There are a ton of resources for learning specific things, but I don't know of any start-to-finish roadmaps of what it looks like to go from nothing to making EDM at some basic level. I started out roughly six months ago, and in the last week or two I've finally began to feel like my tracks sound like music (admittedly not creative/high quality/what it sounds like in my head, but perhaps in the ballpark). I figured it might be useful to recap all of the stuff that I feel has been critical to getting to this point. Maybe other people can get a better idea of the scope of what they're getting into - I've certainly discovered that music production is a wildly huge and complex field.
Software & Hardware. All-in, I've probably spent around $500. Your mileage may vary, but in retrospect I think that I got my money's worth. Skipping out on any of the below 3 things would make my music sound way worse than it does right now.
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Digital audio workstation (DAW). This is basically the command center of producing a piece of music. The main four DAWs are Ableton, FL studio, Logic, and one other one that I can't remember.
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Monitoring headphones/speakers. For the first ~4 months I was using these really nice commercial speakers to mix. I figured that since they cost like $500 they would be good enough for producing music. Turns out you basically need legit studio headphones. I dropped $300 on some Sony MDR 7520s and it completely changed the way I understood sound.
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High quality samples. This is controversial to people on here because you don't really need good samples to make music - you can make your own. However, you can't make high quality samples because you have no idea what one sounds like. You're not going to be able to make a strong kick until you listen to a really good kick sample a zillion times, so you kinda need to get strong samples. I spent several months using Ableton's samples and built-in instruments and was basically chasing my tail producing shit sounds. Then I picked up KSHMR's second sample pack and it changed the game for me.
Knowledge. Thankfully, the cash drain stops here, because everything you need to learn, you can figure out for free. The three main resources I have used are Youtube (CloudSine is my favorite for getting started/intermediate stuff, RevolutionHarmony for music theory, Secrets of KSHMR for medium-to-advanced stuff, and Mr. Bill for pretty advanced/sound engineering-oriented stuff), helpful guides that pop up here every week or two, and the manuals for software (the manual for your DAW is extremely useful reading, as are the manuals for any third party DAW plug-ins you get).
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Basic music theory ideas. These are simple but fairly profound, so they take a long time to sink in. Here I am referring to things like the core ideas of melody and harmony, how they interact to produce chords and phrases in scales, thinking of music as a conversation, keys, and so on. I think it is inevitable that everyone who tries to do this wastes a solid chunk of time (months, in my case) producing dog shit sounds because you don't really get what melody and harmony are.
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Scales and chords (in practice). Learning to pick a key to make a song in, learning how to select and order chords within that key, are all difficult to do well. Initially you'll take a random-ish approach of just picking a key and going with the most generic chord progressions, which produces "music"-ish sounds, but falls far short of being cool. I'm thankfully moving past this right now.
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Melodies (in practice). It's deceptively complicated to write good melodies. There are a ton of rules which are optional to various degrees, but I don't think anyone knows what truly makes a melody catchy or else everyone would have a hit single. You just have to play around with melodies and be miserable for a long time until you stumble into some patterns that work for your ear (or at least that's how I did it), which takes months. And I'm still shit at it.
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The basics of sound engineering. You kinda need to know how to work some kind of synth program at a basic level, unless you're cool with just using other people's synth sounds all over all of your songs. This involves learning the meaning of terms/concepts that are common across the field of sound engineering (attack, release, gain, dry/wet, frequency, shit like that). You also need to know how to use equalization to free up space in your mixes, use a compressor to make drums sound like what your brain thinks they should sound like, and reverb to make everything not sound like you quantized a copy of the same vocal sample at the start of every bar of your track. All of this is technically complicated but conceptually easier (for me at least) than music theory. It takes some time to learn how to literally do it, but once you know it, you know it. The exception is operating a synth, since there is such an incredibly wide range of possible sounds that come from the technically simple controls. This is especially true if you have a really powerful one - I still can't make the sounds in my head using Serum, to be honest.
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Arrangement ideas. Ok, so if you are competent in all of the above areas, you can probably make somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds of something that sounds like "music". Unfortunately, you are still many weeks (or months) of high levels of pain and disgust away from being able to make anything like a song. You have to learn how to combine different sounds, rhythms, and melodic/harmonic developments over the course of several phases of a song to create a coherent, larger work. This is a more "art than science" area and I don't know if there's a good way to learn it other than looking at and thinking hard about a ton of professional songs, along with a healthy dose of experimentation.
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The basics of mixing/mastering. In my experience, which I have to imagine is fairly common, once you get all of the above down and have a 3 minute "track", you listen to it and notice that it's just missing something. In fact, it's missing a whole lot of shit, but the biggest things are probably 1) sufficient loudness and 2) any kind of thoughtful mixing of the volume levels of various instruments/sounds. The first animal, which seems nitpicky but is actually a key part of making music sound decent to the modern ear, involves learning how to use compressors/limiters/clippers on your master track to reduce dynamic range. The second animal is actually pretty obvious once you realize it's important, but is one of those "losing the forest in the trees" kind of problems.
And I think that covers it! I think that all of these items taken together form a "necessary and sufficient" list of things for producing EDM that is in the vicinity of successful, but I might have forgotten something. If you want to know what "acceptable" sounds like in my mind, here's a link to my music - I think that the two tracks at the top are finally decent... if you want to grimace, listen to some of the older tracks on there.
None of this is to dissuade you from trying to learn how to do this. Every time you notice a huge increase in the quality of your sound (which still happens to me literally all the time), it's phenomenally rewarding. If I could go back and do it all again, I would. Good luck to you if you decide to embark on this journey!!
Submitted September 28, 2017 at 05:12AM by pentaSEC https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/72yqbk/overview_of_what_going_from_zero_experience_to/?utm_source=ifttt
Javier Rodriguez
Thursday, September 28, 2017