12 - And then ?

Once you've performed this tutorial, you may want to try creating some small compositions by yourself. You'll realize it is very easy to create rapidly some stunning short pieces. However, music creation is a art with many tricks, and you shouldn't expect creating masterpieces without some background on the fundamentals of rhythm and harmonics in music.

If you are not a musician, keep in mind that traditional music composition relies on consonant intervals, such as the octave, 5th, 3rd... to create harmonious sounds. This means that most classical music scores will look in HighC like pipe-organ scores: many short sequences of parallel and horizontal bars (the andantino sample shows how a classical score looks in HighC). The hints for non musicians section is meant to help you create quickly some "reasonably sounding" scores.
Musicians will most likely have this figured out, but it is important to stress that the goal of HighC is to open up to new forms of music composition, that do not rely necessarily on arrangements of constant-pitched sounds. In other words, this is a tool to help you experiment with new music vocabularies, not a tool to let you compose using your past experience on traditional instruments.
This also suggests that at first, you should probably try to turn the "pitch snap" button on all the time to create pieces that appear to be in tune, and try to stick to harmonic intervals such as the 8th or the 5th most of the time. Using the small gray scale labels and the keyboard at the left side of the view will guide you to find the proper chords.
Finally, there are many tricks in the user interface designed to help you work fast, accurately and keep track of where you're going. The hints for musicians section details some of those.

To create more ambitious pieces that span more that minute and use richer sounds, you'll probably want to learn about using the following features:

Tags: all sounds can be associated a array of keywords, called tags. Those tags help you logically organize the voices and parts of your composition, so that you can work on them and manipulate them independantly or in groups.
Libraries: Libraries are sound banks of envelopes, waveforms and patterns that you can edit independently of a given piece and reference from many pieces. Those should help you create a repertoire of favorite sounds that you may want to share or reuse from piece to piece.
Scales: time and pitch scales help you establish rhythmic and harmonic constraints enforced throughout a piece.
Patterns: Are another way to use higher level structures to compose a piece. Patterns are sequences of sounds that you can store and instantiate multiple times at various heights and durations. Patterns also enable creating granular synthesis effects in HighC

The reference manual explains how to use those features in detail.