When I was starting to try to compose music my son gave me this book: “Composition for Computer Musicians” by Michael Hewitt. It helped me a lot. I also got “Music Theory for Computer Musicians” by Michael Hewitt, also a very good book. Just studying and doing the problems at the end of chapters gave me many ideas and resulted in several of the early works.

A website that I studied often to try ot understand terms and equipment and composition was tweakheadz.com.

For a student who starts with only a little knowlege, these helped a lot. There are tons of websites offering lessons and knowlege about music and music theory and I used many of them.

After a few months, I was confident enough that when someone asked me what Cuban clave music was like, I was able to compose this:

I am proud of it even though I am not sure what a real Cuban musician would think of it.

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