I used to HATE using computers for music making

I have exactly zero formal training in music production or recording mixing mastering all that stuff I do in a computer for a living these days I did study composition in school but I definitely wasn't doing it with a computer I was doing it with some staff paper and a pencil and my piano then a tale as old as time itself I decided I wanted to get into film scoring and much to my chagrin I discovered it was done with a computer so I bought a computer I also got that cheap midi keyboard back there it was on sale and some sample libraries and uh Cubase and then I proceeded to make some of the worst electronic music that you've ever heard and this period of trial and error lasted about 2 years and I released zero music during that time but I did learn a lot about what does and doesn't matter when when it comes to making music in the Box the goal of this video is just to help you avoid some of the mistakes that I made while teaching myself all of those skills over the years and there were a lot of them as a longtime pianist you'd think that midi rooll piano role would be very intuitive and easy for me to read unfortunately for those of us who came up reading traditional notation or at least for me that just just wasn't the case I I love how visual midi is when you're looking at it in your DAW and how easy it is to edit but I found it just isn't precise enough for me to be able to instantly see things like bad doublings or poor voicings weak harmonic progressions all those kind of things that I can identify quickly in traditional notation but it is great for editing and doing things on the Fly I just think it usually takes a few more passes of editing to get it right than if I were actually writing things down in traditional notation so what it lacks in Precision maybe it makes up for in flexibility but there is a period of adjustment that you kind of have to get used to I thought when I first encountered it that it would be the thing i' had been waiting for all of those years when I you know was hating writing things out by hand and this could very well just be familiarity bias but I have found that when I'm working out the bones of a piece I still prefer traditional notation I can identify issues much more quickly as I work things out out in real time without having to go back and constantly fix things like I do in MIDI zooming in zooming out trying to figure out where the problems are it's more of a search for issues in MIDI I found now this is the kind of statement or question that will get you laughed off of most internet forums that are comprised of professionals who have never actually released any music but I've gotten this question before so we're going to address it because I'm clearly not the only one my entry point into music production being a Daw I was immediately using midi I could not afford any hardware sense at that time I didn't really understand how to record real instruments or live instruments really well so I went all in on Sample libraries and uh you know vsts and everything I was doing was based around midi so I started to associate that with audio and I didn't really understand the difference I didn't understand that midi is not the same thing as audio I would look at the tracks see the midi and hear the audio and not really understand that there were two different things happening there midi is just a series of messages it simply tells things when to happen and what to do note on Note off velocity midi CC controller messages and that means that this is not a synthesizer it's a midi controller it can tell a synthesizer what to do and when to do it it can control it but it's also why when you buy a true synthesizer it has not only midi Jacks in the back but also audio outputs so you can typically use most of them to send and receive midi messages if you want but if you're going to get the actual sound from the synth engine you're going to need a trusty set of TRS cables so clearly I didn't have the finest gear nor did I even have the finest sample libraries or the finest third party plugins but I did think that I needed them and I did waste a lot of money on plug-in Suites and third party plugins that did all of the same stuff that the stock plugins and qbase could do if I had taken a little more time to learn you know the foundational things like EQ and compression before I started buying stuff to make my music sound better then I would have realized that I didn't need 50 different compressors that all do the same thing but are packaged slightly different for marketing purposes and forc me to use weird licensing platforms that companies use to frustrate you later as for samples yes you do need some Sound Source right if you're not just using all synthesizers or if you don't really record live sounds as I had a hard time doing in the early days because I I was doing good just to know which direction to point a microphone but you still don't need the finest new string library for whichever company is doing the most clever marketing at that time what you do need are a few inspiring sounds a few things that you can transform and make your own limitations are your friend in this case and many others when I wrote my first EP of past and present I was really bad at tracking piano so I ended up scrapping most of those live recordings that I had made and I used the giant which is a a plugin that I bought in one of those fancy plug-in Suites but what I ended up finding most interesting were the extended techniques that were found within that library and that's just where you you know hit the side of the piano and pluck the strings and play the instrument in sort of non-traditional ways and that inspired me to record some of those sounds of my own because I could figure out at least how to smack a piano and get that to sound decent when I processed it and then those sounds that I recorded combined with those sounds in that Library made up all of the percussive sounds on that album I think with only a couple of exceptions and that limitation and setting that limitation for myself early on really helped unify a group of tracks that otherwise found me kind of searching around for whatever my sound was going to be and it kind of unified and glued together the whole project I also hired a friend of mine to play cello and uh it turns out adding just one live player over a bunch of samples really breathes life into the whole thing and there is probably a really important lesson in there [Music] too maybe the best way to ensure that you repeat a task is to make it as easily repeatable and easy to get started as possible remove the friction from starting one of my biggest early mistakes was not setting up a template which is just a system inside your Daw that makes it easy to fire up and kind of have some things preloaded that you always use I I then took this too far and started you know having templates where everything was loaded and at the ready and I found that to be too far the other way and then I got overwhelmed every time I would open my DAW and also reach for the same few things over and over and always use them in the same ways I found so now my base template when I open Ableton or qbase simply has a few of my favorite effect sends ready to go my favorite reverbs and delays and then some empty midi tracks and audio tracks so I can drag in samples or different plugins and get started working the last thing you want to do when you have an idea is be setting all of that stuff up even if it only takes a few minutes it can take you out of that creative head space so despite what I've heard a lot on the internet the computer is not really an instrument it's more like a Sandbox and it's your job as the producer to set up the right combination of tools that make it the most INSP spiring for you and I found this to be an Ever evolving process so don't be concerned if this is something that you find yourself constantly changing because I'm still changing my setup all the time this one is really boring but maybe the most important thing uh on this list your computer will die one [Music] day so just take some time to learn a little bit about file structure if you're not super computer savvy like I was not especially basic things like where are my libraries and my software installed where are my plugins when I first got started I just wanted to start figuring out how to make music with a computer and so I was installing stuff all over the place I had no idea what I was doing I didn't understand the problems that that would create for me later down the road and I ended up installing several duplicates of different plugins I didn't understand the difference between like st2s I'm not even sure bst3 was a thing at that point in time anyway my stuff was all over the place and uh I wasn't even sure where to go when I had to reinstall something I wasn't sure where to tell cuas to look for it now if you stick with this long enough your machine will break a hard drive will fail something will happen and if you're as careless as I was it could take your will to live with it at least for a little while computers are wonderful uh they've allowed me to make a living and have a career out of making recording and releasing my own music independently and I wouldn't trade that for anything I love doing that without them I would not be here in front of you right now but while they are incredible tools for making music there's still a real value in learning a more traditional instrument that only does one thing and that's Play music Something Like a guitar or a piano is limited in the most wonderful way and those limitations Force us to dig deeper into it rather than just skimming across the surface as I think we often are tempted to do with a lot of plugins or stuff that's in our computer there's just too many options I see a lot of producers talking about trying to escape the grid and I think if the grid is your only means of exploration and coming up with ideas that's really difficult to do but if you play an instrument away from a computer and you aren't actually staring at lines that are vertical and dividing things up into you know four bar Loops for you you start to think more intuitively about things like musical phrases and more complete linear thoughts as my composition teacher once told me the bar lines are just there for rehearsal we composers don't really care about them so my greatest tool out of all of the stuff that I have here that I really don't need my greatest tool as a musician is still my piano because I've spent enough time with it to discover the endless depths of its limitations and those limitations force me to think about things like how our notes put together AKA Harmony and those of you who do play traditional instruments you know that it's kind of like having a conversation with that instrument there's a push and pull and a give and take that you experience with the instrument that is a little bit different than programming midi into a computer now there are certain Concepts that have translated really well over the years from my more traditional background into making music with Daws and electronics and computers and I've compiled those my favorites into an ebook which is a quick easy read and it's free and it's down below in the description I also have a bunch of videos that I've made over the past several months about Bridging the Gap between these two worlds if you are interested right here [Music]

Channel: Jameson Nathan Jones

Views: 25,783

Keywords: music production, music composition, making music with computers, daw, dawless, electronic music production, music production tips, tips for music producers, music composition tips, music production for beginners, stuck in the grid, jameson nathan jones, music composition for beginners, film scoring for beginners, film scoring

Id: iRVPjn_EEkw

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2024