How to Make a Song From Dinosaur DNA
2 min readSome days we end up really struggling for inspiration, this is OK. We are lucky with the vast resource of online tools as we can easily force our creativity. Here is a trick to generate melodies and music which requires no jamming out notes on a MIDI keyboard. I am going to show you a free online tool for making your music for you!
The tool we are going to use is P22 Music Text Composition Generator, this allows you to input text and it will convert it to both sheet music and a downloadable MIDI file. The MIDI file is then able to be loaded into your DAW just like any other media item and can control a synth to make music.
So the first thing we need is a source of text, perhaps you want to write out your feelings, perhaps you want to use previously rejected song lyrics. I’m going to get nerdy and use some DNA. I googled Dinosaur DNA and got this sequence:
Perfect. Now all we need to do is input it into the website.
From here, we can download the MIDI file and load it onto a track in your DAW. The first thing you want to to is transpose it to a key – the notes will most likely be randomly assigned so transposing it allows it to be harmonically tolerable to listen to.
Now we can play around. By adding in different instruments like basses and arpeggiators we can listen out for cool snippets which we’d like to incorporate into our track, If you hear a good musical idea, chop it out and save it.
There is a good chance 90% is garbage but it will yield some good results. In the end, you will get Kudos for saying you used Dinosaur DNA in your track!
Below is an example of using several instruments all following the same file, there are a few cool sounds in there which I’d totally re-sample (and plenty that I wouldn’t).
