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Oh Jesus Christ it took me a second but you mean a music keyboard? Awesome, branching out are we!?

I always suggest that everybody should take up a musical instrument if they can. It's one of the most rewarding things you can do. Unfortunately you picked the one instrument I'm really terrible at. I can play maybe 6 chords, the beginning of Subdivisions by Rush, a (very) little of In the Presence of Enemies part 2 (Dream Theater), a little of the chorus part of Tin Legs & Tin Mines (Midnight Oil), and of course Axel F from Beverly Hills Cop. The only keyboards I ever owned were this tiny white casio PT-10 with 4 sound banks and a much better but hopelessly outdated casio something or other but it needs about 8 D batteries still and the AC adapter doesn't work.

But I too would like to compose crap, ah, MUSIC on my computer through a keyboard someday. MidiMaker was a great program but the only one I own that I bought was on my crappy 500MHz computer from way back and you can't switch computers becuase it writes something to the registry. And there's zero e-mail help from the company / guy who made it. Maybe he died long ago. That was the easiest way for me to make music, and then I could import those midi files into my ModPlug tracker and further screw around with stuff. That's what I did with H2's music, well most of it. MidiMaker only gives you 40 free trials before it stops working and it has regular overflow errors so you can't make anything of a decent length / complexity with it in my experience.

If you ever want to take up the bass or drums I'll be more insightful than this. XD

Ah, thanks for the info. I might look into music composition software first, then check into keyboards. I actually have a piece of software whose name escapes me at the moment that composes music automatically for you based on mood or some shit like that. What exactly do you use for creating all of your music now?

But the easiest one I found was MidiMaker. They do still give you a lot of free trials with it and the interface is really simple. There's 8 channels that are color-coded and you can assign each an instrument. But you'll quickly see that in order to do anything remotely complex you'll have to switch it up a lot on the same color. I've done that a lot, where say the brown will be strings but somewhere in the song it might be a cymbal and then go back to strings. You have to get creative but it's still fun. You can see how everything's laid out right there and go back and edit the length of a note or something very easily until it fits.

Like I said before if you use MM you can't have a hell of a whole lot going on for a decent length of time. Some of my more complicated songs aren't more than 50-60 seconds long because it'll give you an "overflow" error when you try to convert it into a midi. If that happens you'll have to do some chopping which kind of sucks. Ways around this? You can break your composition up and save them as individual midi songs, then later import those all into something that can handle the larger files like ModPlug Tracker. A pain in the ass? Yeah but it'll work.

Another way you can help the length of your file and avoid the overflow error possibly is to reduce the amount of unecessary stuff going on in your song. Most of the time I'd have the hi-hat going the whole time (like a real song would) but that eats up a lot of space in the program's array or whatever it uses to compile the midi later. You can use hi hats sparingly or not at all- and I'm just using hi-hats as an example it could be any instrument- and that might get your song to the length you want. Necropolis Rising's music is all like this. The drums are there but more minimal than I've used in the past. To compensate you have to make the rest of your music "wrap around" it and fill the thing out. I'm very proud of those tunes even if the game itself didn't turn out so hot.

It's pretty cool and if GameMaker can play mod files you can make those with it too (the extention is .it I think. The only thing that ever goes wrong with my ModPlug Tracker is when you export something as an mp3 it'll always get some weird error and shut itself down. It doesn't ruin anything and in fact you can just up and run it again right away afterwards.

For some of H2's songs I started by making it in MidMaker, then imported that midi file into ModPlug, screwed around with it, saved it as an mp3, and THEN converted that mp3 into an .ogg file with the free converter thing I downloaded awhile back. MMF2 can embed an .ogg file so all this trouble was necessary.

Anyhow, let me know when you have something good and we'll check it out!

There are places you can go that have a ton of them, but to google it you'd probably need the correct terminology. Mod plug ins? I haven't downloaded any since 2007 I think but that might be what they're called. There's a specific name for them I know that much.