How to get started with making music on a DAW?

So I picked up Mixcraft 9 and a bunch of other stuff on a humblebundle. Problem is that I have literally zero experience making music.

Most of my interest lies in making metal/rock music, and ambient tracks. The later I can sort of understand tbh, but I've got no experience making metal music or working with instruments. Ideally I would want to do everything on a computer without using real instruments of possible.

How to get started? Any books/guides etc on making metal/learning music etc?

I'm 100% a noob when it comes to making music.

 

Ol' Reliable:
Search up some beginner tutorials.

Here's a playlist I found for Mixcraft 9:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUnojiFYMyeL1gaeu-HtTuycOQCmTd8Lk

 

I am also learning how to produce rock/metal music, with FL Studio though. But, unless you are planning to make something like death metal, you'll still need some knowledge of traditional music theory and practice. I personally am learning from Composing Gloves on youtube. He's probably not the best, but definitely far from the worst. But then again, I haven't really done much delving into youtube tutorials on music production. There are probably better channels out there that I don't know about. I'm planning to check out udemy for some more FL Studio and music theory courses.

A lot of what differentiates rock/metal from traditional guitar and drums is more about texture than beat and melody, so you'll need to find good VSTis for electric guitar and drums. I initially started out with Slayer, stock electric guitar in FL Studio, but recently I discovered the Shreddage line of VSTis, and holy sh*t does it make a difference. It may be expensive, but to me, it's worth every penny and maybe more.

Basically, if you're trying to get that rock/metal sound, you'll have to shop around for VSTis that get you the right sound that you want, and be willing to spend. I think the digital music production industry seems predatory for this (starving musicians and all), but with their specializations, they can set the price.

The other obvious option is to contract the work out for your game. I'm still even willing to do that for my own game, as I still have a lot to learn with music production, and I may never get to a point that I feel like my work is up to the standard for my game, so I always have that as an option.

Good luck.

 

My tips as an amateur:

If you do not have any background in music theory pick up a book aimed at this for computer musicians. A basic grasp of things like harmony, chords that kind of stuff.

On the more production side, there are certain universal engineering essentials, again a decent book can help. Things like eqing, compression, when and how to use effects like reverb etc

Finally, to get started really quickly, see if you can pick up a couple of loop packs e.g. from loop masters that are in the style you like. I have found this orders of magnitude faster to make tracks than completely from scratch. Of course, some would consider this "cheating". To your listeners all that matters is the end result. Good luck!

 

Yeah, some loops are actually really good. The real risk that you run is that your end users will recognize the loops from somewhere else. But you really need a keen ear to spot them. I usually can tell stock/popular loops in radio/TV commercials, etc. However, it's still a big step better than grabbing Creative Commons music from youtube.

@jamespaterson
Do you have any book recommendations for music theory and audio engineering?

 

Agreed the discerning listener will spot a loop eventually. The same goes for certain instruments / sounds. I am less familiar with rock but e.g. the Amen break, Reece bassline, Modern Talking massive wavetable are so ubiquitous in respectively jungle, drum and bass and dubstep you could almost call them genre defining

in terms of books, I would recommend Michael Hewitt:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theory-Computer-Musicians-Michael-Hewitt/dp/1598635034

he also has some more advanced books:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1435456726/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1598638610/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

For electronic dance music (my particular interest), this was also quite useful:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0415825644/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Cheers!

 

One final tip from my (limited) experience. Eventually, you will need to get some monitor speakers. These do not need to be hugely expensive, but should have a flat frequency response. Mixing on headphones tends not to transfer well to speakers, whereas the opposite does seem to work for me. I have found the same with putting together the sound for my game to the extent that I have gone to the effort of having some simple headphones vs speakers presets changing the global balance of music, fx and vocals.

 

Tip from some one who has been making music for years:

If you can make a short 8 to 10 second tune, where all of the notes are in tune, or in key with each other, and don't sound out of pitch/key, then you have just covered over 62% of learning to make music. Alot of people spend years, trying to learn to get notes to go in key, and to go in tune with each other.

If you want some other tips, make a topic on the lmms forum. We have a good bit of musicians, game musicans and youtubers, who ask for music making tips. Just don't put any links to games or apps, because the mods will think you are a spam bot.

 

Wait for black friday sale season. Only suckers buy audio stuff at list-price. Roughly 95% of audio products go on sale at least once a year. There are very few exceptions like iirc. Serum or Omnisphere.

There's some cool free stuff to check out and dozens of youtube video tutorials on how to get metal guitar tones with free plugins.

You'll likely need to buy something like shreddage though if you don't record your own guitar parts. And if you don't have Kontakt full version you might need a bass sample library as well.

That statement confuses me because Deathmetal can be very complex and many legends of the metal scene are rather weak on the theory side.

Anyway, this channel is good for guitar theory:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRDDHLvQb8HjE2r7_ZuNtWA/videos

 

Heh, I wrote that semi-tongue-in-cheek; wasn't thinking anyone was going to comment on it =).

I don't doubt death metal can be extremely complex, in fact it could get so complex it goes into experimental territory that may or may not extend beyond the sensibilities of traditional music theory.

I'm talking about Death metal specifically. To be honest, I'm not fully familiar with the Death metal scene, so maybe there are some legends that I I'm just ignorant of.

 

Guy Michelmore and Thinkspace Education. Seriously.

https://www.youtube.com/user/thinkspaceeducation

 

Generally, Death metal musicians have a better understanding of music theory then the broader metal scene. The chaotic and disjoint sound of the genre is very much intentionally composed. It's very difficult music to both write and perform (and sometimes just for the sake of being as difficult as possible).

 

So, I guess regardless of musical genre OP chooses, "you'll still need some knowledge of traditional music theory and practice".

 

A bit, yeah. Learn some basic chords and stick to common (4/4) timing and you can start to produce some perfectly listenable music. How much more you need to learn will just depend on what you are trying to compose.

 

@splattenburgers , is this music related to a game? That might have some implications for the advice. Game soundtracks are pretty different from "normal" songs.

 

Music theory is mostly putting names to things, not telling you why and when to use them. Theory alone isn't super useful imho. If you learn just a tiny bit of theory, it can even be limiting because it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need to stay within the boundaries of the theory that you know, which leads to boring and predictably music if the limitations of your theory knowledge don't get you past a major/minor scale and some basic chords.

My recommendation is copying songs by ear as a form of study, and then later learning the theory as a means of putting names to the things you've already learned from studying songs of great (metal) musicians. But everyone is different, you gotta find the way that works the best for you.


As to the death metal scene, there's a book called "choosing death" about how it all began, in case you're interested.
The subgenres can be quite different in complexity. Early Entombed or Dismember songs for example are a lot simpler than lets say Necrophagist.


If you wanna see something really fvcking weird, watch the music video to "Infant Annihilator - Three Bastards". x]


For production tutorials I recommend Frightbox Recording, Spectre Sound Studio, and resington, all on youtube.

 

Both.