Electronic music production equipment for beginners (2020)

so you want to get into making electronic dance music but you're not sure what equipment you need to be able to do that so in this video what I'm going to do is break down what you do need what you don't need and I'm going to give you recommendations for different budgets so stick around hey how's it going guys it's John Holt here from the audio journey helping make music production accessible to all and here on this channel what I do is a variety of music production tutorials mainly focus towards beginners and beyond so if that's something that you might be interested in then definitely consider subscribing so if you want to go and check out any of the gear that I'm talking about in this video as you're watching the links in the description below will let you do that they're Amazon links for the US and the UK so feel free to check that out they are affiliate links so if you do purchase through them that gives me a small Commission and no extra cost to you and it's a great way to support this channel that if you wanted to do that I would really really appreciate it so let's dive into this list I've got five things for you that I recommend picking up if you want to start making electronic dance music to get you off to the best start so number one is something that you probably already have and that's a computer but the reason I bring this up is just to clarify what specifications I recommend having to be able to make music on your computer so first of all it can be a Windows PC or it can be a Mac it doesn't have to be one or the other it can be whichever one you already have or whichever one you prefer secondly in terms of storage I recommend having an SSD or a solid-state drive as opposed to a standard spin a hard drive they're going to be so much quicker everything on your computer is going to run so much quicker and most computers apart from the latest Mac's you're actually able to upgrade so if you do have a normal hard drive so not very much money you can upgrade to an SSD and I promise you that's going to be like a new laptop or a new machine for you it's well worth doing I'll put a link in the description below to crucial which is a great site where you can put in what computer you have and it will give you SSDs and RAM which are compatible with your machine and RAM is what we're coming on to next I'd recommend having at least eight gigabytes of RAM in and again this is just going to make sure that things run really nice and smoothly on your computer I had an old 2012 map that had a spinner drive and eight gig of ram I upgraded that to an SSD and 16 gigs of ram and it was genuinely like a new laptop I bought it in 2014 it's now 2020 and that Mac is still going strong so I cannot recommend it highly enough so in essence number one you just need a computer that's not running at snail's pace that can handle running an application or two number two you're gonna need some software on your computer to be able to make music now the software that you produce music on is called a da W or digital audio workstation now examples of a digital audio workstation that you may have heard of include Ableton Logic GarageBand Pro Tools FL studios so let's look at which one is going to be the best for you to get started making electronic music now the most common DOW is that people use to produce electronic music our Ableton Live FL Studio and Logic Pro X and I'm going to go through why you might want to go for each one of those I would personally recommend though Ableton Live Lite the reason I say Ableton Live Lite is I'm going to show you how to get hold of a copy of that in step 4 and it's a really really cost effective way to get up and running with the software if you wanted to go for something like logic or FL studio you're going to have to pay for it and I can promise you it's absolutely worth it but if you're looking to save money getting up and running then wait until step 4 and as I say I'm going to show you a really easy way to get hold of Ableton Live light which is an introductory version to live which is going to do everything you need it to for now there are tons of tutorials on Ableton Live online which is why I think it's brilliant because there's so much resource for you to go out there and learn it yourself so that's why I recommend Ableton Live Lite as the software to get started with and that's point number two number three you want a solid pair of music production headphones the most common misconception from people getting into this trying to make dance music is that if they want to produce music that can be played out in clubs if they want to produce music to be signed to labels you have to be producing on a pair of speakers to be able to do that and I can promise you that is absolutely not the case and I'm going to tell you why the first reason I don't recommend getting speakers for beginners is the cost it's going to cost you between three and four hundred dollars or pounds at least to get up and running with two speakers and an audio interface which you need to be able to plug the speakers in to your computer so the cost is an initial barrier there the second reason that I recommend going for headphones over speakers especially when you're starting out is that you can rely much more on the accuracy of the sound that's coming from your headphones then you can from what's coming from speakers in an untreated room when you're trying to listen back to what you've made in Ableton Live you're going to get a much more accurate representation of that listening on maybe a hundred and fifty pound or 150 dollar pair of headphones then you're going to get from a much more expensive maybe five hundred dollar 500 pounds speaker setup and the main reason for that is when you're starting out you're more than likely gonna be having your speaker's setup in an untreated room or you're not gonna have any acoustic treatment or panels up on the wall most rooms like this one that you can hear is really quite echoey really quite reflective and that absolutely wreaks havoc with what you're listening to you in the room if you walk from the front to the back of this room while there's music playing there's such drastic differences and you just can't rely on which one of those is going to be accurate whereas if you put headphones on you can get really really good quality headphones that are just gonna give you really solid playback no matter whether you're outside whether you're inside it's not affected by the room at all so you're gonna get much more accurate playback you're not going to annoy your neighbors or your housemates headphones is absolutely the way to go when you're getting started so let's look at the headphones that I'd recommend the audio technica ath range is absolutely fantastic and it covers a wide range of budgets so you've got the audio technica ath em 30 X M 40 X and m50x now these start at about $75 and go up to about 150 dollars respectively you can find US and UK Amazon links for these in the description below this video so feel free to go and check those out my personal recommendation though based on the headphones that I've been using for the last six years would the Bayer dynamic dt7 70s in the ATM version in terms of sound quality they are absolutely fantastic and in terms of comfort you can wear these things for at three or four hours and not know that you're wearing them unlike other pairs of headphones which are going to start to hurt after a while these are an absolute dream to wear most of the parts are also replaceable so if something gets a bit tatty you can take it off and bear dynamic have a store where you can just get new bits instead of having to buy a whole new pair so if you pick up a pair of these you're gonna be really impressed with the sound quality the comfort and they're gonna last for as long as you want them to say if you can stretch to it I think they're coming in about one hundred and forty dollars at the moment or one hundred and ten pounds this is gonna be a really really solid investment I've had these for six years and I could easily have them for another six years they're still going strong and I would really highly recommend them number four is a MIDI controller now when I say a MIDI controller I mean these types of keyboards or maybe the grids that you might have seen that help you control your software some people might say that it's not absolutely essential to have a MIDI controller in order to make music you can just have a laptop and a pair of headphones and you're good to go but there are a couple of reasons that I think it is valuable to get set up with a MIDI controller when you're just getting started number one if you've got an idea for like a drum pattern or melody in your head and you're trying to draw it out with a mouse mouse and keyboard that can be really restrictive especially as a beginner when you can't sort of transfer what melodies or drum beats will look like into MIDI whereas if you've got a MIDI controller you can just set it recording tap out your beat and put it in it's a much more sort of natural way of making music for me through the work I've done teaching beginners I found that these really do open up people's creativity even if they thought that was something they were slightly limited in so having this is really really expressive and really helps you get those ideas from your head down into the software the second reason that I really recommend picking up a MIDI controller is that if you go for the right ones you're going to get a fantastic software package with them including what I recommended in step two Ableton Live Lite which is a piece of music making software that comes for free with some of these MIDI controllers which I'm going to talk about now now the two main types of MIDI controller you're gonna see our MIDI keyboards which look like this like that or you're gonna see grid controllers which are going to have just a bunch of these pads on them they're a square like the Novation Launchpad for example my recommendation to you guys would be either the Novation launch key mini mark 3 or the Novation Launchpad mini they're both two great entry-level MIDI controllers says talk a little bit more about why I think they're a great idea in order to get set up with Ableton Live as I mentioned in step 2 you're either gonna have to go out and buy one of the versions of Ableton that are out there starting at around a hundred dollars or you could go and pick up a Novation launch key mini mark 3 or a launchpad mini mark 3 and you're gonna get a free version of Ableton Live with these so you can pay either 110 dollars and pick this up with Ableton Live or you can go and get Ableton Live for a hundred dollars and be without a MIDI controller so to me it doesn't make any sense to do that I think go for one of these even if you don't use it as much as you thought you've basically you just got Ableton Live for a much better price you've got a bunch of other bundled software with this as well which just makes it as I say pretty much a no-brainer I think there's a list of different Novation MIDI controllers down in the description below with US and UK Amazon links so definitely go and check those out as something for different budgets I think you're gonna absolutely love these and finally number five I recommend getting set up with some core sample packs samples are the building blocks of electronic music so if you're making a drum beat or you're trying to find a vocal to work with you're going to be using a sample to do that and a sample in this context is simply an audio file like a dot wav file or a dot mp3 file that you can load into your software and then use to build your track these samples are sold in packs which are specific to the genre of music that you want to make so for example if you're looking to get into making house music then you can choose from a variety of sample packs either jackin house deep house tech house minimal house whatever you want to go for and the samples inside those packs are going to be suited to that genre specifically I'd recommend finding two or three well reviewed sample packs in the genre that you want to make picking those up and then that gives you a really good starting place so when you open up Ableton Live you're not stuck with that sort of blank slate which is going to be quite intimidating you can go into the pack and you can find some inspiration in there throw some bits in and get going with the track that you know is gonna suit the kind of genre that you want to be making you can find these samples in lots of different places but the ones that I would recommend which i've linked below are Luke masters which is a great library of sample packs and also sample magics they have a look through these sites go through this sort of filter sections you can go to genre at the top and go to the John row that you want to make have a listen to the demos so there's demos of all the sample packs audio demos that you can listen to you find something that you think is going to be good for the type of music you want to make pick up two or three and they're going to be really really good for you to get going with now a bonus tip that I would have hit for you is to check out splice sounds I've been using splice for a few years now and it's absolutely brilliant if you just have an idea of a really specific sample that you want like a certain type of riser or a certain type of vocal you can go in and search in splice and you don't have to buy the whole pack in order to get that one sample you can just pick out the individual samples you want it costs next to nothing I've done a video reviewing it which I'll put just up on the card now but that's another bonus one it's not essential to get up and running with but I find it really really handy making electronic music so I thought I'd mention it there we go guys so let's just summarize those five really quickly number one a computer with half decent specs which I mentioned earlier number two a piece of software or addy aw I'd recommend Ableton Live light which comes with the launch keys and launch pads number three you're going to be looking to get out with setup with headphones not speakers so the audio Technica's or the bear dynamics which are all links below gonna be a great place for you to start number four a MIDI controller which is going to mean that making music is a lot more hands-on and you get a great software package including Ableton Live Lite and number five get some good sample packs which are the building blocks of electronic music and you're never going to be stuck for inspiration there we go guys I hope that's been helpful for you and if you have any questions for me then you can either comment below or if you want a quicker answer you can come to the music and explained Facebook group which I've run which I've got a link to in the description below I do a live stream every Wednesday and I'm active in the group every day to answer people's questions so definitely had there if you want to have a chat about any of this if you found this video helpful then I'd really appreciate you dropping a like that would be fantastic and feel free to subscribe if you haven't already check out the other videos that are going to be around me on this card here hopefully there's gonna be something of interest to you there and I'll see you guys in the next video take care

Channel: The Audio Journey

Views: 16,176

Rating: 4.9752579 out of 5

Keywords: music production equipment for beginners, music production equipment, electronic music, ableton for beginners, music production, beginner edm production equipment, home studio setup for beginners, how to start making music, how to start making beats, music production equipment 2020, 2020, music production headphones, MIDI controller for beginners, best MIDI controller for beginners, best music production software for beginners

Id: _kLZRAO2P0c

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 16 2020