Maybe you saw a YouTube video of your favorite DJ rocking the crowd behind a pair of CDJs, maybe a really sick indie album inspired you to do some exploring, or perhaps you wanna make music, but you’re too shy to be in a band(that was the case with me).
Whatever reason you have you’re interested in making some music and I’m here to help you get started.
If you don’t’ know who I am refer to this for my history with music.
Forget What You Know
Now I can’t teach you if you’re cup is already full, I’m trying to go through life with an empty cup myself. It can be hard to put yourself in a space where you’re just happily absorbing as much information as you can. And although I’m not a big successful musician if you’re starting from zero I can at least help you get to where I am. . . if that means anything.
First Forget about music for a sec….
Think about learning how to do art, while the mechanical process is part of it, you’re really learning to see the world in a new way. Colors are broken down into hue, saturation, and value. Artworks themselves are broken down design fundamentals. Before you might have looked at a photo and said hey that looks nice, but now you look at a photo and analyze why it looks nice.
Now come back to music. . . now you listen to songs and think hey that’s nice, but a producer will listen to the same track and be able to explain why it’s nice. Maybe it was the way it was mixed, perhaps the sound design in a certain section caught your ear, or maybe it was the use of filters to build tension before the drop. Before long you’ll be able to analyze tracks thinking in terms of frequencies, compression, volume faders, panning, and filtering. Subtractive Synthesis, FM Synthesis, and things like modulation and LFO’s, and Automation. . . don’t worry about all the fancy words for now.
First Exercise
Now before we even touch any computers, instruments, or headphones I want you to do some research.
What genre of music do you want to create? With the internet, there are too many genres to count. If I say I produce Trap Music . . .someone might say what kind of trap. Industrial trap? Hard Trap? Melodic Trap?
You can Choose up to Three
Here are mine
- Future Bass
- Hip-Hop
- Melodic Dubstep
Choose Your Heroes
Having people to look up to can help guide us when we are first starting out and finding our sound. At first, it’s okay to emulate people that you admire, imitation is flattery after all. As you learn you want to take a little from one artist, a bit from another, you might get blindsided with random inspiration here and there. Over time you’ll develop a mental library of sounds that will form into your unique voice. So from each genre, I’d like you to choose just one artist to study.
Mine are as follows
- Marshmello (Future Bass/Trap)
- 9Tails (Sad Boy Trap/Hip-Hop)
- MiTiS(Melodic Dubstep/Future Bass)
Lastly, I’d Like To Close On Some Benefits of Learning about Audio
Be proud that you’ve stared on the journey of working with audio. You never know where the skills might take you. Remember that for every game you play, movie, T.V. show, and now even some bigger YouTube channels have dedicated guys just for audio. (It’s surprising where some of the sounds come from) There are guys who specialize just in mixing or excuse the pun are masters of mastering audio. I find that the knowledge of audio makes the videos I make at work now better than someone who has never worked with it before.
