I've been doing a lot of thinking/reading/listening about music recently. Not enough doing, but I learned some key things:
1. Transcribe and analyze songs you like so you can steal their secret sauce
2. Chords are relative to a key
3. You don't have to use cadences, you can literally do any chord progression you like
Currently I'm working on a synthesizer for embedding into games. My goals atm are 1. Play midi files and 2. Support NES style music (I have no idea how to use trackers or how I'd embed one)
All of this is to say I'm probably going to make a language specifically for producing music so I can use a text editor more easily
For transcription/composing I find I like using lilypond, but it has some rough edges with playback of generated midi (which I need b/c I can't sight read). I tried using FrescoBaldi but it won't show the generated PDF for some reason and I'm really used to doom Emacs editing at this point