music

Getting an instrument

The most popular instruments in Western society are the rock staples (guitar, bass guitar and drums) and piano. There are plenty of other instruments out there to choose from though, if you feel like doing something different. If you haven't decided yet, take a look at this article for advice on choosing and buying an instrument:

Picking up an Instrument

If you've picked piano, here are couple of other articles that you should check out:

Starting out with Piano
Piano Playing Tips for Beginners - (note: while this article was technically written for pianists, the lessons generally apply to all instruments)

Becoming a better listener

As you start to play music, you'll discover an interesting phenomenon: you'll notice more about the musical world around you. After a while, you'll gain the ability to de-construct all the different music that you've been listening to. This is a wonderful experience and will make you a more observant person in general. Now is a good time to take the initiative and start actively becoming a more deliberate listener. Try the techniques listed in these articles and discover new dimensions in music that you never understood before:

Introduce Yourself to New Musical Genres
Listening to Music Intelligently

Composing music

I have two things to say here about composing music, whether it's a short rock song or a 20-minute symphony. 1. All music, and I mean all of it, is made of of the same basic components, which means that if you can write a bluegrass song, you can also make a disco song, a dirge, a traditional Japanese folk song or anything else you could imagine with the same basic techniques. 2. There's no special talent or magical skill needed to write music. If you have the ability to make pleasing sounds on your instrument of choice, then you also have the capability to compose your own songs. Once you've learned some music theory, even just a little, you'll realize how simple it is. If you can take a pile of colored blocks and arrange them in an interesting pattern, then you'll be pleased to know that while writing music is a bit more complicated, it's still pretty much the same basic concept. If you're still not convinced, this might change your mind:

Gain the Confidence to Compose Music

Then look over these once you've decided to take the plunge:

Don't Find Inspiration: Create It
Daily Songwriting Exercise

Making a studio and recording music

This is possibly the most complicated part of being a musician, but it can also be the most fun overall. Recording is also most likely the most mysterious aspect of music creation for beginners. Years ago, the recording realm belonged solely to the professionals with expensive studios. Now that computers have changed literally everything in our society, anyone can make a studio of their own and even make their music sound fairly professional with minimal equipment.

There are a couple of things you need to know when delving into the recording world. First is the concept of multitracking. You need to understand how that works before you can understand how a studio works:

An Introduction to Multitrack Recording

Knowing and understanding the components of a studio and how they relate to each other make up the second important part of what you need to know. You can learn this and how to build your own studio on a minimal budget in the Makeshift Musician's most popular article, short and snappy:

Make Your Own Recording Studio

or go in depth with the ultimate resource:

The Makeshift Musician's Comprehensive Guide to Building Your Own Studio

Read these too:

What Speakers Should I Get?
Do-It-Yourself Sound Dampening

Once you've got your studio up and running, this would be a good read:

How to Make the Best Recordings on Earth

Beyond

What is left to learn, now that you've become a prolific, multi-talented musician? Believe it or not, there's still a lot we don't know about music and how it affects us. There's much to learn, and you could devote your whole life to music and still not learn everything there is to know about it. Here are a couple of articles that may help guide you towards a deeper understanding of the mysterious phenomenon that is 'organized sound':

The second most popular article on the site: The Importance of Music to Humankind
Book Review: This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
The Origins of American Music

Electronic Musicians: Use Some Acoustic Stuff!

I have a challenge for all you purely electronic musicians out there: incorporate some sort of acoustic instrumentation into your songs. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Sing! You've got a voice, and even if you don't, you probably have a friend who does. Throw in some lyrics. If you're no poet, just write some stuff that doesn't make sense. It wouldn't be the first time an artist did that.

A decent pair of bongos or some other percussion instrument only costs around fifty bucks or more. Go ahead an add some fun drumming. Record multiple takes of the same part for a cool, dense multi-layered effect.

Grab your guitar or steal a friend's. Learn a couple of basic chords or simply learn the exact chords that you're already using and then strum along with your own music. Something as basic as strumming can be very effective. For an example, see Pink Floyd's 'Welcome to the Machine'.

If you are absolutely clumsy with real-world instruments, find a friend who can play something and record them. Recording with other folks is really fun anyway, and it could lead to fantastic collaborations in the future.

Why am I challenging you to do this? There are three interrelated reasons. One is that acoustic instruments not only sound great by themselves, they will also add real gravity to the electronic ones. Synthesizers just sound more legitimate when performing next to physical instruments, and having them mixed together makes for a profoundly rich sound pallete.

The second reason is that by being purely electronic, you are limiting yourself. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a mostly electronic musician myself, but I've still found the time to recorded banjo, guitar, bongos, random percussion, sound effects, my own voice and the voices of others. I see these as challenges. I'm always looking for ways to record real stuff in with my electronics. By getting a microphone and adding some acoustic elements, you are expanding your own potential as a musician, and that can't be a bad thing, right?

The third reason comes from the motto of the old LucasArts Audio Stooges (Michael Land, Clint Bajakian and Pete McConnel), the geniuses behind some of the best music in the game industry: "Music travels through air. If it's not going through air, there's a problem somewhere." Just as it is good to get out of the house and play sometimes, it's good to step out of the computer occasionally and just make some noise. It will enrich your life.

Daily Songwriting Exercise

A great exercise that I mentioned in my article on finding and maintaining creativity was writing music every day. What does this entail? Does this mean you should start and finish a new song every day? Work on just one song over a long period of time?

The mindset you should have is that you will sit down in front of your keyboard, sheet music, studio, guitar, jug or whatever you have to make music every day regardless of what ideas you have. It is important to remember that what you actually make is irrelevant. You could be working on one polished song, making a different little sketch each day, or just recording weird stuff that comes to your mind. Just as long as you sit down and do something every day.

As soon as you stop thinking about results, you can start thinking about making something. Think of it like daily exercise. When you go for a jog, you don't really care about the destination, you are simply doing it to condition your muscles and heart. You do daily creative exercise to condition your creative abilities and your neural pathways. You should not be worried about the result of your efforts. No one is embarrassed about running in a loop every day and getting nowhere. So too, you shouldn't be embarrassed about the random crap you make every day. No one has to hear it but you.

I have often paralyzed my music output because I would worry too much about making something professional and polished. I felt that anything I started wasn't good enough, and soon I would just get in a rut, making pretty much nothing. Finally I decided that this was lame and making somewhat unpolished music is better than making no music at all.

It is particularly fun to simply try to make something new every day. Sure, a lot of it will be crap, but it will keep forcing you to come up with new stuff, which means new neural pathways for you and more creative energy. Plus, you'll quite often stumble on something awesome and you'll want to expand it into something more complete.

So here's my challenge for you: sit down with your music making equipment for at least an hour every day and make sure you have at least something by the end of your session. I don't care what it is, and neither should you. You will discover all sorts of new stuff this way. In fact, go do it right now.

Jumpstart New Song Ideas

Sometimes it can be really hard to come up with ideas for new songs. You may find yourself, as I often do, simply repeating the same chord progressions over and over again, and you're afraid that all your songs will start sounding the same. Here are some things that I do to get myself back into the creative flow:

Listen to New Music - I have an article on introducing yourself to new musical genres. Follow the steps in that article and you'll no doubt gain several ideas for new songs. Listening to interesting new music always gives you a new perspective on things. Everyone else in the world looks at things a little differently than you do. A piece of music represents one artist's or group's point of view. By continually stimulating yourself with new viewpoints, you will always be able to see everything differently, even that keyboard sitting in front of you.

Try writing in a different genre - I covered this a lot in Don't Find Inspiration: Create it. Writing a different genre than you usually write in will give you something new automatically, plus you'll learn a lot while you do it. Pick a random genre or combine two different genres that don't normally go together. You can get some weird and interesting results, and they will always be creative.

Play with more obscure chords - Break out your old books and look up some of the more esoteric chords in them. Like listening to new music, hearing new chords will give you a fresh perspective. Try combining chords in ways that you haven't tried before.

Mess around with some pre-made loops - If you have the ability throw together some looped drum tracks or chords on your workstation, dig through the presets that you have and put some together. You'll have instant accompaniment while you try to play new stuff. It really helps get things flowing quickly.

Start to Finish: The Process of Making a Song

The way I write songs may be a bit different than most. First of all, my songs don't exist in live form. I only write a song as a finished studio piece. Second, I generally don't know where the song is going when I start it. It can be a kind of messy way to make music, but it usually yields interesting results. Even my more focused songs, like Harvest or Continuous Welded Rail followed a similar writing process. I mostly deal electronic instruments, because I have a strong, possibly quixotic desire to be a one man show, but I'll occasionally throw in vocals or some live instrument part. Lets get to work!

Part I: Composing and Producing

I always start with one of two things: a concept for a type of sound, or a melody or chord progression. Sometimes I'll randomly come up with a melody at an unexpected time, or sometimes I'll stumble on one when playing around with the keyboard or banjo. Other times there will be a particular song that I like and I'll want to write something in a similar style. I never use those AB-whatever song structures that are so prevalent in pop music, nor do I try to come up with hooks for my songs. I love hooks, I'm just not particularly good with them.

Anyway, lets say I've got an interesting melody. I'll then practice playing it over and over with different instrument sounds, like piano, strings, synthesizers, maybe horns or something. During this time my left hand will often be searching for chords that fit with the melody as well. Eventually, I'll find a sound that clicks with me and I can picture an entire soundscape surrounding the melody, which is when I get to work.

First I'll decide the tempo I want the song to be at. I do this by tapping a special button on my drum machine that gives me a tempo readout based on my rhythm. I start a new song in Cubase and set that tempo. Then I'll pull up some drum preset on the keyboard and record it real quick and loop it. I'll choose a drum loop that roughly fits the feel I'm going for, though it is unlikely that it'll be used in the final production. This makes for a metronome, or click track, that is way better than the usual obnoxious beeping sound that the software gives you. Now I can play my melody along with a nice beat to keep time.

I'll record the melody first in MIDI format, which means instead of recording the sounds of my keyboard, I record the data of what keys I press onto a MIDI track in Cubase. After that, I'll tell Cubase to quantize my notes, which essentially means make minute changes to each note so that they're all in time with the rhythm. I don't do it too much or everything will sound too mechanical. But since I have just about the worst rhythm a musician could have, it's very useful. Once the notes are in place and they sound like someone with actual talent played them, I'll have the software MIDI track play my keyboard, and this time I actually record the sound. Often for simpler melodies or chords, I won't bother with the whole MIDI/Quantization thing.

I'll then record other parts in the same fashion, like a bass line or a sweet pad (a simpler background chord). I'll also start thinking about what kind of percussion I want. I make sure that I experiment with any instrument sound I can think of. I never leave out any possibility for any kind of sound. Who says you can't have harpsichord, oboe, a screaming synthesizer, xylophone and distorted rock drums all in one song? I'll never tell you that.

By this time I'll be thinking about new melodies to follow up the first one, new chords to move the song to, and transitions to tie the pieces together as I make them. Because I pretty much record as I write, a very experimental way to make music, I'll often end up with several versions of a song, each one going in different directions. Many of them are terrible, but by continually experimenting I'll find new avenues to write in. Working with each part is like working on a miniature song, since any one part can sound completely different from the next. Sometimes I'll go from purely symphonic to purely electronic to several layers of percussion without melodies, and each one requires a different mindset when mixing. This is also a good time to record anything acoustic, like bongos or, *shudder*, vocals.

Eventually I'll get to a point where I either think it would be a good place to end the song or I simply can't think of anything else to add. Sometimes I'll try to incorporate some elements from the beginning of the song into the end, to wrap things up nicely, but it isn't necessary.

Part II: Post Production and Mastering

After I have everything pretty much written, I get to the mixing and engineering stage. This is where it starts to sound less like a collection of disparate sounds and more like a cohesive song. I'll fix up the percussion and add in interesting rolls and crashes to spice up transitions between parts. I might add some small, quiet higher pitch melodies to complement the main ones. I'll change the volume levels on everything until it all sounds great. Remember this: Good volume levels on everything will mean the difference between a mediocre song and a great one. I'll add effects like reverb, filtering and distortion.

I'll keep tweaking it as much as I can. Then I'll leave it alone for a day or two. This is important. I'll leave it alone and make sure I listen to a lot of other music that's not mine during this time. When I come back to the song I'll have a much more neutral and fresh perspective. I'll tweak whatever I think needs work and then I'll burn the song to a CD. I'll listen to this CD in my car as I drive to see what it sounds like there. Listening to your song or mix on different sets of speakers is a great way to make it an excellent, well rounded mix. I often find, for instance, that the bass in my mix is a bit heavy in the car compared to my studio monitors. I'll also probably listen to the song on headphones, which you should be doing anyway occasionally when writing the song. This helps with tweaking the stereo image you've made in your mix.

Once I've listened to it in a few different environments I'll go back again and tweak whatever is left. Then I'll declare it done. (Maybe after listening to it in the car again?) I save it as a WAV file, and bring it to my Windows computer for mastering. I only do this because my mastering software ended up being Windows only. I'll add a very small amount of compression which I add to all my songs to give them a consistent volume level. Then I'll convert that to a high quality (256kbps) mp3 file, put all the necessary tags on it, and upload it to my website or send it to whoever may have asked for the song in the first place. I keep the master WAV file in several different places, (one on the Mac, one on the Windows machine, and one on a separate backup hard drive) to be safe. I also backup the original Cubase tracks as well, because you never know when you're going to need the original tracks when you're famous and some creatively starved rapper wants to pay you millions for the right to call your song his own.

Then I take a quick break and start all over again! If you want to hear examples of songs of mine that followed this procedure pretty much to the letter, listen to:

Falling Gracefully
Apathetic Macrocosm
Quantum Foam
Behold! The Mountain Cries

Postmortem - What I Learned From Producing a Game Soundtrack

Recently I completed my first soundtrack for a computer game; a turn-based strategy title in a stylized fantasy setting. Although the game is on the verge of cancellation, working on the score was a fantastic learning experience.

Generally, a composer is given artwork from a game, or if he's really lucky, an early playable copy of the software to play around with. I didn't have much artwork or software to go by. Actually, I didn't have any. I was writing the soundtrack based entirely on the background story and game structure that the director described to me over the phone and through email. So it wasn't quite the same experience that a composer for media usually has. Regardless, in the end, I had roughly 40 minutes of music spanning 15 tracks. Here are some of the things that I learned from the experience:

MIDI Quantization is your friend - I didn't start using MIDI quantization until this project, but now I've learned how useful it can be when trying to write and simultaneously record. MIDI Quantization is the process of playing a melody and then having the computer nudge the notes around a little to keep everything synced up with the tempo. Some would call it cheating, and it is in a way, but when you're writing an entire soundtrack and live performance is irrelevant, then it can save you a lot of time and frustration, and allow you to focus on quality of composition.

Restraint is an important musical technique to know - Because of the experimental nature of my writing style, I tend to simply throw in whatever sounds I think will make a song interesting. The game had a fantasy setting, so I couldn't go nuts with, say, the electronic elements as much as I would like. I had to stick with a smaller sonic palette than I normally use, a situation which tends to give a person a false sense of creative limitation. It will, however, force a composer to be more creative with the elements that he does have. This is probably why the soundtracks to all those old Nintendo games are so catchy: when you only have four channels of audio to work with, you tend to make those the best damn four channels of music you can possibly deliver.

I really, really need to learn more about chords and chord progressions - oh boy do I ever. Learn how to make a variety of good chord progressions or all your songs will start sounding the same. This has always been a problem of mine and it's starting to catch up with me. I learned a lot just from making so much music in a relatively short period of time, but there is still so much left to learn. If you learn as much as you can about chord progressions, and drill chord structures into your mind, you will become a much better musician.

When writing for others, you can't get too attached to what you make - You need to see everything you make objectively. Even when you think you've made your best work, the other members of the team may not like it at all, and you'll have to rewrite it. I was fortunate to have a team that gave me a lot of creative freedom, but I still needed to do the occasional rewrite.

You can learn a lot when you force yourself to write every day - In fact I wrote a whole article on this after finishing the soundtrack: Don't Find Inspiration: Create It. It is one of my most popular articles.

LABEL YOUR MUSIC TRACKS - I didn't really do this before I started the soundtrack, but now I can't stress this enough. If you have a 30 track song, and you need to re-record a particular string part but you just left all the tracks labeled as "track 21", "track 22" or something else equally generic, you're going to be miserable trying to figure out precisely which string patch you used before, especially if you first recorded it weeks ago. Label each track with precisely what was recorded, along with any special conditions involved in recording it.

I learned a lot of small technical things as well, but these are the most important, overarching lessons I've learned from writing and producing a score. I think they all can apply to music writing in general. Any other composers or producers wish to share their thoughts?

Head over to http://myspace.com/jupitermanmusic to hear a few samples from the game soundtrack: The Regrets of Man, The Inevitable and Legacy of the Dead.

Forget Genres!

One of my favorite things to do when I'm working on a song is to occasionally ask myself "What would happen if I introduced rock drums into the piece?" This almost always leads the song in fun and interesting directions. I have a tendency to write my songs without any idea where they're going, and most of the time I get interesting results out of that philosophy.

For instance, my song Falling Gracefully starts out low-key with simple, almost jazzy keyboard playing. It then becomes a sort of ambient thing with a choir and adds some electronic percussion and violins for, uh, maybe a new age sound? After that part I actually asked myself the aforementioned question and found out the answer by adding some rock drums and loud synthesizers and hammer instruments. Finally it ended with oboes playing some mellow chords. You can hear the whole thing here.

My point is that I never had any idea of what genres I might be using when I started the piece, I just followed my intuition as I wrote and recorded. For Falling Gracefully, it worked fantastically. Sometimes it doesn't work as well, like in Quantum Foam, where the second half ended up with a much higher quality sound overall than the first, making it inconsistent as a whole.

But it is important to remember that while writing for a specific genre is perfectly fine, constraining a song or (more importantly) all of your work to one genre will eventually limit your creative output. Pop artists tend to stay in one genre because that helps them sell records. But think of legends like the Beatles and Queen, who experimented with multiple genres, sometime in the course of one song. Two of my favorite artists, William Orbit (the Strange Cargo albums in particular) and Matt Uelman (Soundtrack to the game Diablo II) thrive on making their music span all sorts of genres. It is their greatest strength.

Although it is completely possible that you will be able to write 30 pure rock songs (as many artists have done), you will be amazed at the worlds that open up to you when you try out new genres. It is an incredible thrill to see a whole new set of possibilities laid out in front of you. So don't let the concept of genres make you afraid of branching out.

Don't Find Inspiration: Create It.

(Though this is the Makeshift Musician blog, the lessons in this article can generally apply to anyone trying to find creative inspiration)

How does a music writer come up with ideas for songs? Some artists continually create for years and years and show no signs of stopping. This used to baffle me. How can they keep coming up with new content without burning themselves out?

I know that there are many artists who will tell you that creativity can't be turned on like a faucet. They say that one shouldn't be pushed to be creative. Let me clarify something for you. This kind of thing is spoken by people who don't have the strength of character to understand how much can be achieved by one individual. Random, unplanned inspiration is a very real thing and can yield fantastic results, but it isn't the only thing driving creativity. Two other things that will drive you to fantastic creative heights are experimentation and goal-setting.

Goal Setting:

In the world of evolutionary theory (bear with me here), some researchers have developed computerized artificial life simulators. These pretty much simulate, from the bottom up, simple organisms with the ability to gather food, reproduce, pass on their DNA, and mutate it a little each generation. Researchers running these programs found that if the little computer beings were given an abundance of food, they would continually eat and reproduce, but even after thousands of generations, they would never evolve. They just kept eating what they had, and slacked off like college seniors. When the researchers took away most of the food, however, the beings immediately started evolving. Once sustenance became difficult to gather, the organisms had to continually become more creative with methods of achieving their goals. Think about it: if all life on earth was given infinite amounts of food right from the beginning, it would have no reason to evolve beyond single-celled organisms, and then we wouldn't have any art at all!

Now that I've alienated all the religious-types here, I'll say that this is a good analogy for your own creative output. If you just wait for inspiration to strike, you won't be continually challenging yourself to make better music. If you make yourself write every day (or almost every day), then you will soon be forced to come up with new stuff. Eventually, you'll drain your comfortable, routine way of making your art. It will become insufficient for new creations and you will be forced to think differently about composing. Your easily reached ideas are no longer abundant, so just like those little computer creatures, so you have to be adventurous and evolve.

Set a goal for yourself to write music for a couple hours every day, or to have two or three new songs a month or, if you're really ambitious, a new song every week. I think eventually your own output will astound you. When I was just writing for myself, I always thought I was running out of ideas pretty quickly. After working on my first soundtrack, I've found that constantly writing music and having no choice but to make new ideas has produced the best stuff I've ever written. Plus all that practice just makes me better anyway.

Experimentation:

Aaron Marks, in his book The Complete Guide to Game Audio, told of a really cool exercise for game musicians that I want to relay and expand upon here. It goes kind of like this: Write down every musical genre you can think of, each on a separate small piece of paper and then put them all in a bowl (or for maximum fun, put them in a top hat). Then pick out two at random. Now you have to make a song that falls into both of those genres. You might get stuck with "Bluegrass Metal", "Tribal Pop", or even "Surf Rock Polka". This is a glorious and fun way to make you look at things differently.

Now for some of us with limited music resources, or those of us who tend to stick with one genre, this might be unfeasible. In that case, just take one random genre from the bowl and try to incorporate that into your next song as best you can. If you play nothing but piano and you pull out the "Metal" card, well, tough luck. Better try and figure out how to get the 'feel' of heavy metal while still maintaining the beautiful sound of piano. Think of the new genre you might invent!

My point is that experimentation automatically inspires creativity. If you play guitar and sing, try getting a cheap pair of bongos (I got mine for $50) and record that with your song, or find a friend who's willing to accompany you on them. Don't just have it play in the background of your existing songs, though that is fun too. Try writing a new song where the bongos are really prevalent. You'll be surprised at how versatile you really are.

If you constantly challenge yourself and experiment with new ways to make music, you will never have to fear your creative well drying up. In fact, don't even think of it as well. Your creativity doesn't come from a single small source. Think of yourself as exploring the world, discovering new and unusual sources in your travels, leaving the unadventurous behind at their single, quickly depleting creative source.

Gain the Confidence to Compose Music

I think that the biggest barrier that keeps most people from composing is a lack of confidence. I've even met very talented musicians with confidence issues. Mostly though, I've heard people say they can't write their own music because they don't know enough about music theory. That is a big, fat load of bull. I'm here to tell you that you can make music to call your own. Don't listen to what other people say. If you can hit some notes on a keyboard, or you know some chords on your guitar, then you can write music. I started composing music before I knew anything about theory or recording, but through making music I learned just about everything I know today.

By the way, when I say 'composing' or 'making music' I'm not necessarily talking about busting out sheets of blank musical staffs and diligently writing down all the notes of your masterpiece. I might as well tell you to get one of those ruffled shirts and a jacket with long tails before you sit down to compose. There is nothing wrong with writing music using that method, but don't let anyone tell you that that is the only way to compose. If someone did tell you that, they're lying, and it is your civic duty to light their pants on fire the next time you see them. If you somehow make a sound that is uniquely yours, you just composed something. See? Easy!

So lets just assume that you've agreed to go ahead and start composing music. Depending on how you want to do this, you could read my articles Picking out an Instrument and/or Make Your Own Recording Studio. Once you either learn to play an instrument at least a little or have an awesome small home studio ready for input, or both, you can come back and REALLY soak in this article.

I know I was encouraging you a few paragraphs ago, but lets just get this out of the way: the first songs you compose probably won't sound so great. Learning to make your own music is just like learning to play an instrument; it doesn't sound all that great in the beginning, but that's because you're new and practicing. When I started making music on my computer, my rhythm was terrible, sound quality was bad, and everything was in C Major only because I couldn't figure out how to use those little black keys. I even still have some of these old pieces on my website, which you can listen to when your starting out, so that your own music can at least be better than something.

The important thing to remember about composing is that you need to compose! Compose and produce and perform your music all the time. No one needs to hear your first recordings besides you. I guarantee you'll be surprised with the results of at least one of your first few efforts. It'll sound way better than it should, and you'll look back when its done and think "Wow, that's actually not completely terrible!" One of my first songs ever was this. When I wrote it I still knew nothing about music theory and had only written a couple of songs before it, it's a very simple and repetitive song, but it does convey a feeling and is relatively polished. I was as surprised as anyone when it was done. Once you've made your new song as good as is reasonable, record it if you can, then leave it and start a new one. The more you compose, the better you will get at your technical skills and your technique.

There's a voice in your head, we all have it, that says to you "You shouldn't even bother, whatever you make will sound really bad. And what if someone else hears it? That would be a nightmare! Just give up now and watch reality shows instead. I love that one with the clown and the cheerleaders." The most important thing you can do for your composing and maybe for your whole life is learn to ignore that nagging, doubting voice in your head. When is the last time you ever thought, "Wow, thanks self-doubt! I almost did something new! That was close!"

Once you've started composing and have successfully tuned out ugly self-doubt, then there is absolutely nothing in the way of making some fine music that others will actually enjoy. If someone like me, with so little real training and even less natural talent, can do it, then so can you. Send some of it my way when its done.