Making music. At the ripe old age of 16, I bought DJ Shadow's "Entroducing" album, and wanted to make music just like that. Started out making "music" with the Wave Editor that shipped with Windows 95, and the rest is history.
In the last 26 years or so (man that sounds like a long time), I've learned a number of different DAW's, put a modular system together, learned to play instruments (piano, guitar, drums), and wrote hundreds of songs. It's such a fulfilling hobby. Which has been equally fulfilling every step of the way. From noob to whatever I am now. Can't imagine life without it.
It's pretty dependent on what exactly you want to do, but I have found the Signals Music Studio channel to be a great resource for learning some music theory and composition stuff.
Music theory is not a necessary entry point per se, but it can help to get some basic concepts into your head to play around with. But really, the best thing you can possibly do is just pick something that seems adjacent to music you like and just start screwing around (if you're a metalhead, maybe guitar, if you like EDM, pick any DAW, if you like jazz, get a decent midi keyboard, etc). Music really isn't an intellectual exercise, just start doing something, see what you like, and what you don't like.
I wrote this comment a while back on learning music theory, which has some more thoughts and also some links and pointers to various tools and resources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078383. Might be of interest.
Music theory isn't a necessity, and I didn't using anything but samples for the first 5 years or so. But, I'd recommend people learning it as soon as possible. Even just picking out the root, third, fifth, and seventh of a key. Then, making random melodies / sequences until something sounds cool.
LPT: If someone is new, and looking to make house, techno, etc. I'd recommend sticking to minor keys when exploring music theory.
It's changed a lot over the years. There were forums I belonged to early on, but most are gone these days. Typically, if I have a question about something particular these days, I Google it, and usually run into a YouTube video, or a random link (a lot of those end up being Reddit).
I don't release music (although I do consider from time to time). I mostly just enjoy the process, and listening back to older work.
> I don't release music (although I do consider from time to time).
I think you should!
Not that my opinion counts for anything, I need to take my own advice. But my guitar teacher said something recently that really hit me - "You don't need to wait 20 years until you're the perfect player before you put music out into the world."
This was a big part of what made me feel confident enough to publish the solo video I linked in my other comment, and I've got some other stuff in the works too. I am trying (to some very small success so far) to be a little less fearful of looking stupid or putting something half baked out into the world.
Music is for everyone! Share it. (Or ignore this advice, that's ok too, don't let me tell you what to do ;)
In the last 26 years or so (man that sounds like a long time), I've learned a number of different DAW's, put a modular system together, learned to play instruments (piano, guitar, drums), and wrote hundreds of songs. It's such a fulfilling hobby. Which has been equally fulfilling every step of the way. From noob to whatever I am now. Can't imagine life without it.