Best place to learn music production?

Nico_NI

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/13279#Comment_13279

Thanks for sharing Aaron. Indeed some good resources here, so much learning content out there!

Kwarantine

I was having the same issue for a while. I found a program called Building Blocks by Audible Genius on sale at ADSR Sounds, and it has been a complete game changer. It's basically a video game that teaches DAW based production in your browser. I think the interactivity of it helps solidify the foundations that you require to make the music you want to. Afterwards, I got a plugin called RipX: Deep Remix by Hit 'n' Mix, from ADSR as well. It's a stem extraction tool that I have been using to get a better understanding of song arrangement for the genres of music that I am interested in making. I think I spent ~$200(CDN), but a worthwhile investment; also, a small amount in comparison to what I have spent on studio equipment and other gear.

afrogrit

ProducerTech . . . nuff said

Jon Watte

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/13129#Comment_13129

Books, magazines, peers, school teachers, and trial/error. You could go out and meet people in, like, physical music stores, to have someone to talk to.

It was less efficient overall than everything-online, but we made do. (Also, Usenet existed at that point, and teenage me was early on that ...)

SOO much trial-and-error. Teenage me had lots of free time.

eye776

The book Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers (J. Anthony Allen) should be a good starting point for most people, just to get your feet wet. There are a ton of free/open source DAWs and music notation programs.

The same author also has a whole set of music theory classes on skillshare and udemy, called Music Theory Comprehensive, that teach music theory from grade school level all the way to entry level college.

Jonathan Peters also has comprehensive music theory classes that go through all of the basics and most of the intermediate and early college notions.

Other than that, coursera has music theory courses that can be audited for free. Youtube is not entirely useless but there is a lot of distracting content. Apart from channels already discussed here there are also MusicTechHelpGuy and Music Matters or Max Konyi who have alright music theory centric playlists.

If you are an absolute beginner avoid short videos that teach some popular technique. Focus on multipart playlists. Have a notebook next to you and a DAW open. You need lots of time and practice.

Networking, so you can get your music heard, played and possibly even licensed (for actual money), is an entirely different field and topic.

Kaiwan_NI

@Kwarantine said:

I found a program called Building Blocks by Audible Genius on sale at ADSR Sounds, and it has been a complete game changer.

Thanks for this! Have you tried their Syntorial as well?

barinka

Music production is my hobby. And my colleagues from Mabbly gave me online training on Coursera. I really liked

Kaiwan_NI

@barinka Mind sharing which course you enrolled in?

PK The DJ

I saw an ad on YouTube the other day for a site called BBC Maestro. They do courses covering all types of stuff, but the ad mentioned a forthcoming course on music production hosted by Mark Ronson.

I signed up. Hopefully will find some good stuff during the six hours of video (available from July 5th).

There's a songwriting one by Gary Barlow too.

Kaiwan_NI

@PK The DJ Interesting. I didn't know BBC has its own version of MasterClass. Let us know how it goes once the course starts. 😃

PK The DJ

MasterClass looks interesting. Some big names on there! Might try that one as well. 😁

Cretin Dilettante

I had producer friends who I asked for basic advice, read & watched various tutorials online, read computer music magazine, Tom Shear's (Assemblage 23) blog, and more recently I've been watching Ken Hiwatt Marshall's channel.

On the music side of things, I watch a bit of Game Score Fanfare & 8-Bit Theory every now and then to try and absorb new strategies for composing & arranging.

Kaiwan_NI

@Cretin Dilettante That's one YouTube rabbit hole I haven't yet discovered. Game Score Fanfare and 8-Bit Theory sounds like something right up my alley 👾

tribepop

The issue for me is not the lack of learning material, it’s the motivation to sit through said material for hours instead of actually writing music. Some things are ideal to learn at your desk so that you can follow along or apply the concepts quickly but other videos aren’t really structured for that.

For example, a lot of videos that have good information are not in a bite-sized or academic format but instead are hidden within an hour long stream of their jam or something so it’s hard to extract that info without watching the entire video. I find it helps to save these to a watch later list and instead of putting on some dumb click-baitey video on YouTube while taking a break or eating, I’ll instead throw on one of those videos and let it play in the background.

The two big points I wanna make are:

1) Don’t just watch “tutorial on how to use X software or X feature within some software”, watch videos of people creating tracks from scratch, decomposing popular tracks, people reviewing community tracks, etc. Watch videos from people you know are knowledgeable regardless of the genre or software they are using. Chances are, if its good advice it will be applicable to your situation.

2) Always find the takeaway message in the videos and try to apply them. A lot of times I’ll find I get stuck on a part and I’ll remember some trick that I learned earlier that day from watching a video and I’ll just end up trying it and it usually ends up working out quite well. Always try to stay thirsty for knowledge.

Nico_NI

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/28426#Comment_28426

Hey @Richard Gravener, did you have a look at the tips above already? There's potentially something for you to get started with if you want to cover the main steps of music production.