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Hi there all together, in my opinion, the best way to start making own music, is to cover or remix songs you like. From this you are able to learn, how other musicians made music, which can be a good point to use some techniques for your own songs. I am listening to OCRemix-Tracks very often and since a very long time. I am not sure, but most tracks use the scale, the rhythm and / or the same speed as the original track. And here it comes to my question: How do you get the melody, the chords, the bass and so on from the original track? I can't imagine, that all of you musicians get all the notes simply by listening and writing it down. So, is there a secret technique to get the tones, which everyone is using, but no one is talking about? Maybe, because it is so obvious? Idk It would be nice, if someone could help me to get on the way. Thx in advance LeKris

Got it

I tend to listen to things by ear and transcribe material myself when possible. For me, it's a fun skill to develop but that's obviously not everyone's cup of tea. Usually, I'll load the song into my DAW and also a very plain synth then play along if I need to make absolutely sure I'm hearing what I think I'm hearing. To that point, I find that my tools help alot with this process. I use Reaper and there is a global speed control that's independant of the project tempo so if I need to slow a song down to hear it better, that's useful. I don't know what DAW you use but there might be a similar feature. I also transcribe rock and metal songs and load them into Guitar Pro which currently has a similar feature with the added benefit of being able to go note by note if need be.

I am extremely lazy when it comes to transcribing (that's the technical term you're looking for), and I usually only transcribe the melody, loosely, and by ear. And then just have a play with it. Bass, chords, etc might come from the source track too, but I usually wing it by doing it by feel or by ear, roughly. And melody is usually the easiest part to transcribe. Just play the part on repeat, sit back with a midi keyboard (or other instrument of choice), and try to get the right notes and the right rhythm (and you can do those separately if you need to, can come in handy for faster parts. Bonus points of doing it that way (for me at least) is that I will automatically add enough own interpretation to it for OCR's standards, because I only take the melody and write the rest myself. For faster or more tricky songs I will sometimes download the song from online (e.g. by converting a Youtube video to mp3), put that in an audio editor and slow the tempo waaaaay down. That way it's a lot easier to get the notes and/or rhythm. And if you are taking older chiptune songs as a source (e.g. from a (S)NES, Megadrive or basically most consoles before the PlayStation), you can often use emulators where you can play/mute and export every single channel of the track and then transcribing it that way. Which is of course a lot easier than having to transcribe a piece of music when there's 8 things going on at the same time. So in this day and age, also don't forget to take advantage of technology (audio editors with slowdown functionality, emulators, midi) because it can really make things a lot easier. Definitely a lot easier than when I started and I had to play back & rewind things from cassette tape like a few hundred times to get the right notes...

Depending on the source, sometimes you have no choice but to do some or all of it yourself. However for me personally, after years of transcribing by ear and trial and error, I don't want to do that anymore haha. It's a thankless job, can be arduous, and frustrating if you aren't into it. Not that I want or deserve extra like... adulation or anything LOL. But it's mostly just a skill that while worth building, is also worth skipping if possible for work flow purposes. But again, sometimes you have no choice either fully or partially. But with that aside, yes there is a uhh, not so secret technique. Midi files. If you're old like me you are probably intimately familiar with them from the early internet days, and if not you may still be haha. Midi files contain some are all of the sources original composition to varying degrees of accuracy. Some people make them (transcribing as I said above) and some people rip them from the source audio when/if possible. With a midi file, you can import that source into your DAW and from there work with it how you will. You can keep it very basic (which is not OCR quality) and slap some instruments where they should be and bam, you got a song. But with the source midi you can also begin to get creative and play around with it, make changes, add things, take them away, etc. Anything you can imagine I suppose. Some people may just use it as a guideline and actually play the parts themselves for humanization, idk. It just depends on you or what you are going for. And again, some people may not need a midi at all if the song isn't that complex or you are building something really different. There really is no one way to do things. TL; DR - I rambled so here is a short breakdown. A shortcut to avoiding transcribing (writing down by ear) is to get a midi file and import it into your DAW. Not all people do this and what people do after that is sort of up to them. Midis arent always readily available and sometimes they aren't well made either so you may have to do it yourself anyway. But that shortcut is often available, especially for older game music.