Music production, do i need to actually now a lot about music?

A lot of the most important things have been covered already, but honestly I wouldn't recommend someone with little musical experience to start with theory, I'd wholeheartedly recommend you take piano lessons though. I mean I've been playing music since I started violin when I was three, and since I've taken both high school and college theory at this point, I'm certain that if I had started with theory first I would have given up almost immediately.

If you really want to cover your bases as quickly as possible, get a keyboard, a practice pad and a pair of drumsticks and just start playing. I know when I'm producing I'm rarely thinking about scales unless I'm trying to put together a main hook or something...the majority of it is jamming on my piano, feeling the music and playing for hours until I find that perfect thing I'm looking for.

But on the other side of the argument is the fact that being the most gifted musician gets you nowhere these days if you don't also have a deep knowledge of engineering (at least as far as electronic music is concerned). If you have minimal knowledge of DAW's and all the steps that going into mixing, etc..., then you're effectively going to have to learn two completely separate and complex disciplines to produce quality material. And asking questions like "how do I use softsynths" or "how do I mix" are frankly just so vague and expansive that it's almost impossible to point you to one or two resources that can bring you to a level of even half competency, but it wouldn't hurt to read books about the basics of synthesis. To be honest synthesis hasn't really changed much since the 70s aside from it's accessibility, so anything from that time period would be time well spent as the knowledge required to understand one will translate across most platforms (as in, I recently took a course on Massive and it helped me hugely in FM8 and Sylenth). But anyway this is going a little off topic

tl;dr if you're coming from a place of little/no musical/engineering experience, your only option is to literally dive head first into learning every aspect and fundamental of production. And if you're really serious about making something out of it, you have to live either at your computer desk constantly learning, or have an instrument in your hands. Either way you have to live, eat and breathe it for the simple love of creation.

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Originally Posted by attila

And if you're really serious about making something out of it, you have to live either at your computer desk constantly learning, or have an instrument in your hands. Either way you have to live, eat and breathe it for the simple love of creation.

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This is the most important thing. It really comes down to what your motivation is for why you're doing it. If you want to produce music because you want to make it big and tour the world and party every night, it's going to be hard, because the number of hours put it to achieve that is huge, and although it's never really seen by the general audience, it's the reason why people make it big. With that being said though, if you're doing it because you love music and producing, and it's intrinsic motivation (doing it for the love of of making music) then it'll be easier, because all the hours spent won't seem like time wasted, it will be learning experience.

It's a basic message for anything you do in life, if you love what you're doing you're going to find it much easier to accomplish what you want and it won't feel like work. It's cliche, but it's true. You have to love the journey not just the end result.

As long as you have the determination and the discipline to keep at it, you'll be fine. Nobody's learned these things over night, it's a never ending process. Learn enough to get you started, and you'll learn the programs and plugins better as you use them, because you'll learn the little tricks only when you need the answers to specific questions, if that makes any sense. (You'll learn it only when you want to know if there is some way to make what you're already doing easier. Like i just recently learned how to bus channels in ableton, because my screen became cluttered and i needed some way to reduce the number of channels)

But you've got the right idea: music theory, knowledge of software, and most importantly TIME