How do I learn production, Sup Forumstants? I completed my dissertation this Friday and now I'm sure I'll be graduating in spring with a Computer Science degree, so I'm planning to finally spend some time on learning Ableton inside out over the next few months.
Can anyone point me in the direction of a good, long, detailed beginner tutorial series for Ableton? Can any of you recommend a good book I can read to understand how synthesizers work so I can know what the fuck I'm doing when I turn the knobs? Should I read through the reference manual to gain a thorough understanding of what each instrument and effect does?
trying and getting error, trying and getting glitch, trying till it look well exactly like you want plus
a) buying musiq equipment b) buying / pirating DAWS c) seeing tutorials / buying box courses d) having talent/not being zomby or david guetta
John Thompson
>I'm sure I'll be graduating in spring with a Computer Science degree How do i write a program in python that prompts the user to enter a weight in pounds then displays the equivalent weight in kilograms accurate to three decimal places. my hw is due tonight senpai
There's point reading a giant manual and a book on synthesizers when you've never fucked around with Ableton before.
Watch some Youtube tutorials for the super basics and then just start fucking around. After a few months you can watch these videos again and they will make much more sense.
You can figure out the basics of synthesis by watching a few videos and fucking around. When you roughly know what envelopes, filters, oscillators, LFOs and all that crap is and what it does you can start reading books.
Camden Hernandez
type this
lbweight = input("Enter your weight in pounds:" ) kgweight = lbweight x 2.25 print("Your weight in kilograms is: " + kgweight)
something like that hope it helps
fair man I just know when I start producing whatever I make I'll be a bit of a perectionist with it so I'm planning to read theory + watch tutorials + work on a track or three to get out by the end of the month to force myself to work on something, no more fucking about in FL and making 20-30 second loops I never finish
Cheers, can anyone else chime in with other tutorials to check out? Or again if there's a comprehensive book out there on understanding synthesis that's up-to-date and relavent to modern music production that'd be gr8
Zachary Howard
Anyone know the best or any >$100 recording software I can Rewire with Reason 5?
James Morris
1. Start Windows 2. Start Linux 3. Open Python 4. Click "Run" 5. Ctl+Alt+Del 6. End process "conhost.exe" 7. Open Notepad 8. Type "1 kg = 2.22 lb" 9. Save as "python.jar" 10. Open Adobe Illustrator 11. Turn off your router 12. Turn off your speakers 13. Make a sandwich 14. Take Sonic Adventures 2 out of your Gameboy and stick it in D: 15. Close D: 16. Shut down your computer 17. Go to Guitar Center 18. Take a guitar off the wall 19. Stand on the cashier desk and play "Wonderwall" 20. Raise spork 21. Go home and reboot your computer 22. Open "python.jar" 23. Test out your program by setting a 1 lb weight on the modem 24. Wait for Siri to tell you how many kgs it is 25. "0.454 kg" 26. Celebrate
James Robinson
>Open Adobe Illustrator
Julian Garcia
see youtube tutorials that aren't made by total knobs. there are plenty tutorials on how synthesis works.
i've used ableton for 4 years and i've seen tutorials that cover every inch of it, however i only remember the features that i use regularly and it works out fine for me. it's more about finding your workflow rather than knowing how the DAW works.
I think experimenting with DAWs is good. After trying many, i realised i prefer ableton because it provides huge liberty and is very flexible, you can have an idea all of a sudden and apply it to the project immediately if you know how to work it.
from what i experienced, FL studio (the most popular DAW) seems a bit more streamlined but if you already have a good idea of what you want to make from the start, it's quite fast to work with. Personally i didn't like it because stuff like automation was treated as secondary, and i use automation all the time. In ableton it's very easy to set up, it's right on top of the audio and midi tracks.
remember that your results will always be shitty for a long time. It's discouraging because your knowledge of music comes from albums created by musicians that selected and put their music out there. Their outtakes and rejected songs would probably be just as bad as yours.
Don't restrict yourself to genre rules and guidelines, they are useful for when you are learning the basics but there is nothing superior to just listening to your track yourself and figuring out what is missing and what is messing up.
Remember to experiment, it's very difficult to listen to two different things (for example, a drum pattern and a bassline) individually and know what they sound like together. Put them together and always focus on the result, don't worry about how parts of the song sound individually. Two crappy drum samples can come together to make an awesome drum loop.
Good luck
Isaiah Perry
Try the NY school of synthesis intro tuts or Syntorial (even the free version is worth it). If you can find an old /prod/, I remember seeing lots of great links in the OP.
Bentley Clark
Here, I'll post the OP:
Talk about music production, composition, songwriting and audio engineering.
or any other similar website. GIVE and RECEIVE feedback.
>ATTENTION! DO NOT post Soundcloud, YouTube or any other links where you are not anonymous (unless somebody asks you for it). That is considered self promotion and will usually result in a bad feedback.
>READ THIS BEFORE ASKING WHERE TO BEGIN >REMEMBER THAT IT DOESN'T MATTER WHICH DAW YOU USE
Carson Hill
Thanks for the pasta, but this thread isn't going anywhere with that OP. It's better if you just start a new thread with the pasta and a lunga.
Hudson Thomas
>was supposed to jam with a friend and sell a couple of pieces of gear today >friend got sick and buyers haven't called/emailed me all day lame
Easton Clark
thx senpai gl with ableton
David Carter
I might if this dies. Dunno. I planned on adding a bunch of new resources but a new prod is usually already opened by the time I come. I have to organize them a bit more anyway and then I'll post them.
Jacob Bennett
Soooo, it turns out this little "something" I did today (and posted in the last thread) actually can't escape my head now and I think I'll continue working on it. Do you think I should?
The only problem is that I returned to my previous state of throwing together a new idea fast and then stopping working on it.
I still don't know why it exported the fucked up audio, though.
Hunter Morris
OP here I agree you have my approval to start a new one I'll just copy/paste the relavent data from this one and silently lurk the next thread for ideas, I've got some ideas for grime, dub and disco-y house instrumentals already
thanks for all the help guys, I'm downloading the lydia.com tutorial now, going to read my music theory book in the meantime, work through all the built-in ableton tutorials and try and throw together something with the built in sounds
Alexander Thomas
What does computer science has to do with mixing?
Landon Young
nothing but I'm good at it so I studied it
it was good but I should have worked more rather than go out and feel guilty about not working and never really enjoy myself
looks like I'll graduate with a good degree mark but wasn't worth leaving everything to the last minute and being a stressed wreck at home for 2 weeks every time there was a deadline
trying to make more "dark" sounding instrumentals, how is this sounding?
Anybody have any music theory tips for making horror/dark music? I don't know any music theory but I think If I knew some it would help me in the beginning of making new tracks.
John Adams
One thing I can't recommend enough, is to NOT watch any of those "HOW TO SOUND LIEK SKRILLEX" or "HOW TO MAKE PH3T BASS". They usually just involve copying a guy making a patch off a video and doesn't help you learn synthesis at all.
Hudson Allen
>how is this sounding? like it needs much less sub bass
Ryder Ortiz
It can help with learning a specific plugin they use, though. I always learn some new trick too.
Go through the help shit in Ableton. Look up the hot keys, get a feel for the interface, then go to town. Don't watch tutorials. There's no point. You're gonna waste your time watching people tell you their opinion or their personal way on how to do things. Any DAW is just a creative template or canvas for your sound. Don't think there's a way to go about this, because their isn't. You need no musical or technical training and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. No successful artist will EVER tell you otherwise. You will never hear any producer of repute tell you to start with fucking tutorials. You start where you are, because that's the only way to do it. Go in and get after it.
Justin Fisher
Thanks for pointing that out, I'm aware that isn't the best method but I'm thinking what said
but yeah, introduction courses first, music theory book first, then will grab one of the big sample packs Ableton offers and make something using that
will do senpai
Hudson Brooks
I loved techno but after starting producing music I can't listen to it anymore. It's just boring to make and now that I know what's going on, boring to listen to.
>aight 909 kick and 909 hat on the offbeat. Get a clap on every other with some fucking reverb on there, one note sub-bass, nice shit. I'll just pitch down this movie quote and have it looping behind all this. yeah I'm just gonna let this play out for the next 64 fucking bars and then start up with the 16th note toms and white noise swells and we're done
Charles Moore
Does anyone have good resources for starting out on reaktor?
Jayden Cruz
dont start out on reaktor.
Grayson Adams
How do I get some interesting organic sounds out of simple drum packs?
Like use Vespertine as an example. Especially It's Not Up To You. youtube.com/watch?v=TV-lb8tDzHA Where do I even start creating sounds like the ones at the beginning here?
Lately I've listened to that album a lot, along with Bad Vibes and In Rainbows/AMSP and I've been trying to figure out how to get really organic and natural-sounding stuff out of my music but all I've got are guitars and a laptop and everything that I create with software just sounds boring and sterile. I've tried to take regular drum hits and shorten them/pitch shift them around but that just gives me a bunch of choppy Ryoji Ikeda-sounding bullshit. I know obviously I'm not going to be creating sounds like the ones on fucking Vespertine immediately but some direction or some idea of where to start would help a lot.
you cant make dark trap. trap beats are to corny. if you want to make a darker sound you need a to get better at sound design. the better you get at sound design the less you need to worry about music theory. kinda..it helps alot. the sounds you make can help make the song more interesting without making an intricate melody. you could also get good at both and blow peoples dicks off. hate to sound like a dick m8 but your synths are too "childish" sounding. the pad you have is nice tho but it doesnt match a dark vibe. its more of a chill synth
Cooper Gomez
lots of effects and modulation. combined with basic sample manipulation.
Bought a tape deck. Gonna run a line out from my amplifier into it and make me some poorfag analog recordings.
Christian Lee
>effects and modulation What kind of effects though? Surely you don't get the kind of sounds that open up the song I posted by putting reverb and chorus on something. And as far as sample manipulation goes, like I said, I've tried to cut up drums and pianos and random recordings from my phone but everything I come up with either ends up sounding shitty and sterile or over-stretched to hell in a way that gives it sort of a lo-fi quality (but not in a good way).
I dunno. I realize these are pretty silly questions but I've given it a good shot and nothing I've found works well.
Thomas Gray
why not fl studio, all the basic functions are easy to understand, it's really simple, doesn't have tons of useless shit like other daws and you can still do anything with it.
Nolan Nelson
You have to buy Ableton GOLD to sound like this, if you use anything else you are fucked. Ableton GOLD has a special secret plugins that make your sounds sound like you were designing them before Christ died with one click. Look it up if you wanna go pro.
Luis Perry
but thats not dark. when i picture dark i picture this youtube.com/watch?v=wIQTxXeUCa8 youtube.com/watch?v=31A5CNsx1KQ you could def make some hip hop instrumental with these elements and vibe. just trap beats dont have a dark vibe but a more hype, turn up, lets go fight some mother fucker vibe. thats why i cant stand "chill" trap. nothing about a trap beat is chill
Cooper Morgan
Got two different motifs in this one. Is there enough of a transition, or should I flesh it out more?
Start making some ravey techno loops, get some simple melodies to compliment, use a 606 (get some circuit bending plugin) or 808 for the drums. Melodies should be short and repeititous, to emphasize a dreamy, sleep deprived quality.
Make a bunch of loops, then arrange em basically arbitrarily. Start going through the very simple repetitious melodies and apply effects to individual notes. Just resample all that shit. Same with the beats. Just throw in transitions to other loops when you feel like it. Start treating every 8 bars, 4 bars, 1 bar, etc, as a new composition so you just delving into it and getting things to sound more varied. Then you can start blending em together with volume automation and adding or subtracting different elements of the loops. Booom. Now you have some cool "technical" le so many time signatures jazzy shit just cause you got autistic with it and spent way too long on the micro-edits only spergs will like. That's what I do at any rate and I try to sound like my boy Richie Rich on occasion.
Mason Fisher
Why don't you try to sound like you ;)
Benjamin Parker
i second this
Gabriel White
my guy did you really put that beat down as notes inside of a computer and say "yeah this is fire"
listen to some beats and please tell me you see a difference in what's going on
Jose Carter
anyone??
Luis Nelson
snares and hats need to be more up front. kinda muddled under the bassdrum tail loops and reversed strings. kick a bit more punchy, cause it also gets lost in the vibes. otherwise I like it senpai. Simple and obvious, but it's got feel. I think if you start arranging and getting some variations of that going, you could do some cool shit. Maybe try tying that vocal sample to a sampler with an arpeggiator on it and coming up with some vocal melodies
Chase Ramirez
or like transpose down those strings for parts, but it's your call semp. I think I'm bein' specific cause it sounds like something I might have made at some point. I really like it.
Julian Gutierrez
>ATTENTION! DO NOT post Soundcloud, YouTube or any other links where you are not anonymous (unless somebody asks you for it). That is considered self promotion and will usually result in a bad feedback.
saving this feedback, thanks man, toss your track if you want
Jacob Taylor
im sorry! i didnt realize, i literally have like 4 garbage throwaway tracks on there. should i change the username or what?
Christian Rodriguez
...
Samuel Evans
just upload to clyp m8
David Powell
I like it but I'm weird. Kinda boring at parts, but understandable as I expect most tracks posted here are essentially drafts. You could probably throw supatrigga, glitch, grossbeat, livecut et. al on the different tracks, play around a bit and have some instant breakcore, since it's already got that playful, silly, but oddly menacing and intense vibe that people go for in breakcore for some reason
Christopher Nguyen
ok ok i'll delete my post, sorry i didn't see that post i just read the actual OP
Jaxson Lewis
But what if I want me to sound like Aphex Twin??
Haha, I was mostly joking, but thanks for the info anyway. Love RDJ, SAW II and drukqs especially so this is nice to know. I'd love to hear some of your stuff if you put that much detail into it.
Like I said up here, , I'm mostly interested in programming stuff that sounds a lot more organic and less obviously mechanical. I was pretty broad in my initial post so I guess I could just narrow it down to Vespertine's microbeats. Do you know anything about how I get sounds like that? I know I got an effective answer already but I've tried with that before and nothing I've ended up with has sounded even close to what I'm looking for.
I have yet to listen to any of Matmos's stuff but I know they helped with the production so I'll probably hit up Ultimate Care II later tonight
Levi Gray
Hey guys I've been trying to re-create a synth for a little while now to no avail does anyone know how to make that cool, warbly, sounding synth that plays in this vine when pikachu is in the tunnel way/when ashe is walking with the girl. It only plays for like a second but i love the way it sounds. It sounds like some kind of arp or something.
Uploaded a recent one to Clyp! Still not set on my drums and it's just a basic loop but lemme know what you guys think for early shit
Kayden Peterson
It sounds like just a run-of-the-mill synth line with a fast arpeggiator and really heavy EQ on it
Zachary Hernandez
bitcrush with EQ and reverb?
Its okay, the drums sound like shit and it gets a bit repetitive
John Clark
The beginning sounds like stuff you can get with granular synthesis (toss some breakbeats in granulator for M4L and you'll come up with some cool stuff that sounds like this with the right tweaks. specifically fool around with spray, lfo, and fm settings) or graincloud stuff with loadsa sampled breaks and shit in ableton's sampler. You can get really metallic, choppy sounding drums by putting a 1/16th note lfo on it in ableton's sampler. If you want this stuff kinda painlessly you can check out Krypt in Reaktor. You can also drop shit-tons of samples into krypt and get wildly unpredictable results that come from c cycling through them all at different rates, with different effects, etc. I feel like Krypt doesn't get the love it deserves because bending it to your whim and really learning it is basically lovecraftian. Alternatively start resampling on the elements of your beats with grain delay. grain delay can lend things a slippery squelchy, organic quality like that. for metallic drums, try a 1ms ping pong delay. and putting that at the end of a chain of effects results in cool shit (iirc specifically chorus and phasers tend to do well). For making micro-edits musical, it's important to start with a base, relatable beat, and keeping it intact as a structure , making edits inside of it. I guess the thing to stress would be not to change the order of the beat, or if you do, keep the longer structure intact. Otherwise it will become unmusical and unrelatable.
Samuel Turner
okay, thanks for the feedback! i am trying to use entirely vinyl samples just cause this is just for fun, so the drums are all ripped from radiohead or my quasimoto albums.
Alexander Perry
hey guys OP here I was mucking about with the amen break in the sampler to practice getting to grips with it and was surprised I made some pretty decent drum rack clips with it
how do I jungle what should I add next (using preferably only the built-in Ableton instruments but I can add stuff if necessary)
Kevin Diaz
And staying inside the general, loosely stated structure of the beat actually let's you get pretty inventive and far-out, as people tend to pick up on something that starts and ends more or less the same way, even if the in-betweens are pretty fragmented and abstract.
Ayden Morgan
fuck man that was nice. bring that sine wave synth up a little more and make that Staccato more alive with a tad bit more reverb . i really enjoyed this dude fuckin good job bro
Carter Butler
delet this and dont ever tell these noobs about krypt again
i like the prod but the lyricism felt a lil dark for how easygoing the beat is. it would also be cool if you stuck a little longer on the same rhyme scheme or focused on transitions a little more
William Murphy
DELETE THIS
Henry Collins
please add fart noises and willhelm screams you'd be neil ciciriega in no time : ^ )
Luis Powell
Slap some deep bass like a stretched out 808 kick whenever there's a kick and make a bassline out of that by pitching it up or down whenever it fits. Just treat it like another percussive element. Maybe feel it out jammed over the break. In jungle there's nothing complex. Besides drums it's mostly one-shots of different samples stabbed out and then repitched or something.
Maybe get some hoover stabs with reverb. Look up the Jungle Jungle sample pack and go ham. That one telephone sample with fucktons of reverb and some toasting or dancehall vocal samples are essential as well. It's a pretty simple genre. I think you treat the overall production more or less how you would treat the drums. Think of all the elements as simply phrases to be ordered differently.
Isaiah Green
Why? Rely on Krypt to make good music? If you don't know how to do it by hand you shouldn't use a plugin for it. Then you rely on sounds other people can make just as easily as you. I use Krypt because it is fast for my purposes, but given the need I could do the same in Ableton's sampler.
Julian Flores
melody is 2/10 also the drums sound like farts :3
wtf are u doing
Mason Watson
long leply
wtf are u doing? seriously though, whole thing sounds decent just need "change ups" in your music because it sounds bland
Henry Hill
Holy shit awesome, thanks for the help. This is pretty detailed and it's like 1 AM but I'll dive into this tomorrow for sure.
I'll check out Krypt but like you said I want to know how to create this stuff on my own too without relying on plugins. It's the same reason I don't use Fracture a lot even though I have it and like a lot of the sounds you can get out of it.
Zachary Foster
>Why? Rely on matches to make a fire? If you don't know how to do it by hand you shouldn't use a match for it.
Camden Jenkins
listen to techno, not deadmau5
John Brown
What am I doing? Chilling out answering questions I think I may know the answer to
Christian Morris
Because then other people start using matches when you're trying to make fire in a way that isn't like other people, then suddenly everyone catches on to this whole matches thing and you don't know any other way to make fire
Adam Watson
Not a day older than 17
Isaiah Cooper
sorry m8, but you can't see the forest for the trees
Camden Richardson
I don't care. If you don't want to say anything other than "I disagree with you" continuously I feel like you aren't exerting enough effort to warrant any more replies or attention. You just keep making me read the fact that a person on this planet doesn't agree with a viewpoint of mine, which I knew before reading your comment, so you may as well have never posted anything, unless your intention was simply to waste some movement of my fingers or a few minutes of my existence
Grayson Martinez
i dunno if this thread is still active, but I highly highly recommend the Ableton course by Tom Cosm.
The whole thing takes about 50 hours to complete. You can buy it for $5 bucks. The first two parts (of 10) are free on YouTube.
Sup Forums recommend that to me and it changed my life. It's exactly what you're looking for. He explains everything, not just about Ableton but about production in general.
Leo Turner
Where can I find that? I can only find creating beats.
William Sanders
thats what happened to me, EXCEPT WITH ALL MUSIC. it is truly suffering.
only shit i can listen to now is like noise trap or really pretty female vocals.
That's the one. The first two parts are on Youtube, after that you pay like $5 and can download the rest of the videos.
Follow along with him as he goes through. He's using Live 9, but I almost nothing has changed in Live 9.5 besides a much better Simpler / Sampler.
It should take you about ~50-100 hours to go through all ten parts, assuming youre following along and pausing to keep up with him.
Robert Watson
So what exactly is your argument? People shouldn't rely on a particular piece of software because others might also be relying on it? And then we get music that sounds similar?
It doesn't matter what software you use, at the end of the day the listener is not going to be able to tell what plug in you used for whatever it is youre doing. If a sound does become overused to the point where listeners get tired of it, producers will move away from it. for example any self respecting producer won't use the 'yoy' Massive sound anymore. It doesn't matter if you used the Massive preset to get it or if you hand fucking crafted it with your own voice and resampled it to sound the same.
Nathaniel Morales
Can you hang around? I have a couple questions.
Jaxson Perry
With what I learn here, can I make M83 style music? Like, not house-type stuff, or trap, but large, arena sized, spacey post rock?
And synths are so confusing. I'm in a post-rock band, and I'm trying to experiment with different sounds, so I've acquired a number of pedals, so that I can substitute synth with a guitar. It's worked pretty well so far, but I have a feeling I'm going to hit a wall very soon, and that I'm going to need to learn how to play synth. Where can I go to learn about full keyboards vs minikorgs/monophonic keyboards, what I need to play live (I've seen some people play with just keys, and I've seen some with their laptop, analog modulators, DI boxes, pedals, and two keyboards), like I don't know what they fuck to get/what to use. It's all so much. A WHOLE different monster.
James Martin
yeah just sample m83 songs have some imagination, jesus
Julian Harris
seriously anonnnn :^(
Jacob Rivera
Not that user but I can tell you to start small. Don't go out and buy hardware until later. Torrent Ableton and play around with it, make whatever, you're not going to crank out the exact song you want right off the bat. torrent some virtual synths like Sylenth1 and look up tutorials on youtube, follow them step by step, get to know the synth. You'll be able to recreate M83's synth style after a few weeks of tinkering with Sylenth, he uses pretty basic synths. Get a midi Keyboard and hook it up to a laptop running Ableton and you'll be able to play the digital synths you create, or some presets, live. Just a few tips
