Published in print by TN2 September 2020. Published online 26 October 2020.
Over the Summer, I got around to doing something I’ve been putting off for years – producing electronic music. From the outside, this hobby can appear intimidatingly difficult, with its own jargon, software and online subcultures. Once I started digging into it, however, I was surprised to find there are a plethora of free, beginner-friendly resources available. The most difficult part was learning where to start. For help, I reached out to Irish electronic musician Herb Magee (AKA Arvo Party), for advice on getting into electronic music as a beginner.
To produce electronic music, you need a Digital Audio Workstation (commonly referred to as a DAW). This software allows you to create, record and manipulate audio. There are many reputable free options, such as Garageband (which comes pre-installed on Macs), Reaper (recommended in a Q&A with Autechre) and Cakewalk. Arvo Party “started out with Logic and still uses it for writing and recording. I use Ableton for live stuff…” These DAWs are expensive, and are more common among professionals, but both offer free trials.
In the early stages of learning production, it doesn’t matter too much which one you pick. The most important thing is to make a choice and stick with it until you become familiar with the interface. This is the biggest initial obstacle, and if you switch around a lot at the beginning, you’ll waste a lot of time adjusting to each new program.
What you’ll see when you open your DAW will depend on which one you’ve chosen, and it is at this point that online video tutorials become helpful. Generally, a DAW will include a library of audio clips and MIDI instruments, as well as a time grid with seperate tracks (like a multi-track recorder). In Ableton, tracks are divided into either MIDI or audio. Audio tracks can hold any number of audio clips, as long as they don’t overlap (to overlap audio clips, you would have to place them on different channels). MIDI is like a piece of sheet music, an instruction of what notes should be played, at what volume and for how long. To play MIDI clips, you will need to load a MIDI instrument onto the track. The interface of DAWs tends to be pretty intuitive. You place audio or MIDI clips on different tracks, you press play, and the program begins to play what is on the tracks, moving from left to right.
The best way to become comfortable is by simply playing around with the tools at your disposal. Don’t worry about sounding good or doing it “right”. Just experiment and have fun. You’ll gradually become more familiar with splicing and editing audio clips, creating MIDI melodies, and finding your way around the DAW’s library of sounds.
After you’ve been experimenting for a while with a DAW, you might hit a roadblock. Either you’re still baffled by the interface, or you don’t know what to do next after you’ve put down a drum pattern and one or two instruments. Thankfully, again, the internet is full of tutorials. Still, I would like to recommend one particular YouTube channel: Collective Intelligence. The host uses Ableton, but the tutorials he has on mixing, arrange and workflow are broadly applicable to many DAWs. He gets straight to the point, he’s a natural teacher, and he never assumes his audience knows anything about what he’s explaining, a problem I’ve found with many tutorials.
Of course, you won’t become a musician by watching hundreds of online videos. Arvo Party himself said “I don’t really use Youtube as a means of learning music production. I might use it if I come across a real problem (I remember being confused by Logic’s buffering system early on) but for the most part my learning comes from trial, error and experimentation.” Tutorials can help you with a particular obstacle, but at the end of the day, you’ll learn the most from doing it first hand.
In some ways, electronic music can be easier to make than traditional music. If I want to record a song I wrote on guitar, I need to be able to perform it perfectly (notwithstanding the ability to do multiple takes or “comp” sections from different takes together). When producing music digitally, I have total control over details that I would be hard pushed to reproduce on a real instrument. However, there can be significant challenges to becoming a skilled electronic musician. You need to be able to design sounds, structure tracks, create beats, chord progressions and lead melodies, mix the different elements and master the track. In a typical band, each one of these roles is handled by a separate person. In electronic music, it is often one person fulfilling most of these tasks. The learning curve is high, and you shouldn’t let yourself get discouraged. These things take time. When I asked Herb what he would have liked to say to himself when he was first starting out, he responded “If I could go back and advise myself when I started making electronic music, I would spend a lot longer teaching myself how to mix and EQ stuff. I would also not let myself near any compressors or limiters! Everyone has to start somewhere and I’m glad I’ve been able to teach myself many things about production but I am still learning something every day.”
Luckily for us hobbyists, the pressure’s off. There is no rush to become the next Aphex Twin, or squeeze out track after track when you’re not having fun anymore. When you get fatigued delving into one area, you can always change tack and focus on something new. “The beauty of the modern home studio,” according to Herb, “[is] that if you do find yourself stuck, you can simply move on to another idea and come back to whatever is trapped at a later point”.
When you’re considering engaging seriously in any new hobby, it’s important to be realistic about how much time and energy you have to spare. There’s nothing worse than having a hobby become another chore. Setting out an allotted time for music production can help ensure you don’t just dabble at it once or twice before abandoning it. In an interview with Perfect Sound Forever, Aphex Twin mentioned that he made his best music when he waited until “you’re really bored and you’ve got nothing to do”. As for Arvo Party, he said “I don’t really have a ritual for making music although I suppose in the last 5 months, it has always been in the same environment with mostly the same equipment.”
Everyone has to find what works for them, but producing music digitally allows for a great deal of flexibility. Whether you’re a fan of vaporwave looking to slow down forgotten seventies hits, an aspiring composer, or a vocalist who wants to make their own backing tracks, I hope this article has made the prospect of dabbling in electronic music production a little less daunting.
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