MAKING E

LECTR

ONIC

MUSIC

F OR

BE

GI N

NE

RS

OVERVIEW

Intro

Software

Why people like the music they do

Theory(covered over the series)

INTRODUCTION

About me: I produce Dubstep, Drum and Bass, Trap, and Chillstep. I have been producing for about two and a half years and have been Djing for three years.

I am assuming you have had no prior training into how electronic music is produced.

Electronic music is produced in a Digital-Audio Workstation(DAW). All of your drums, virtual synthesizers, and MIDI(Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files will be in the DAW.

Where can I get a DAW? Some of the most popular DAW’s are FL Studio, Ableton Live, and Cubase. If you google any of these, they will come up.

What is the cost of a DAW? Depending on the DAW you want, $100-$800.

DAW’S

What will a DAW look like when you open it?

This is FL Studio. Pretty clean, easy, and effective. Not used by a lot of popular producers though. If you look at the right side of the picture, you notice all of the squares and rectangles, that is called a “sequencer”, but we will talk about that more later.

DAW’S

This is Ableton Live.

A bit more complex but widely used by many popular producers.

DAW’S

This is Cubase

Nicely made, widely used. I see it as a combination of both FL Studio and Ableton Live.

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE LIKE ELECTRONIC MUSIC?

From my personal opinion, people like electronic music because of the movement of the genre. There are certain chords and articulations(style) of music that people tend to like compared to others.

People like the bass. However, when producing electronic music you need to remember the mid’s and high’s!

Tone Quality. Like playing and instrument, you need to have good tone quality to make it sound good. If it sounds bad, nobody wants to listen to it.

THEORY

Surprisingly, producing electronic music does require music theory. However, you do not need to take theory classes.

You at least need to know what tempo is. In music, tempo is represented in BPM(beats per minute). An example of a tempo in electronic music is 150 bpm, 180 bpm.

It would be VERY helpful to learn the piano or know they which keys are which on the piano. Almost all DAW’s use a virtual keyboard to tell the synthesizer what to play. If you don’t know what they keys are on the keyboard, you will have a very hard time making things in key.

Staying in key. When you listen to dubstep, you probably hear just a bunch of random sounds. However, these are not random notes. If every synthesizer played a different note at one time, it would just sound like a bunch of random notes being played. Think about playing every singe note on the piano at once, it wouldn’t sound very pretty.

REVIEW

DAW = Digital-Audio Workstation

MIDI = Musical Instrument Digital Interface

People like certain chords and articulations.

Make it sound pretty.

NEXT LESSON

Synthesizers

EQ

Starting production in FL Studio

More theory

WHERE TO FIND MY MUSIC?

SoundCloud: http://www.soundcloud.com/Excentricity

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/EpicenterDubstepHD

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Excentricity