I think this is a really good primer for electronic music production if you're going to start from absolutely zero.
If you specifically want to program beats, I recommend this quirky book "Pocket Operations": https://shittyrecording.studio. It's basically guitar tabs for drum machines. Pick out some styles as a foundation and then build on top of it. Think of it as boilerplate code.
Being a software dev by day, and a former musician in high school, the current world of digital music production tools is as incredible as it is overwhelming. It's good to have something that orients your practice and experimentation.
Literally a no-fluff cheatsheet for drum patterns presented in the simplest to digest form possible, and without losing any important parts. Programming drum patterns has always been daunting to me, as it seemed like everyone just "knew" their patterns and how to play around them. Even though I knew that it wasn't the case, it was still difficult to approach. But with this boilerplate, it's like a massive blocker is just gone for me. And by going through even just a a portion of the patterns, I can easily see how one can acquire a sense for them and is able to come up with their own takes.
Or you could just try to reproduce the beats of your favorite songs. It will be incredibly difficult at first, but after some tens of hours you should be able to slowly program the simpler ones.
Obviously you need some native beat tracking capabilities, it seems some people just lack this skill.
There's a music teacher at NYU, Ethan Hein, that seems to be working on this exactly in the context of groove pedagogy. For example, he recently picked apart the amen break in a blog post [0] and tried to replicate it in ableton from scratch, methodically. He first lies out the basic pieces or the groove, then builds up the groove adding and removing elements, gradually complexifying it.
As someone who has trouble with drum patterns as well I really liked the idea.
Might I suggest simply playing with a basic drumset in real life for a few hours? A kick snare and hihat are the principal components needed. I contend that you will organically discover a kind of conversational dialogue between the kick and snare that known beats are a result of.
It’s something that will inform your drum programming immensely, even if you never pick up drum sticks again
This pings on something I've been wishing for locally: I would like there to be a music shop that has a short time studio rental (30min to an hour) where you can access a trap set (specifically for me) or other piece of gear, already setup with headphones and monitors, such that you could just go in an play for a while, without an investment.
A place to just jam for a little bit and explore, able to be separated such that any awkwardness or shyness can be reduced.
Maybe this is a common thing and I just don't know how to ask for it.
You can go into pretty well any music store and play the drums there for as long as you want. Even electronic ones with headphones on. I used to work in one, and there was a guy who would come in on his lunch hour everyday and just play. Honestly don't even know if he owned a drum kit at home.
In my head, which is based on decades old experience and the occasional stop by a music store, what I'd be wailing on is demo kit, out on the main floor. To me, that's different from getting a small, private soundproof-ish room where I can pop a few songs onto the headphones and hit it.
I don't want to be a drummer and I'm not interested in performing publicly. I just want to rock out and suck as hard as I can, without feeling the social awkwardness of being out in the middle of the store.
I guess I've never been to a music store that has the drums on the main floor. Nearly all the main sections are dedicated to guitars because that's what sells. I've even been to some where the drums are on a different floor. Personally, as a computer programmer, I've embraced social awkwardness as a core part of my being though, so being terrible at drums in front of bunch of people I don't know would be right up my alley haha.
I don't have the information to say. I would say that the kit doesn't have to be top of the line gear. The fee would need to cover wear and tear (and maybe a deposit or kicker if someone gets a little overzealous,) hourly rate of whomever is maintaining the setup, plus some margin.
What I'd be willing to pay is something on the order of up to $50 for a session. I think the sweet spot would be $30-$40 for something like 20 to 30 minutes.
There's probably rehearsal studios in the burbs with a minimal drum kit and minimal backline for $25/hour, in San Francisco i remember i being at least 3x that but really worth the money. Part of the experience is going into a dungeon like environment, inhaling huge amounts of smoke and wondering if you'll survive.
thats a pretty good idea. I went to a university that had a music department and practice rooms. (Keep people from playing in the dorms). They were pretty soundproof rooms, and many had a piano. I used to walk around and sometimes duck into an empty room and play the pianos (not a music major..) I'm not great but it was a fun break from studying.
That's what I'm thinking. Just a small room, soundproof. Cost for entry covers upkeep plus some margin. Hook your phone into the monitor or headphones and go to town.
this is a really great idea. I never played a kit until after 15 years of involuntary music lessons as a kid, including a stint in high school percussion section. Just having high hat, snare and kick is like magic.
At least i hope it's magic for somebody, playing clarinet or pedal steel for me is magic, whereas playing my best instruments, piano, guitar, flute, not really magic.
> Or you could just try to reproduce the beats of your favorite songs.
Depends! I went into hobbyist music production a few months ago probably bc I saw a cool midi controller that my kids might find interesting. Fast forward a few months and I've bought and sold a few $100s of gear and now I have these great immersive music making sessions with just a Korg Volca Beats and a MicroFreak.
I'll save you all hours of YouTube synth hype bois by stating that the MicroFreak is hands down the best way to learn synthesizers. It packs SO MUCH into a small, tactile form factor. The manual is actually a fun read and explains each and every parameter in an engaging way. It is a masterclass in approachable documentation for a complex subject, (and was probably translated from French, since Arturia is a French company).
You have no idea how unfathomably timely this discovery was. Truly unreal. I've scoured the internet for a while trying to collect every dataset known to humanity about beat programming in this exact sense. Thank you.
It’s the only thing I’ve found/needed. Just like any instrument, drums/drum machines can be pitched, respond to velocity, and are affected by sounds played around them. Understanding where your sounds fall in the EQ spectrum is huge. Don’t sleep on amplification, saturation, and EQ.
I love love love Ableton Live. It's possibly my favorite piece of software today.
If you're a software engineer interested in UX, I think Live will fit your brain like a hand in glove. It reminds me very much of emacs or vi where the app is designed to disappear from view and let you focus on your content.
Also, it's incredibly programmable and generative at many many different levels:
* Session view lets you build arrangements on the fly in realtime.
* Follow actions on clips let you automatically build sequences of clips, loop, them, randomly chain them, etc. It's like control flow for clips.
* The various built-in synths and effects support all sorts of dynamic modulation to make timbres evolve on their own.
* Then, of course, there is Max4Live, a full-fledged visual programming environment integrated deeply into the app.
You, of course, can ignore all that stuff and just make completed fixed tracks. But if you're interested in the live aspects of Live, then the software really feels like a substrate that you can use to build your own bespoke instrument for playing your music in real time.
I agree, and with over 15 years of experience with Live and a fruitful music career thanks to it, I have a deep respect for it. It’s hard to use anything else because of how many small, seemingly insignificant workflow features it has which add up quick in a session.
_But_ - man is it far behind the modern DAWS like Studio One and Bitwig in the low-level fundamentals like plug-in isolation, multithreading, and flexibility in terms of your ability to offload frozen tracks from RAM. This puts a bottleneck on the max size of a session before it becomes unstable and unusable. Even with 32GB RAM and a top-shelf CPU, my ability to finish a song grinds to a halt around the 100 track range. My songs can have 150 tracks with 1-20 plugins and 1-30 automation lanes per track by the time they are finished, and the number of hours I’ve lost from crashing or just waiting for it to respond could easily add up to months at this point.
And small things like the inability to know if a plug-in is the VST2 or VST3 version have been driving me nuts for over a decade.
My music is absurdly abnormal in terms of complexity though, and the vast majority of people will never encounter these problems. I worry, however, that the glacial pace of development likely due to the prehistoric tech stack at Ableton will prevent it from ever closing the growing gap made by the increasingly valuable feature sets of modern DAWs have been able to push out quickly and consistently.
Either way, Ableton Live is a great demonstration of the incredibly fine nuance involved in a good UX. They got a lot of little things right, and that alone has been the largest contributor to their success in the industry.
As a hobbyist musician even I notice Live's flaws. And while it does indeed get out of your way most of the time, when it doesn't you can't change it and it becomes frustrating. While other larger players in the industry are farther ahead, just how far behind Live really is becomes especially apparent when you look at Reaper. They're fundamentally different in their approaches, yes. But Reaper's pace for adding new features and how up-to-date they are in terms of the changing landscape of the industry (CLAP plugins, ARA2 support, etc.) is impressive considering their small team. But Ableton's focus with Live seems to be more towards adding content rather than features or large overhauls. At least that's my impression.
I genuinely love Live's workflow. It feels the most natural to me. But the ever growing list of annoyances and shortcomings make me look into other DAWs fairly frequently. Though sadly no other one has really stuck with me so far.
There was a defect in Live’s implementation of VST3’s UI that lead to poor UI performance (lag) that got fixed in the upcoming 11.3, it’s in beta test right now.
It most affected users with hundred of tracks and VSTs in most of them. No impact on VST2.
Controller script added for Novation Launchpad Pro MK3
Controller script added for Novation Launchpad X (via reassigning the Rec Button)
Controller script added for Novation Launchpad Mini MK3 (via the special 4th row buttons)
Controller script added for Akai APC Mini MK2
Controller script added for Akai APC Key25 MK2
Controller script updated for Novation Launchpad Pro (MK1)
Push is made by Ableton. I am not sure they are willing to help a company build by some of their ex developer who left them to build a new DAW with possibly stolen code and at least many ideas that were discussed internally.
Despite the headquarters proximity, I think they are not the best friends.
Not so sure about the "stolen" part. Bitwig code has a completely different code base (Java backend with UI written using Juce), and the sentiment at the time was that a few devs were frustrated by Ableton management rejecting several proposals that ultimately were implemented in Bitwig.
Also the multitake tracks UI that was implemented in Live 11 is basically a (slightly improved) copy of the same feature on Bitwig.
The stolen part mostly relates around the sales and distribution network, less around the code. Basically the sales equivalent of IP theft, and a really huge douche move by their CEO. Makes him very unsympathetic to me. Not as bad as Behringer but close.
Ableton is great but these days I prefer Bitwig. It does most of what live does but lets you do more modular stuff without the massive context switch into Max.
I've used Ableton for about 12 years before making the switch to bitwig, it's the best thing I've ever done.
There are very, very few Ableton features that I miss. The only thing I can think of is the automations rescaling I wish Bitwig would implement, otherwise it's vastly superior to Ableton in any other way. Especially the bounce/audio editing workflow, this thing makes me 2 to 3 times faster than when using Ableton (no hyperbole)
It's also massively cheaper. For a lot of the things available on stock Bitwig (~399$, often discounted at 249$) you need Live Suite + Max 4 Live + Cycling Max MSP, the asking price is no less than 1300$.
Live main selling point right compared to Bitwig now is ubiquity, basically. You can expect to go into any recording studio, anywhere, and find a Live desk available.
I use Acid Pro 10... I think it allows me to have a more original sound to be honest. At this point I've found that tools are leveling off in terms of capability and now it's more a matter of what a producer knows how to manipulate best. There are nuances like how audio clips and knowing how built in efx work that make transitioning to a new DAW painful until you catch up, the deep learning curve is steep for advanced production... Rather than switching, I already know how my current DAW works, and it works, so there's no need to change right now.
I've always been curious about synths and how they are programmed. I'm a JS dev learning Rust and was having ideas about building my own synth. Is Max4Live a good choice for building audio plugins in 2023? Also, is Rust a viable option for creating VST plugins?
I don't think Max4Live is not a good choice for building audio plugins. It's a weird platform that was designed for 'institutionalized academic music,' as I once read someone describe it. It's difficult to program in and not efficient. None of my favorite music software is made with it. It's also quite buggy, in my experience. For doing some basic extensions to Ableton Live specifically, beyond what VST allows access to, it's OK, since it's the only official way to do so.
If you want to just dive into DSP using wires and boxes, with some additional code sprinkled in, SynthEdit or Reaktor Core are faster, more fun, and produce better results. If you don't mind C++, check out iPlug from REAPER's WDL codebase: https://www.cockos.com/wdl/ — there are some forks of it.
There's also JUCE. You'll find some people complain about it and some people regret using it, despite it being relatively popular.
There are some Rust things for doing VST (and AU) development. Here's one that I've seen a few things made with: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/nih-plug/tree/master I wouldn't worry too much about the differences between C++ and Rust in this world. Audio software tends to be buggy, so the bar for being considered 'good enough' is pretty low.
Max and M4L have a very specific jargon and tech legacy that makes them quite different compared to regular VSTs (not better nor worse, just different). Reaktor gets closer in terms of performance and limitations to regular VST development compared to Max, while still using a visual programming approach.
Handling/touching/processing MIDI events with JavaScript in Max will mess up the timing due to how Max handles scheduling — it will defer the event to a lower priority thread — so I don't recommend doing that. You can safely use JS for GUI code and using Ableton's API to manipulate the session and UI, though.
I like Ableton, but the better way to get started making music is with your voice, singing with songs that you like. Sing the melody, and also the bass and harmony parts. If you have a phone you can use the voice memo app to do two-part stuff. If you want to move up to an instrument, my favorite is the melodica, a breath-operated keyboard that is very cheap (~ $20), sounds great, and teaches the notes of a piano, and requires no electrical power to operate. In fact for some things I think the melodica is better than a piano, since in some ways it's closer to an organ with the ability to maintain and vary the sound over time.
That's a funny instrument! I'm definitely getting one of these since I'm a terrible singer but I always have a tune in my head that I need to hum out loud.
A few ios app recommendations I'd like to make are:
Alternatively / my personal preference and hot tip: Start with rhythm. Get a practice pad and some drum sticks and a free metronome app or website and try doing single, double, quarter and triple notes (I'm naming triples later because they're an odd number and as a first-time drummer they did me a bamboozle at the time).
A really versatile, affordable and fairly compact percussion instrument you can start off with as well is the Bodhrán; you can make some really great beats with it, see e.g. the opening scene of the film The Magdalene Sisters, just bodhrán and singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxXFs8EL35o. Here's another version of the same song where the artist plays it with just his hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mjWhMn-VnU
What about classical guitar? I.e: Nylon stringed, Spanish guitar. I've played Beethoven and Bach pieces on one. Granted one can do that on an electric or steel string, but something about the timbre lends classical guitar to classical music. Plus it's the only style of guitar which really sees regular classical concert performance.
I guess guitar is much less of a statement these days (being in a band is no longer the coolest thing to do) so the social pressure bit feels less relatable to me. I did catch the tail end of that era though so I know what you're talking about.
I do similar to this, recording to a voice notes app, but then importing the clip into my DAW, which quite helpfully visualizes an approximation of the pitch I was singing at, and using this as a template to build instrumental parts upon. Usually my vocal tracks aren't in the final mix, once I've replaced them.
Good advice - no matter what you play, whether you produce electronically or acoustically, singing will help you internalize music, ready to be transferred to any sound-making object.
You can also go the route of dispensing with phones and learn to transcribe solfege into a notebook. This is something I just started exploring and while it does take practice to gain the ear to transcribe things, you can start by learning to write down children's songs like Baby Shark(do re fa fa fa fa-fa fa-fa)and gradually work up to pop melodies - and once you do that, songwriting becomes a very natural process. All the precision stuff, you can work out in the DAW once you have a general indication of melody and rhythm.
I think the solfege for Baby Shark would actually start with sol la do, or in the key of C, G A C. Because the phrase eventually ends by dropping down one semitone on the final "shark", which would end up being F# (Fi!) if you started at the root of the scale. The initial movement from G to C, or sol to do in solfege, is very common and something you spot everywhere once you're aware of it.
I tried this a few years ago and it was addictive and amazing. Highly recommend.
I’d also like to tangent to say: music used to be a much bigger part of our lives. Before the radio a piano was a household staple. Kids would learn, family’s would play and sing to each other. We’ve largely given that up.
Imagining hearing one of your family members just start singing to themselves without any background music, does that feel uncomfortable? Would you sing along?
I think to many the answer is clear, music, as well as many other endeavors are something to now be enjoyed but not created. And oh boy do we get to enjoy the “best” music and “best” films and “best” books on demand.
And along the way we lost the large bits of ourselves which created and enjoyed together. So, in short, 10/10 would do the tutorial again.
I can only respond anecdotally but from where I’m sitting, the DIY music world has never been larger or more diverse and younger people are a huge part of that. Friendly digital recording, platforms line SoundCloud, YouTube, and Bandcamp, plus the magic of internet communication platforms have broken down so many barriers. There’s a micro-sub-genre for every mood, combination of styles, level of production, topic, and day of the week. I’ve been performing and releasing music for 20 years and I’ve never seen so much happening at once.
Im seeing everyone stuck inside screens in consumer mode, and when playing instruments it’s for YouTube popularity contests doing cover songs or showing physical prowess and definitely copying some already cool thing, and definitely not showing us the mistakes made along the journey , just the gloss of a perfect performance…
A neighbor kid started crying when he could not ride the bicycle the first time like his online hero did perfectly.
This is a messed up transition time of some sort, no doubt we will make some cultural choices to free ourselves of this tyranny of our own mentation.
There’s certainly a lot of that but it’s still a version of music being part of our lives, even if the people trying to participate in musical “me too” experiences aren’t creating what we’d all consider art. These things have always existed, they are many people’s way of engaging with the things they love. What’s new is our ability to share it and see others do it.
Besides, popular music has existed in a “perfect performance” place for, what, two decades now? The virtues of imperfect performances are lost on most people. Speaking as a performer and occasional producer, I simultaneously enjoy the imperfections in my favorite albums and invest serious energy to purge them from my own releases, so I get it.
None of this changes the fact that DIY music scenes are thriving. Physical album sales are healthier than they have been in years. Playing guitar seems… cool again???? None of these are bad things, even if there’s one too many videos 14-year olds playing perfect Dimebag Darrell solos on YouTube.
> music used to be a much bigger part of our lives. Before the radio a piano was a household staple. Kids would learn, family’s would play and sing to each other. We’ve largely given that up.
Recorded music, and our reaction to it, has pretty much crushed that. On the one hand, it's marvellous that I can listen to Jussi Bjorling or Maria Callas any time I want, but we then tend to criticise anything less than "the best". Heck, the process of recorded music has often deceived us: the Wrecking Crew made most of the great US pop/rock albums of the late 50s and 60s[1].
The net result is that when people break out a guitar or sing, we tend to critique them harshly. Why listen to a mediocre performance when we could have perfection? And, of course, who wants to perform when you'll just be compared to the recordings of the best ever?
Internet exceptionalism is a phenomenon to watch out for in all parts of life. The internet surfaces the top percentile examples of talent, and if we aren't careful we can find ourselves unhappy with anything less. Worse yet, people find themselves unhappy with their own talents and equipment in comparison.
This feels overly pessimistic to me. Since you mentioned pianos, they are big, unwieldy, expensive, and require maintenance. They were a household staple if none of that was an issue for you. There are cheaper and more convenient paths now, and tons of content online to learn from. If you want to play music, there's never been a better time.
> If you want to play music, there's never been a better time.
People used to learn from… people. In fact, many people prefer that still.
And I’d say, I’d rather have a dozen friends who play music and actually want to hear my music than have the potential to get a million fans I’d end up rather not meeting because it’s just awkward and unnatural.
>I’d also like to tangent to say: music used to be a much bigger part of our lives. Before the radio a piano was a household staple. Kids would learn, family’s would play and sing to each other. We’ve largely given that up.
Music fandom used to be a bigger part of lives after that. Pop/rock stars were royalty. Now with all the other stuff competing for eyeballs it's just another thing. Aside from a much smaller music-obsessed demographic, most teens could not care less today.
That's more about the ticket price, and just going to have some fun with friends (plus the trend), than the music. People do similar shit for iPhone or console launches, movie premieres, social media stars, and so on.
I strongly disagree. My lower class sets of grandparents both had pianos. Other family members had violens, accordions, portable little organ things. Making music was the norm before the radio just like the original poster said. Do you think classic blues pianists came from rich families?
Honestly I think I just misread "before the radio" as "before the internet" and didn't realize it until it was pointed out a second time to me. I don't actually know what life was like before the radio, even my grandparents would have been too young for that.
That's very true. However people on the poorer side did what they could historically (see cigar box guitars, washboards, jug bands, singing, tap dance).
There's now the meme that one guy will bring a guitar to any event and start playing Wonderwall, lol.
I was at a Wardruna concert a few months ago, and the artist had a (somewhat awkward because he doesn't like speaking English) speech about this very thing, he encouraged people to make music, to sing to their children, to bring less manufactured, casual music back into people's lives.
> Imagining hearing one of your family members just start singing to themselves without any background music, does that feel uncomfortable? Would you sing along?
No need to imagine, pretty normal at my home. (Sometimes I am that family member.) And to answer the questions, no, and yes. (And none of us is a trained musician.)
But I agree, we (as a society) lost a lot of that. I have a feeling that it's cultural; I strongly suspect that in some countries people sing a lot more.
I guess it will depend on the family/household too. A friend of mine (same age as me) grew up in a house where everyone sung, and used to have huge family gatherings based around singing together. All his family played at least one instrument.
My parents, on the other hand, had exactly zero interest in music. I grew up without any music in the house (no radio, no recorded music, no musical instruments).
After I left home music became one of my main hobbies, though I've always felt far behind many of my peers (many of whom at least had a few piano lessons in their youth). Slowly making progress, though I've always struggled with where to start with singing (since no-one in my house sang, I'm very self-concious doing it).
IIRC Paul McCartney grew up listening to his father play pop tunes in a room full of guests and family members. It was a rich musical environment. As Paul got older, he started playing pop songs for the guests just like his father. It's interesting to learn that this was a common social activity back then.
This was my house growing up. All my siblings, including myself, learned music and instruments we picked out. It helped that my mother had a degree in music, but still. At 40 I find myself singing out loud without music often.
Bitwig Studio also supports Linux and comes with a large collection of sound content. It's nice to have an all-in-one package for Linux that's in the same league as the other well-known DAWs for Windows and macOS.
If don't want to pay full price for Bitwig, wait for their summer and winter specials which happen every year. They also have an educational discount.
Bitwig uses a subscription model for upgrades, but if you end your subscription, you retain access to the last version available during the subscription (plus minor updates to that version) for life. When you buy Bitwig, it includes a 1 year upgrade subscription. When you're on the subscription, you also get access to a rotating selection of content from Bitwig's partners (https://www.bitwig.com/circle/) in the form of license keys, but unfortunately, many of these partner tools don't work with Linux.
I also use Bitwig. I switched from Ableton because it was cheaper. It's objectively a better DAW from a technical standpoint.
But I have to say the sounds and plugins it comes with are not on par with ableton, some presets really have me scratching my head and it took forever until they gave us a decent convolution reverb. For the longest time I was not able to get a simple sine-wave out of the synthesizers it comes with (wtf?).
It's also worth mentioning that back in the days this DAW was promoted with a feature that lets you collaborate with others over the network, now 10 years later there is no more mention of this feature and I think most forgot it was even planned. Recently they tried to sell you stock-plugins for a premium but back-pedaled quickly. That is just ridicoulous after I sunk hundreds of dollars in their update plans.
> I was not able to get a simple sine-wave out of the synthesizers it comes with (wtf?)
It's not uncommon for synths (even hardware ones) to come without a sine wave. In fact some of the most famous ones don't have it (hello TB-303, SH-101, Minimoog and many more...). Of course, now that we have the grid, we can have whatever waveform we like. Also FM4.
Expensive ? Of course your mileage may vary, maybe where you live it's a lot, but this is a professional tool starting at $99 with the full version being $399. Given what it does, it's effectively given. Back in the days, I can remember paying a lot of money just for RAM expansion on an Akaï sampler. These days, for music tools, we're all spoiled kids.
No, it's $399. The killer features of Bitwig are modulation and Grid, and you will need the $399 version for that. $99 version is basically a generic DAW with a modern UI but less built-in instruments than other DAWs. Of course it's still useful... but to be honest using the $99 version is hardly "using Bitwig".
While we're here, if you get into electronic music and want some samples, the Library of Congress's "Citizen DJ" project has multiple gigs of public domain audio you can use:
I think this is awesome and I recommend anyone interested in following it through.
But one problem with this kind of thing is that it has the character of "How to Draw an Owl" [1]. I have been tinkering with Ableton for 10+ years but when I got to the song structure part (especially the Photek Drum 'n Bass one) I kinda had to laugh.
Making music is really difficult. This kind of tutorial is step one on a thousand step journey.
This tutorial comes up every couple years and it's got a pretty elegant UI and presentation. It seems to be a perennial HN favorite.
But I got a free copy of Ableton (not Ableton Live IIRC) with an interface I bought and Holy cow if Ableton isn't the most painful and disgusting UI I've seen in a while.
It took me about 2 seconds to get the interface working correctly in Garage Band. I literally gave up after an hour of trying to get Ableton working correctly. There were like 1000 buttons and one of them had a default value that made the interface not work right or the audio not get routed into the track. IIRC I got it to the point the audio was coming into ableton and it looked like it was working but then nothing ended up in the recorded track.
I play guitar as a hobby.. I have no time do put up with something like ableton, I want absolute minimal time spent futzing with a DAW and maximum time with my hands on the actual guitar.
This was all on top of me being a software engineer (which maybe made me less tolerant of figuring out the UI) and my interface coming with a long series of video tutorials on how to get Ableton working with the interface. Meanwhile again, got it working in about 2 seconds without looking at the help in Garage Band.
A lot of the differentiating features don't matter that much, micing my amp and using my pedalboard/amp sounds better than the synthetic sounds in the DAWs unless I spent a bunch more money.
Ableton reminds me of "configuration over convention" or something. Or ancient MS/IBM software where the user has to figure out 1000 options to get anything working.
Love what the team over there does with these web demos. They previously made this amazing interactive synthesizer learning resource: https://learningsynths.ableton.com/
I also always think of a very important point that I saw concisely expressed in an interview with Daniel Miller, about fifteen years ago. (If you don't recognise the name, Miller founded Mute Records and signed Depeche Mode, and is an influential electronic musician in his own right). The journalist commented on the ever-increasing availability of inexpensive recording equipment and asked, "is making good music easier than ever?" Miller replied, "Yes. But making great music is as difficult as it ever was."
I think that was the quote I misquoted. I had heard it somewhere years ago backstage. Or maybe on a podcast. It resonated with me to the point where I remembered it (my way apparently) and put it in the old Rolodex.
It was never easy making a living as a musician. If you were really good, and at least a bit lucky, you could. The vast majority had to have other jobs.
I agree it's probably tougher today though. The fact that producing and recording is something anyone can do with a laptop just makes the S/N ratio even smaller. And a lot of the surrounding industry jobs have probably gone away too, since big physical mixing desks and multi-track tape machines and record cutting and pressing machines are no longer used nearly as much.
It's extremely easy to make a living from music right now. With a weekend's worth of YouTube training, any decent musician or songwriter should be able to invest 40hr/wk and reliably generate $5k/mo within a year.
That's a territory of 1M views per month (or more, not sure what's the pay/ad-tolerance on music videos). That's a slightly higher level of views than Postmodern Jukebox and Pomplamoose are at. Being able to pull that off easily is pretty optimistic...
Also "reliably" is optimistic given YouTube's issues with policy/copyright enforcement and channel restrictions. (I.e. do you want your 5k income to be dependent on a few sudden bogus claims you can't dispute?)
You're pretending that YouTube ads are how musicians make money, and that's just not the case. YouTube is one tiny piece of the marketing map -- not the revenue one.
Add Patreon + Merch sales. You know, where they interrupt the song to pitch stolen t-shirt designs on their shopify site. Yeah, if you're just making YT content w/ patreon support and stuff you might be able to crack $5k/mo if you're decent at music theory. That's a lot of hustle. Where-as you used to be able to record a master, work your shitty job for duplications, go tour clubs and spots selling t-shirts you designed and your album to your audience as well as on your online shop. Now, you can just sit in your bedroom, where a mask, start up twitch, and let AI generate beats while you look like you're DJ'ing.
You're absolutely correct. And it shows how out of touch Hacker News is that the people who understand the existing market get downvoted, while the people who claim "YouTube ads are the only way to make money" somehow get upvoted. What a sad state this site is in.
There aren't that many topics to learn. If you pick one music industry content creator, they will have around two days worth of videos that you can watch. If you do the things they say, you will make money. There's no magic to it.
Many thousands of live streaming musicians have had no trouble going from $0 to $5k/mo. You're welcome to check out Twitch or TikTok any time for evidence of this.
I've dabbled in making music, but it makes me bump against an existential crisis. I could make nice sounding music, but what does it mean? Often, it's just an excuse to buy more gear.
I think I'd rather find a way to enjoy developing tech for universal friendly anonymous healthcare workflow identifiers. But if anyone can write supporting music, please do.
It’s funny, music was what solved my existential crisis. Software is always being replaced. When I die, chances are my kids and grandkids will never be able to point to a piece of software and say “my dad did this”. Even for my grandfather, who architected several buildings in my home town - his buildings are gradually being replaced and I can’t point them out to my kids anymore.
Music (and other arts), on the other hand, is yours forever and exists forever, and it’s a way for future generations to connect with their ancestors and even pass on a legacy.
For me, making music is like climbing a mountain I will never summit.
It is the journey, not the destination.
I live in a major city, though, and a lot of my friends are much more talented musicians than me. There is a musician community for me to participate in.
Modern DAWs are absolutely amazing, but if you're into both programming and music I can't recommend checking out a tracker enough.
In particular I recommend the Dirtywave M8 as a fantastic blend of everything that makes trackers great, and modern convenience and power.[0]
+1. I’ve been experimenting with using it in a live setup. It’s very flexible and lets you set up macros that can be triggered with midi. It’s kind of nuts what it can do. Highly underrated.
Dirtywave have shipped plenty of M8's in the last year. They just produce them in batches, there have also been shortages of the Teensy 4.1 microcontroller used IIRC and they are highly sought after. You can also "build your own" from supplied firmware https://github.com/Dirtywave/M8HeadlessFirmware
This is not the fly-by-night kickstarter you are implying.
It would be cool if HN had a list of popular / repeatedly submitted url's/articles like this one, and a total count. Would be a great list to look over, too.
The last time I was doing music production, I was learning how not all instruments are created equally.
If you want to do some pop music work, drum beats are a dime a dozen.
If you want to do high quality orchestral work, you're going to have to fork out some serious cash for stuff like EastWest Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra, Vienna Symphonic Library, Garritan Personal Orchestra, and others.
I'm sure things have since changed and you can now get some of these on cloud subscriptions, but you couldn't really achieve the same depth at all with some of the stuff you'd get as standard packs from your favorite DAW.
I’ve been a user of those kinds of tools for more than 30 years, as an amateur, and of course i’m amazed at the progress made. However, a part of me wonder how much we lost in the process. We’ve automated so much that i wonder if the tools don’t play a role in the lack of diversity in music production. When every part of a song has to be composed or improvised by a human, note per note, isn’t it clear that the end result should be, be definition, more original , as well as more meaningful ?
I'm inclined to disagree. I believe the progress in music software has opened up new avenues and genres, it hasn't stifled existing ones. Instrument players are going to keep playing their instruments, just that now it's easier than ever for them to make their own professional sounding recordings and songs. On the flipside you have more and more people getting into music without requiring any formal musical background.
I also think the older we get, the more we think most music sounds the same because music inherently changes over time, and will be different to what we grew up on, but we also become more distanced from the subcultures and communities pioneering modern music trends. A young person today probably thinks all rock music from the 50s-90s sounds the same
I disagree and think there are objective measures of cynicism in music today that are unprecedented.
I agree that the paths you suggest are possible and that the tools available have never been so available.
I see cultural problems as the root issue. We’ve reduced music to a recorded consumable and thereby reduced the role of the humans communicating telepathically via music, which is the social function of music, as I understand it
if you think there's a "lack of diversity in music production" you're just not listening to enough music.
Not only are people taking newer music production technology in every different possible direction, they're still pushing the limits of old methods as well as combining them with the new stuff.
I just use a DAW like I used a four track recorder back in the 80's. Put down a drum beat, bass line, guitar and voice individual tracks. Then do some light processing. A lot of times, I'll copy paste the music then go back and play each part all the way through so it has a looser band feel.
I think the problem is that tension creates interesting results as the limitations are subverted and the open possibilities of Ableton Live make this way harder since it is not immediately obvious what is interesting to do when you can do anything.
Even Robert Henke, the guy who made the precursor to ableton and the co founder of ableton, laments this about ableton https://youtu.be/iwOaYxSJGqI
People here are saying that you are wrong but when the creator of ableton is agreeing with you then maybe they should listen
Why not both? Lots of the live (power/symphonic) metal bands I see will have at least 5 artists singing/playing and then backing tracks that add even more depth to what they are playing.
Literally nothing has been lost, because all of the methods available to create music are still available, and people are still using them. Aside from that, the net gain on music technology is a massive net gain however you see it.
I'm not dismissing you because you're a 'boomer', I'm dismissing the point because it's just willfully ignorant.
If you think 'modern music' lacks diversity, you're simply not looking for anything original. Because you can find it, by the bucketload.
My wife only started learning drums a few years ago, and now she's regularly gigging with a band in a bunch of iconic venues around London. It's never too late to start! :)
If I could make a couple of suggestions for people who are trying to "get serious" with their hobbies as electronic music composers, I got a lot of value out of:
1. Berklee Online courses on music production. They're not cheap, but the instructors are stellar, including the guy who literally wrote the Ableton book on creative strategies.
2. https://www.producerdojo.com/ is incredible if you have the time for it. You get paired with a coach who is usually a seasoned electronic music veteran, possibly a regularly touring performer, and you get to work on becoming better at making electronic music at your pace, with their supervision. It's a lot of work, but the results are about as good as they can get.
I started learning Live after applying for a job interview at Ableton. At that point I had only known what Live was but I never touched it and never had an interest in music making. I downloaded the trial version and after just a couple of hours familiarizing myself with it, I was addicted. I never got the job, but I still open up Live when I'm bored to tinker around.
Here's what stands out to me:
- Session view is great for experimenting with different arrangements and samples using the same processing chain without having to scroll through a huge timeline of different ideas. You can then go to arrangement view to work on your final arrangement.
- Almost everything that you create is reusable. You can string together an instrument and/or a bunch of effects, group them together, map each their controls to a unified (and smaller) set of controls, and now you have a new instrument that you can drag and drop later on. You can then chain and group those together as well.
- Max4Live is to plugins as Flash was to games. There are a ton of weird and experimental M4L devices out there available for free or for a very small price.
There are some negatives though:
- As others have mentioned, it is pricey, $750 as of today if you want the complete version with all their instruments and effects.
- Bouncing (re-recording) to a new track or to a file is a bit convoluted. Furthermore, bounced samples are encrypted in Ableton's proprietary format which means you can't use samples that YOU created in other plugins easily. There are a few workarounds that I found but it's just a frustrating experience. This also applies to any sample packs that come with Live or from Ableton's shop, you can't use them outside of Live's inbuilt devices or M4L devices. Again, there are workarounds but it's frustrating and there's probably something in the fine print against it.
- No facilities for batch exporting sample slices. Say you want to use Live to process some sound effects and export them to individual files, well you can't do that easily in Live. There's a paid M4L device out there that helps with this but I just use Reaper to do this now.
For those interested in getting started, Knobcloud.com has cheap Ableton Live intro licenses. vital.audio is a super cool free(ish) virtual synthesizer, https://www.spitfireaudio.com/bbc-symphony-orchestra-discove... is a free virtual symphony orchestra. If you just use your basic PC built in sound, you will also need to install ASIO4All ASIO drivers to reduce latency. I wish I was a kid today the tools as so amazing, instead I spent my youth learning the make DX7 patches which to be fair did prepare me for the pain of being a Microsoft stack developer in the 1990s.
> After playing with these boxes for a while, you'll discover certain combinations that you like. Many types of music are created in exactly this way — by mixing and matching small musical ideas to make interesting combinations
This is the bit I struggle with most; expression and intent. Sure, I can throw random shit together and with some technique it can even sound half-decent, but it is very difficult for me to express anything intentionally with music. And the oversimplification that major=happy, minor=sad is not really helpful at all here, especially with modern music which is more than ready to break any such conventions many times over.
One thing that has been amazing me recently is the current state of vocal synthesis. It seems to have improved rapidly in the space of just a few years, thanks to neural network models.
For example, here's a quick clip from a synth I've been using in recent weeks:
In light of what we learned with vocaloid in Japan, is this even meaningful? Singers don't make the song. You can have crowds fill stadiums to watch a hologram, it has already been proven.
To boot, isn't this the fidelity vs fun argument of videogames again, too?
Madonna's "Ray of Light" is still a good song without her; William Orbit is a master producer after all. I hope we see a refocusing away from personalities to producers out of this.
It depends on the audience, and the producer. Some people are content with listening to robotic-sounding Vocaloid type synths, others prefer something closer to an authentic singing voice with the more complex range of emotion that can be expressed.
Even just from a technology point of view, I find it fascinating to see how the envelope is being pushed via machine learning models.
>Some people are content with listening to robotic-sounding Vocaloid type synths, others prefer something closer to an authentic singing voice with the more complex range of emotion that can be expressed.
Let me just point out the nuance that many people, including myself, appreciate both types of music.
Thanks for sharing this. The Solaria AI video you linked to is impressive. Some of my favorite EDM tracks have guest vocals in them. As an electronic music producer and a terrible singer, it's mind blowing to think you can now produce an instrumental beat and attach realistic sounding AI generated vocals to it.
Prior to this, I'd been experimenting with pitch-shifting the output of Google's Text-to-Speech service (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech), which was quite interesting and somewhat pleasant sounding for spoken word vocals, but didn't really have the range or expressiveness I was looking for more generally.
If anyone is interested in a good book (in French) about the history of music electronic music (mixed with the history of electricity, recordings, and music itself) I recommend this book I enjoyed very much :
https://www.amazon.com/fous-du-son-Laurent-Wilde/dp/22468592...
I remember getting lots of ableton tutorials after learning how to use garage band, logic and a little pro tools. I think learning other DAWs makes the Ableton/bitwig paradigm harder but I encourage everybody that's never played on a DAW to borrow a PC/mac with one and find your inner Iggy, Sheeran or Taylor Swift.
- Reaper isn't free, but it has an unlimited, 0 trade-off trial period
For some free open source synths:
- Vital is a great wavetable synth
- Dexed is a DX7 close that is phenomenal
- dsp56300emu emulates a bunch of classic high quality synths, notably the virus
- Surge Synth
...there are so many excellent open source VSTs you really do NOT need to spend any money.
I don't really know of any high quality open source DAWs, unfortunately.
Ardour (http://ardour.org/) is probably the most fleshed out one, but it's still pretty bad compared to popular commercial options (Albeton, Bitwig, Reaper, FL Studio, Logic Pro).
Hey, I think it's extremely unfair to call Ardour bad, even if only by comparison with well-known commercial options. Ardour has a very specific use case and is designed to fit that use case well.
Honestly, not really. I feel like this is one of the very few areas that doesn’t really have any great open source options. Reaper is about the closest you’re gonna get. It’s not open source, but as far as fair licence and good price without sacrificing any usability, it’s kind of in a league of its own. It was started by the guy who made Winamp.
Yeah Reaper isn't open source, but the licensing system is an amazing breath of fresh air. You can just download it and start using it with no account sign up process and once the free trial (60 days) ends all that happens is a nag screen pops up. You can literally just keep closing the nag screen and never buy the software (though this is an illegal use of the product) but why would you do that if you have the money to support the devs? I bought it as soon as I realized how easy it was to demo and start using.
If one of the primary points of open source software is to promote accessibility, Reaper goes a long way towards this without actually being open source. There is no DRM, there is no need to make an account and do some long sign up process to get Reaper up and running, there is no iLok required (vomits in mouth a little). You can download it in and start working on a project as quickly as your computer can finish installing it.
From Reaper's license popup:
> We are showing this message, instead of crippling this evaluation version of REAPER, because we do not feel technological enforcement of licensing policy is in the best interest of our customers
Reaper is the only professional artistic software (sold as a product) I have ever come across that is remotely realistic about how people use it. Nobody has ever pirated Reaper in the history of Reaper, there is no point and that is how software should work in a more sane world.
One of the Reaper devs once said on their forums (or maybe it was KVR) that they never want to add anti-piracy measures to Reaper because it's just a cost-center for development with no real payoff. It can potentially hurt paying customers, and it almost never converts pirates. If someone doesn't want to pay, music software is easy to pirate. If it's somehow not easy to pirate (Cubase was crack-free for several years), there's so many competing products with the same utilities, they will just pirate one of your competitors.
Exactly anti-piracy measures only punish paying customers because the pirated version won't have them. I think several big name musicians (with the money to pay for a software license) have been caught using the pirated version of music software simply because the pirated version doesn't require some stupid BS that the legal version does. I.e. you can get it running on your gigging laptop and not have to worry about juggling how many computers are currently using your license, stupid iLok usb dongles or some other nonsense. The pirated version just works.
Further, 99% of digital audio workstation customers start off as broke kids with no money to feasibly drop on a music production software that costs $150 or more. So a huge amount of future paying DAW customers are piracy converts anyways. Making a DAW that can't be pirated is a sure way to shove your future customer base onto somebody else's DAW that can.
It really isn't worth the pain - the whole open source sound stack is a bit of a mess. If you happen to own some Apple hardware, Logic offers incredibly good value for money, and a perpetual license, although there are signs of it transitioning to a subscription model.
LMMS is a passable FruityLoops-style clone. If you're not following a guide the initial barrier is hunting around online for quality VSTs you like but once you have them (they tend to run fine through LMMS via wine) you can make your patterns and use them to make tracks.
Some "wannabe" ones, nothing to write home about compared to the quality, scope, and stability of the commercial (even the free commercial version) offerings.
It's more-or-less the same program (made by ex-Ableton devs), just well designed for 2023.
With that said, Ableton has the advantage of being more mature. What I mean by that, is that the stock plugins are generally better, and it has a bigger use-base, which I would argue is important if you're starting out.
If on the other hand you're a medium/advanced user, then Bitwig is a much better choice.
I've switched from Ableton to Bitwig and man, you don't realise how behind Ableton is until you try Bitwig.
I think it's a case of death by a thousand cuts with Ableton. For example, Ableton does not have customisable shortcuts! Which is a huge workflow blocker.
Arguably, a lot of the issues are UX related, as opposed to feature related. But UX is a core part of the product and subsequent usability of the product.
Meh, I disagree. I’ve owned Bitwig for about a year now and there are some frustrations with it I didn’t have with Ableton. Nothing is perfect, neither is ahead of the other. If I wasn’t on Linux I would go back to Ableton, to be honest.
Bitwig has the synthesizer thing and effects thing down pat, but it’s audio editing is frustrating to say the least. I want to turn of this track comping nonsense but I can’t, I hate track comping and have used DAWs since they were invented so…
You can turn off track comping, you need to turn off the overdub button (that big plus sign in the top left).
What parts of the audio editing is weak to you? In my opinion, it's one of the strongest things it offers. I assume you're trying to edit the audio in the arranger, instead of in the clip view. What makes it so strong, is that you can chop it up in the clip view, and your audio in the arranger remains one contiguous piece of audio.
It sounds like you're either trying to use the software like Ableton and you're getting frustrated that it's not Ableton, or you don't understand how Bitwig works.
If you start with this limited mentality, you are going to be stuck with a partucular workflow, funnay that its onky workable using ableton. Its an alright program, but look around more and focus on which works for your idea of music before investing in it,
Most DAW’s impose a workflow and set of tools on you. Hell, any set of notative or formal tools will do that - it’s part of what makes music-making possible. If you’ve ever messed around with a complete alien tool like the therimin or Tenori-On, you quickly figure out some hacks to cram its operations into something your mind can work with. A “limitless mentality” would be something like Cage or Reich where you’re so advanced about making music that you know how to break those boundaries elegantly. For most people “getting started with Ableton Live” will do.
You have to start somewhere or rather if you try to start with everything at once on your own you are going to have a hard time.
That is sort of like saying one shouldn't start with one programming language, but instead sample all languages and various frameworks before investing their time, but that completely ignores the fact that if you start with zero knowledge you can't just randomly sample different things - most of which you haven't even heard of - before you even get to see if you like the thing you are doing in the first place.
I'm a classically trained pianist with a bunch of music theory under my belt but zero idea how music is produced, and this is fascinating and addictive to the point where I need to put it away or I'll get no work done today.
This is incredible. I'd love to see something similar for sound synthesis (how do you craft that perfect piano/violin/dubsteppy sound?) and mixing/mastering.
I don't know a suitable tool for mixing/mastering except many years of trial and error. Lots of things exist to get you the basics and aware of what all the major tools do, but nothing I know of (yet) really teaches you how to put them together to make a great mix nearly as well as making 100 bad mixes first.
I can't remember the speaker, but I watched a lecture (probably a decade ago) where the speaker said you could give the same project file to a great engineer who is only allowed to use the volume faders, and an amateur who is allowed to use any software tools and any expensive rack hardware. And the great engineer will make a better mix 100% of the time. I very much believe that statement is true.
Spotify's Soundtrap claims to have live collaboration, haven't tested it though so I don't know if it's actually realtime or just a step in that direction.
I have no idea, but this thread was about getting started with making music. It is literal lunacy to just drive by yell "this software is better" if it has no comparable tutorial.
If you specifically want to program beats, I recommend this quirky book "Pocket Operations": https://shittyrecording.studio. It's basically guitar tabs for drum machines. Pick out some styles as a foundation and then build on top of it. Think of it as boilerplate code.
Being a software dev by day, and a former musician in high school, the current world of digital music production tools is as incredible as it is overwhelming. It's good to have something that orients your practice and experimentation.