Newbie Producer

[DemiAlex]

My favorite advice I have received is to do a lot of "active" listening.

This is where you sit down and listen to the song and dissect each part, figure out the movements, how the song is building up energy or bringing it down. Active listening is where you put all your focus on listening to the song and try and figure out how certain parts click.


Also for a lot of house tracks, you'll notice the intro drums are the same as the drums played in the "drop" and the outro. So don't start with the intro, spend your time building the meat of the song, that way your intro you can just copy and paste your main drums and add a little creative atmosphere here and there

[AtmaInfection]

watch for sonic academy courses.

[maccwerk]

+1 for active listening! Very valuable exercise!

[FMILYR]

See if you can get your hands on a completed project file for Logic. Then you can study it and see how everything was produced. I know Splice had some projects up. Once you understand how to use your DAW, and the other essential things like eq-ing, leaving space in your mix, using side-chain, etc... Then you can start letting your creative mind go. I started by using my creativity and trying to make projects, but they ended up all sounding awful cause I didn't have the first clue why my kicks weren't loud, why my bass was getting washed out, why everything sounded muddy, and whatever else I can't remember. It was frustrating. If I could restart, I wish I would have studied the production aspect first. Once you get a grasp on that, I would study some music theory, all the different scales as well as chord progressions. Hope that helps!

[Not Applicable]

active listening works best for me. I also listen to all types of music when I am not producing or mixing.

I used active listening to better my mixing skills. I would say to also active listen to your own productions.

[ragverp]

production process may vary per individual, this works different for everybody but the thing i just learned sounds very helpfull.

The process is like this (this is done in ableton but applies to any daw) Load a track you really like in an audio track in the arrangement window, set the tempo of you daw the same as the song so the bars(or warp) align and start adding markers with explanation to the parts you see and hear mapping the song structure.
if done correctly you will end up with a layout of the song , you will have markers like intro, drums, start hihat,start bassline, break, buildup, drop etc etc. If you then delete the wav file of the song the markers are still there and you will end up with the skeleton of the reference song and you can start building your own song on this skeleton to have some help, you can always change things but its helpful and you have an idea how a song is build, try this for different genres to see the difference of song structure between techno, drum & bass, Electro etc etc for instance you will notice that with techno you see chances in the song every 4 bars or a sum of this ie 8,16,32 bars adding or taking away a element of the song

also try to find a decent workflow, for me its building a beat and adding melody and bass line, for some one else its making a melody and adding the beat etc etc .

read up on masking, phasing and how sound works, important things to know when producing

Google is your friend

[suri1100134]

1. Reading the manual. Yes.
2. YouTube has TONS of good material. Don't be afraid to type "Logic X" + a genre or tecnique.
3. There are some good books on this topic. It really depends on your current knowledge, but Dance Music Manual generally is a good point to start with.
4. Don't get fooled that you need to spend more money on software and hardware. If you know your stuff you can make a hit with a computer, a DAW and some headphones.
5. Focus as much as you can on actually making music.
6. If you want progress you got to work on that. Fiddling around is fun and will get you a little further too. However if you want to step up the game some day you got to learn music theory, learn how to play at least one instrument and also don't be afraid to learn a bit of the physics side of things.
7. Have fun. There should be no other reason to make music.
8. Don't pirate.

thank u for sharing you experient

[MilcoB]

I think manipulating samples is a great way to start.
Eases the pressure of sound design and you can go right into writing!