Best place to learn music production?

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.

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.

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.

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.