A Stranger Among the Living

This piece has a good beat and solid performance going for it.  If you decide to stretch it out, a change in the structure or chord progression could help a great deal to keep it from being too repetitive.  Otherwise, you're off to the races.

Thanks, guys.

When I first started out, I wanted to do one of those 8-minutes-long  progressive-type songs, but after a couple of weeks of working on and off I decided I'd better end it while I've got a logical ending point set up (you know, right after that last bit of build).

I want to get into more progressive types of music, but I get hung up on keeping it fresh.  Lynn, your suggestion about changing up chord progressions is a good one, but I'm lacking in some of the fundamental knowledge necessary to make it work.

Do you know where I can find some resources on chord progressions in general, or how to write a chord progression that'll fit with an existing progression?  All I've been able to do in the past is read over the wikipedia page for chord progressions, but it being an encyclopedia, it's not really presented in 'teaching' format that gives techniques or advice for beginners.

I'm wanting to make my writing more interesting, but I can't seem to find a lot of solid resources online.  Can you possibly recommend a good book on the subject of composition and arranging?  I usually write by ear just experimenting with what sounds right, but knowing the theory behind it would be really helpful.

Thanks again!

Tom1!  Dude!

I can't thank you enough for helping me out!  I've got the Firebox at the center of my setup now -- the outputs of my mixer go into the Firebox panned hard right and left so I can record in stereo, no noise, no latency. Recording has become orders of magnitude easier without having to worry about noise reduction and recutting everything to deal with lag

Thanks for the music theory links.  I'll check those out.  I want to get into more melodic writing for my instrumental work, but it's definitely fun to throw down some loops and chop up samples.  I guess at the core of things, I want to understand what's happening when I make something more so than I want to write just from theory (that is, I want to know what's going on behind the scenes to understand why one thing sounds more appealing than another or why certain elements work well together in a piece).

Anyways, thanks for the all the help.  Toodleoo for now.

The first minute was a bit creepy but that's alright if you want it that way. After that it pumped on well and I imagine that the dance floor will dig it. I suggest you better trust your ears than try to study music theory that's a whole other line keep the music in center as you do now.
Good work

Awesome, I'll give it a look!

I've tried some other notation software, but nothing ever really seemed to work too well (probably owing to the fact that I was either using 90s software or alpha-version freeware, haha).

I really like musictheory.net, by the way.  The interactive lesson/practice structure is a very welcome change from thumbing through the encyclopedia.

I guess now I've got ear training to do?  Probably should relearn the notes on the staff (as much as I didn't like school band, it did teach me some handy things).  Hopefully there's some parallels between reading music notation and riding bicycles, eh?