Rough draft: Will add more pics and links later.
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/160/1884388.jpg
When I was about 17, something started happening in my head when I listened to music. I had been surrounded with music all my life to some extent. I went through a great deal of rigorous ear and vocal training throughout elementary, junior high, and high school, played piano for a number of years, and of course, established myself in high school as a consummate anti-establishment punk-rock/metalcore fan. I had always experienced that shared phenomenon of getting music "stuck in your head" whenever I heard a catchy song -- I can't even tell you how long I had the chorus riff from "Al the Killer" by Coheed and Cambria completely ingrained in my mind.
I think it started really happening when I'd be in the shower with music playing in the other room. I could hear the song, but not very clearly, and my mind seemed to start misrepresenting aspects of the song -- even confusing them with aspects of other songs and crossing them up into some funky hybrid that just didn't really make any sense. I'm sure there's some psychological/anatomical explanation for this type of cut-and-paste aural phenomenon, but I really took notice of it and it started occurring even when the music wasn't obscured by ambient noise. I suppose it was almost like aural dyslexia; I'd hear a riff from a song like "Selfless Cold and Composed" by Ben Folds Five and think that I was actually hearing something like "Muscle Museum" by Muse and effectively splice them together in my mind. In fact, it started getting to the point of where I was hearing riffs, melodies, and rhythms that I couldn't even identify the root of even when there was no music playing at all.
It went a step further when I listened to music I'd never heard before; especially in the case of the absence of melody within a song. I'd hear a really cool rhythm riff and hear the solo I'd kick out in my head on a guitar or piano as if the music was just jumping out of my brain. It was really fun. It was perhaps the first perspective I ever managed to gain on the concept of true artistic choice. I am absolutely horrible when it comes to visual arts, and the closest I had ever come to really "creating" anything through an artistic process on my own accord (aka outside of required school classes) was angsty and contrived poetry from high school that I've long since deleted for fear that someone might have eventually unearthed such awfulness.
Regardless, I was feeling unprecedentedly creative with this newly-discovered awareness of the fact that the people who write these catchy riffs and rhythms actually have to make decisions when they write them! This may seem like common sense to you in retrospect, but to my knowledge, most people tend to take what they listen to at "face value" and don't really think about it much beyond what simply appeals to their ear. I was like that until I became absolutely fascinated with attempting to figure out an artist's rationale for making compositional decisions. For example, one of my favorite (and most absurd) artistic choices in music comes from an old friend of mine; HORSE the Band. Though I don't really listen to HORSE quite as much as I used to as I feel like the awesome sound of R. Borlax has since eroded, the choice the writer made in "Sevententacles and Eight Flame" to go from this quasi-hardcore 7/8 riff to a dancey and hilarious techno breakdown was completely beyond me.
So I've got all these ideas going through my head, but I have absolutely NO outlet by which to express them. I'm not very skilled at any particular instrument, and I can't exactly sing these musical ideas into permanent existence. It was around this time that my best friend introduced me to a program that has undoubtedly changed my life -- Power-Tab Now, I'm going to preface this by acknowledging that this statement is laughable to anyone who uses Reason, Finale, or Sibelius. Power-Tab is undoubtedly an analog solution in a digital world. It is not very compatible with other programs, it hasn't been updated in years, and it's generally used for guitar tablature transcriptions for guitarists to quickly learn how to play songs when they can't read standard notation. There isn't even a way to add a drum track outside of an obnoxiously annoying metronome.
For me, however, Power-Tab was an absolute Godsend. I learned music in a simple way entirely different than it could ever have been taught to me in any composition or comprehensive musicianship class just by fooling around with Power-Tab. I will admit that I do have some knowledge of standard music theory: I know most major and minor key signatures, I am familiar with meters, beat quantities, and tempo (obviously), I can distinguish harmony from dissonance, and I can define (or at least hear) most standard minor and major scales, chords, and arpeggios. This knowledge is just about all you need in order to be competent with this program, and it's not a whole lot.
I learned music mathematically through Power-Tab. When I start writing on Power-Tab, I don't acknowledge key signatures or notes whatsoever. I only acknowledge numbers. I write every instrument in tablature; generally guitar, piano, and bass. I write everything in numbers. Why would I bother even dealing with notes or key signatures for that matter when I can hear exactly what I'm doing through a simpler system of counting and playback? I don't even write with an instrument. I can play everything back as much as I like, and when I'm trying to harmonize a chord, create a progression, or arpeggiate a scale, I can just hum what I'm thinking to myself and quickly add the pitch degrees as numerics to figure out the next note. Bizarre? Perhaps. But incredibly effective.
The program can functionally do anything I need it to without automatically adjusting things -- one of my biggest pet peeves with other composition programs. Everything is very simple and easy to find, and the program lets you drag-and-drop all the toolbars wherever you like to optimize your layout. The playback, unfortunately, is only in video game MIDI (which in my case sounds like a jazz-fusion Castlevania). Nevertheless, if your goal is to write a piece of music for a band to play, you can certainly work with the program as it puts everything in both standard notation and tablature for you when you write the tabs devoid of the playback quality.
Some of my good friends, especially other musicians, have called me stubborn for not doing what seems totally obvious and upgrading to my (free) copy of Finale 2007. However, I feel like the real virtue of this program for me is the fact that I had no boundaries whatsoever in writing with it. Other programs demand that you be familiar with a significant number of more complicated music theory concepts which I simply do not have time to learn. It's especially good for those of us who exclusively sing and don't play an instrument as we tend to learn things more by pitch recognition than note recognition. I'm certain that I'm not alone in using this method of composition, but I felt it worth talking about for anyone who has ever heard something in their head that they wanted to hold on to but did not have an outlet by which to express it.