PICO 8 Music Theory for Programmers
Does the idea of making original music for your PICO-8 games fill you with dread? Have previous attempts resulted in music that is boring or confusing or just a dissonant mess? You might blame a lack of talent, but more likely you just lack an understanding of how music works.
This tutorial provides an introduction to the basics of pitch, melody, harmony, rhythm and composition within the context of PICO-8. It explores music in a decidedly mathy way through a series of interactive demos that use spatial relations to connect sound to vision. Upon completion, you will have the skills and knowledge you need to add original music to your games. It's easier than you think.
This tutorial runs best on a desktop or laptop computer. You will need a mouse. The 🅾️ and ❎buttons are mapped to the Z and X keys.
Development log
- New Lesson for Music Theory TutorialJun 09, 2024
- Music Theory Tutorial UpdatedApr 11, 2024
- PICO-8 Music Theory Tutorial ReleasedSep 02, 2023
Comments
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Very good material. But I think there are some minor mistakes in lesson 6 chord progression. At the bottom, you wrote:
I think the right one should be like this (subdominant and dominant):
According to Wikipedia: Axis system - Wikipedia
There are minor mistakes in other lessons, but so far I have found, this is the biggest one.
I really want to download some of your game cart of this tutorial, please tell me how if possible.
Thanks for this feedback. You, Wikipedia, and the cart itself are correct and my text is in error. I'll update the text when I release more lessons in February.
Yes, you can download all the carts. If you look at the heading for each lesson, there is a load command, for example LOAD #MUSICTHEORY6. If you enter this command into the PICO-8 console, it will download the cart and make a copy in your carts folder.
This is awesome, thanks for making this! The visualization into the similarities of pallets really made different scales ‘click’ for me! Looking forward to the rest of the series.
Thank you! I highly recommend anyone wanting to learn music theory give this a chance. Maybe it's bc I'm a visual learner, but this has been the helpful set of tutorials I've discovered for Pico-8 and probably music in general.
This tutorial is amazing. As someone with zero musical background, I am finding it incredibly useful!
I'm so glad to hear it's helping. I also plan to release more lessons in the coming months.
Great, I'm looking forward to it! :)