How To Produce Music With NO Music Theory Knowledge

hey guys salix room and welcome to the only place you need to become a master at music production in today's lesson I'm gonna show you how to produce music without knowing any music theory at all or without any musical background at all I've taught thousands of my students how to produce music who have had no music theory knowledge or no musical background at all how to make music including a student this year who was able to go from absolute newb with no musical background at all or music theory to signed tracks on Spotify collecting royalties literally every day from streams in just three months he was able to achieve that in three months and he even got paid up front for that track from the label who wanted to promote that track form so that just goes to show that anything's possible if you're considering getting into music or if you're still a beginner and you're worried about by your lack of knowledge for music theory you you you don't need it to make music music isn't all music theory has something to do with it but it's not gonna make or break you and you kind of just pick up music theory as you go anyway so that being said let's go ahead and jump into the video so the easiest way to make music without music theory or any music theory knowledge is just to stick to all the white keys on the keyboard oil up all the black keys on the keyboard if you stick to all the black keys there's only five keys that you have to now get yourself around if you stick to all the white keys there's more than that one two three four five six seven seven keys you have to stick to if you go with the black keys your musics gonna sound a little bit more mediocre not so emotionally-driven you're gonna have to stick to something that isn't as melodic because it's just really hard to make something interesting with just the black keys however you stick to just the white keys you can make anything you want because all the white keys are either C major or a minor - very popular scales for pop hip-hop and electronic music but we're gonna do in this video is we're gonna stick to all the white keys and I'm gonna teach you a method that I teach to all my students in the EDM bootcamp of - available on my website Alex from sound com so I know you're thinking there's a million white keys on this keyboard how do you make a nice word said or melody can you have no idea which keys the users to many watch this I want to show you how to do it we're gonna go to our middle C or C three so every keyboard has that C key that is directly in the middle of the keyboard and we're gonna make four notes as our guide notes that are the length of four bars in total so each note is one bar in length and you get four notes that are one bar each the next thing we have to do is we have to try harmonizing with our guide note and the easiest way to harmonize with our guide note is to pick any of the notes in the same octave and try to harmonize with this guide note so what I like to do is I like to skip this white key and then I like to harmonize with these three white keys right here so each of these notes are going to get one of these three notes under each of them so watch how easy this is I'm just gonna put a note here on that white key a note here on that white key and then this key and we're just gonna pick either of these three will work for our fourth note and watch this we already have half a chord now because this will sound good [Music] keep in mind we're limited to only the white keys we cannot use any black keys so that's gonna make things really easy now we have to start building the chord forwards have a minimum of three notes playing at once our chords only have two notes playing at once so we got to set them up so that we can have three playing at once and we don't have any music theory knowledge but I'm telling you making chords is easy it's just simple math we have to make it these notes five steps apart so what I'm gonna do is eliminate that first set I'm gonna go one two three four so that these notes are each five steps apart including this bottom note we're gonna count four notes up from each of these notes and then we're gonna put our top note and that will be almost Accord watch this one two three four zero one two three four zero one two three four notice that math will always work we're always going to be on the white keys we can't use any black keys [Music] now that now is the easiest part I used to think it was the hardest because there's no math that can help you with the hardest instead it's personal judgment we need to note that's going to be in between each of these notes here so if you notice directly in between these notes we can't actually get directly in between these notes we can either use this note that's closer to the bottom note or this note that's closer to the top note which one do we take well this note it's a black note so we can't use that one so I guess we have to use this one again we're stuck in the same dilemma we can either use this note that's close to the top note or this note that's close to the bottom but the bottom one's a black note so we can't use that one so I'm going to use this one and this one because they're both white keys and look at that you have chords [Music] like that that's it you have your set of chords and watch this you don't know music theory but now your chord progression works in any key signature you wanted to or we could come down to key signatures look at that we're using all black keys and white keys now and our our chords still sound good that is because if you become a master at all the white keys you will automatically know all the other key signatures if you just know how to start using the white keys so you can build any chord or melody in the white key and then if you don't like how it's out if you don't like the mood and you can switch that to a different key signature without actually building in that key signature isn't that awesome I think it's pretty awesome so here's how songs are written we have chords that are in the middle octave which is going to be around c3 it sound exactly c3 all the time but it's around the middle octave so we're going to call it around c3 and then you have a melody that's going to be in an upper octave or a lead melody or a top line melody and then you have your bass line which is going to be a lower octave that deep low-pitched bass so now we're going to do is we're going to make a melody but we don't know music theory but we do know that we have to stick with the white keys that's it so what do I do when I know I have to stick to the white keys but I don't know music theory give yourself a guide note and my guide notes oh it's gonna be on C because that's the easiest way to make a melody in a monitor why I don't know why don't we use a when we could use a but see it's just a way I found to be easiest now with melodies instead of 4 notes like this like we did for the chords we're gonna make these a little bit more like a little bit shorter because melodies kind of dance and prance over the chords so I'll just [Music] like that isn't there an Allen Walker song that kind of sounds like that do-do-do-do do-do-do-do-do maybe it's a Kagura song now we got our guide notes for our melody and all we got to do now is move the notes around on different white keys and see what it sounds like much this is like there's no no like skill you need to actually move notes around and see if they sound good it's either you move them around and they sound bad or you move them around they sound good and I already know I can't use the Black Keys so we're not even gonna step out a key there's no way cuz you know that you can't use any other black keys so watch is watch this I'm gonna just take this and duplicate it melodies are set up in patterns just like poetry and hip-hop the way melodies are set up earned patterns of like a B a B a a a b a b a c and different patterns like that is just like what we learned in poetry if you learned poetry but this melody has a pattern of a B a B just like that [Music] and to give you an idea of Blake but that means just to clarify if you don't know what that means that means that our a pattern is the same in both AE parts so we have an a part of our pattern here and an A here they're exactly the same our B is exactly the same here in here too so that's our melody now let's go ahead and make an ABA C pattern how do we do that all we got to do is change this part to make it its own its own thing [Music] [Applause] [Music] just like that you got a beautiful little money so watch this we could do this all day long we can pick whatever white keys we want all day long cuz we're never gonna step out a king and worst case scenario we get a different melody and it might sound cool and why not so watch I'm gonna break this one down into two [Music] [Applause] and all I have to do when making a melody is make it like half the length and then duplicate it and then we can change something back here just make it interesting and then boom you got a new melody [Music] [Applause] [Music] so let's recap what is this an a a a b a b a b or a b a c well it's gonna be an a and then here's another area right here so it's gonna be a blank a blank looks like it's gonna be a B a and this one's completely different than both of them are so C so we have an a b a c melody so now you need a nice baseline and watch this we're just this is we're making music just gets so easy it hurts our bass lines already made it's the bottom notes of the chords right here so I'm just gonna copy those paste whoops drag them down we can paste them here way down here depending on how deep of a base we want [Music] and then we go we have our base down in some low-octave we have our chords down in some mid octave it doesn't have to be this one it could be the lower one like that and then we got our top-line melody that could be some higher octave above the cores and above the baseline so now that doesn't sound interesting it just sounds like a cheap piano making some sort of melody and blah well let's go ahead and start producing music thought the music theory part is done you've made it you've made it this far so now what you do is you do the most fun thing in the world which is sound selection and you use sound banks we call them to make sound selection possible so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a synthesizer that's built into logic here because I'm going to try super hard not to use any of my expensive third-party plugins because I know if you're watching this video you're probably a beginner and you probably don't have a lot of plug inside so I'm just going to use free plug-ins for this so let's go ahead and take airy synth lead I hope it sounds good I'm going to take my top line melody and when you're making a song you have to start getting organized because you're going to accumulate a lot of layers that will make up a song synth lead well synth lead [Music] boom we got a sinfully and let's go ahead and add reverb on it make it really really Spacey and big yeah just like that now we got this big beautiful synth lead it's kind of beautiful but whatever and the chords let's go ahead and take these chords and copy them and paste them down here I'm just gonna mute that again and then this one has to be sent to because we're making an electronic song and everything has to be electronic we could use a piano but I don't like that piano it's kind of cheap and this is just more fun let's go ahead and find a really cool plucked sound that will give us a really cool fun electronic sound to mess around with let's take these now our chords the chords are fine but we could totally add some rhythm to them and make them really nice just like that look same chords different rhythm electronic music saw about that funkiness and that rhythm so that's all we're doing doesn't that sound awesome we still gotta make the bassline then we're gonna make a little drum loop - it's gonna be really nice alright guys and now we're gonna take our bass line and make a really big sub bass 808 line like a boom boom boom boom something really nice so I'm gonna take our notes here actually I'm gonna take the new notes from our old chords that's what's cool about bass it's like you make it based on your chords and if you make it based on your chord notes something cool will come out like most of the time I'm gonna take these nodes that's not part of what we're trying to do here I'm just gonna take these down into a nice bass octave and we can get started on our bass notes so we need a nice boom boom boom boom nice big 808 so I'm gonna come into our logic stock plug-in here pick our 808 preset here ooh listen to that now this one let's make this funky let's just take up those notes pick them up just musics all about having fun there's no rules ok we're gonna give us some drums so to get drums every producer in the world is using a service called splice displace calm and what you do is you download its place and it gives you access to as many drums as you would like so all you have to do is you got to pick certain pieces of the drum kit that you're trying to lay down and you just drag it on it so we're gonna grab our nice LC kick here I'm gonna snap to the grid so that everything is on grid as possible [Music] I'm gonna grab a little clap we're gonna use a lex luger clap even though we're making a house beat right now at lex luger is a hip-hop producer it doesn't matter like I said we're gonna follow rules or just enjoying ourselves nice okay so let's go ahead and grab a hi-hat so I have nice hi-hat loops here and I'm lazy I don't feel like making hi-hat loops from scratch so I pretty much just find nice hi-hat loops and I download them [Music] and then one last thing I'm gonna do is add some bounce to all this stuff doing what we call side chaining now if you're not into music yet you're just a beginner side chaining is one of the biggest term don't make friends with as a producer you might not have ever heard of it but it's gonna be a big part of your life if you become a producer now let's say the difference with side chaining and without so here's without side chain II here's with side chaining [Music] see how kind of like bumps that's the point of it makes everything bump is how you make electronic music without knowing any music theory alright guys I hope you took some value from this video if you did give me a thumbs up give your best comments in the comment section of this video I love you see you later

Channel: Alex Rome

Views: 169,259

Keywords: logic pro x, logic pro x music theory, music theory course, music theory tutorial, how to learn music theory edm, no music theory tutorial, how to learn edm production, producer electronic music, electronic music producer, edm producer how to music theory, no music theory produce music

Id: nsI-y8rXMcg

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 23 2019