Fun Friday Resources

This week, something for the musicians among us.

If you’ve ever wondered how a synthesizer works, Ableton has you covered with their Learning Synths website. As they say on the first page, you don’t need any equipment—their lessons are contained in your web browser.

Once you’ve learned how to work one, our friends at Open Culture have you covered. There’s a wealth of links to free online synths, tutorials, everything you need to become the next Space Music Overlord™. (Here’s another Open Culture synth post.)

And for you regular pen-and-pencil composers who are looking for an inexpensive way to produce scores/sheets for your music, here’s MuseScore, a free, open source music notation program. (Full disclosure: I haven’t tried it.) It seems to be powerful enough to create a symphonic score and parts, but not to create decent mp3 files with quality sounds. Perhaps in the future, though…