Get started making music

Anecdotal: there's a few different approaches to learning songwriting that seem to click for beginners. The "build up" approach is the most common and is what this link offers: It first teaches beats, then chords, then melodies and then, in theory, vocals etc. These lessons in this order make sense to many people, but not everyone. If you're interested in learning to make music and the lessons in the link are confusing or overwhelming or boring, some students find a…

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…

This is incredible, I love it. I've recently switched to using Ableton exclusively for making music, it feels like more of an instrument than a computer program to me. It's so expressive and lets me make the sounds I want to hear as well as things I can't even conceive of. I can't really articulate what it is about Ableton, but I really love it and I'm so thankful that it's around. If anyone wants more, Ableton also has a…

To anyone who thinks "it is easy", try this experiment: recreate a popular song (+100M views on YT for example) in some DAW. (the songs are produced in similar DAWs.) You won't be able to recreate the vocals, but you should be able to recreate the backing track almost identically. Put the original in right ear, your version in the left ear, and iterate until switching between versions sounds identical. Over 100s of hours, this will train you ears, and…