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Get started making music

learningmusic.ableton.com

11–20 of 152 posts

Re: Get started making music

#11

I always liked listening to edm and when I first got to know that you just need a laptop and DAW to make tracks the idea of becoming an edm artist sounded exciting and glamorous to me. (like alan walker, martin grx) I installed FL Studio and tried my hand on making some beats ( https://youtube.com/channel/UClKt2vzomuegCDA45SU6FbA/videos ). Before I spent too much time on it I released it's actually less about making…

That's a pretty common beginner's trap, to have your motivation be to release music rather than in creating music itself. For basically any beginner you need many years to get to the point where that should be a consideration. Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making the music. Ironically this is what actually differentiates the greats from those that struggle: the former make music primarily for themselves, the latter make music primarily for others.

Re: Get started making music

#12
I used to make music as a teenager. Spending many hours in the "studio" certainly shapes your aesthetics and how you approach new music. Even understanding just the basics and tiny bits of underlying techniques makes you listen differently, makes it easy to become a snob to be honest. Overall though, and generally, making things of any sort lets you appreciate the creative process as an overarching art in itself, an appreciation you can often transport to other fields, even those not conventionally regarded as artistic.

Re: Get started making music

#16
A small anecdote: Back when I was still a little kid I had an awful music teacher in school. He would throw all the theory on the whiteboard but never explained how it actually relates to the music itself. I would've loved to know so I asked how this strange mathematical stuff of 4/4ths makes music and he told me to learn it or I'd fail but nothing actually relating to my question. So I always had a bit of antipathy towards the subject and never looked it up or even asked somebody afterwards, even to just satisfy my younger self's curiosity because the whole subject's been tainted.

If those classes ever even mildly resembled even how well this little interactive tutorial presents and explain thing I probably would've joined the school chorus or learned to play instrument in an extra-curricular fashion. Which I regret never doing.

Eventually when I got my hands on a copy of Reason at age 11 or 12 (can't remember) and started messing around with it, I got to a point where I kind of understood the concepts -- the whole process was kind of similar to how this tutorial is put together, it just took way longer to figure out. :)

Re: Get started making music

#18

I’ve been working on an IDE for music composition https://ngrid.io . Launching soon.

Interesting project, got any screenshots so far?

I’m polishing up the UI as well as the analysis algorithm. I’ll be done by the end of the year.

Re: Get started making music

#19

Pretty cool. If you like Ableton but would prefer to use a more obscure underdog for some reason, there's Bitwig.

Obscure, and yet technically superior in all ways...

Bitwig == Ableton++, after Ableton management vetoed engineering's desire to do a major and much needed architectural rewrite. As I understand it, they didn't see how tearing down all the legacy code and building something more stable and modular would help them sell more licenses the next year. Hence, we have Bitwig.

I like it as one of the rare examples of engineers wanting to fix problems and create something great winning out over the desire for predictable annual returns.

Re: Get started making music

#20

Pretty cool. If you like Ableton but would prefer to use a more obscure underdog for some reason, there's Bitwig.

Also Ardour (which is GPL'ed and runs natively on Linux as well as Windows and Mac) is currently growing Ableton-like features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiwUN7hz6eU
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