Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers

Musicians today live in a golden age of tools and technology. A ninety-nine-cent smartphone app can give you the functionality of a million-dollar recording studio. A new song can be shared with the world as soon as it's finished. Tutorials for every sound design or music production technique can be found through a Google search. But despite all of this, making music is still hard. Why? Making Music was written both to answer this question and to offer ways to make it easier. It presents a systematic, concrete set of patterns that you can use when making music in order to move forward. There are already many ways-books, classes, video tutorials, software documentation, private teachers-to learn about music technology and music production. But almost all of them focus on the second half of the equation-technology or production- rather than the first half: music. Making Music is an attempt to help people who are comfortable with the basics of music production at a technical level but who still find music-making to be a difficult process (which I suspect is all of us!). This book will not teach you how to use a compressor, program a synthesizer, or make a great-sounding kick drum. Those aspects of music-making are already well covered. What it will teach you is how to make music using those tools, with a specific emphasis on solving musical problems, making progress, and (most importantly) finishing what you start.