Get Started Making Music
learningmusic.ableton.com
learningmusic.ableton.com
If anyone wants more, Ableton also has a synthesizer playground site at https://learningsynths.ableton.com/.
edit: I don't get the donwvotes on my comment of not getting other peoples downvotes :) Ok, I guess I asked for it :)
I wanted to learn but I do not know where to start. Just asking out of curiosity. Thanks
These days I have a strong preference towards "hardware"* only music making -- I spend most of my waking life staring at a screen, so I find it satisfying to step away and be hands on when creating music. The brains of my studio is a Synthstrom Deluge, which is an amazingly intuitive little gizmo - it has a built in synth and drum machine, a looper, a sampler, and a MIDI sequencer allowing you to drive all other synths in the studio. I also have an Arturia Keystep, which has a great live MIDI sequencer. Another fun gadget is the Roland RC 505, which gives you 5 independent and dubbable loops - I drive one of the two fx sends from my mixer through it, letting me build loops live from any of the other synths. Aside from those I've collected a handful of synths, both FM and analog.
(* quotes because pretty much all available synths, analog included, run on software. Most come with USB ports allowing you to connect and change settings, update firmware, etc.)
The main things I like about doing it all on a computer are:
* Great screen and interface. It's easy to drag and drop and see the composition visually. Boxes like the Digitakt look like a lot of fun, but then I watch a youTube video of it and it's like 80% knob-scrolling through menus on a tiny LCD screen and that doesn't look like fun.
* Easy file and data management. It's all just files on a hard drive. It's trivial to switch between projects, back up, restore state, etc. Managing that when the data lives on flash cards across a handful of sequencers seems really stressful to me. I'd be so worried about accidentally losing a patch or something.
* It's cheaper. If I want two separate delays with different settings, I can just add a second delay. I don't have to go on Sweetwater and drop another $200. Sure, Eurorack stuff is "modular", but each module requires shelling out cash. In Reason, I can wire up huge racks of crazy stuff without spending a dime.
But..., man, the hardware stuff looks like a lot of fun. I also feel like it can be a real struggle to get something that sounds rich and full out of Reason. I can get there, but it takes effort. It's default sound tends to be kind of brittle and dry, which is to be expected from software but can be uninspiring. (I should maybe check out a different DAW, but I know Reason well and exploring different software is a whole other can of worms.) With a lot of hardware gear — at least judging by videos online — you power it up and it sounds fat immediately.
I think what really matters the most to me is finding a path that gets me finishing music I like quickly. I don't want to just noodle, but I also want something fun and immediate enough to stay in the moment. I'm still not sure if software or hardware (or a mixture of both?) is the right path for that.
Any thoughts on how to dip my toes in the water with hardware to see if that's a better fit?
Zaquencer - $200. The most sequencer you can get at that price point. But lots of knob turning, no real displays. Its fun though.
Toraiz Squid - $600. But it has some great features, and its very 'playable'. You can also drag and drop all of your midi from the device into the DAW.
I would suggest starting with purchasing a MIDI interface and a sequencer. Just use them to control software instruments in your DAW.
This is my workflow. Make a bunch of patterns in a sequencer. Record audio or MIDI into the DAW. Arrange the patterns. You get you brainstorming done on the hardware but the editing on the software.
I find that the device that gives me finished tracks with highest probability is OP-1.
Totally with you there. Menu diving on a 20x2 char display is no fun at all.
> Any thoughts on how to dip my toes in the water with hardware to see if that's a better fit?
It wouldn't get you a full setup, but a keystep + a behringer neutron wouldn't break the bank, and looks like a lot of fun. (I don't have a neutron. Maybe on my list once I sell a couple pieces of equipment that I don't use.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfD8RmALHwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJTl_ntNTgo
I own Elektron Analog 4 and it's extremely fun to use and make quick loops. You may need to organize your sounds a bit at first, but when you have a reasonable "palette", editing is easy. The UI is extremely well-organized when it comes to common operations. If I needed to make a professional-sounding track in hurry, that's probably what I would use.
How much money is "dip my toes"? If you're talking less than a hundred bucks for some cool toys, you can buy Korg Volca and one of PO-x0 series from Teenage Engineering.
If you're thinking $500+ you can get something like Alesis Micron (designed by Bret Victor, BTW) or Korg Electribe, or Elektron Model:Sample. If you're fine with real-time recording, you can instead get something like Behringer Neutron or Kors Minilogue. You can make entire tracks on those even if all you have is a linear recorder.
If you're in ~$1000+ range you can buy Analog Four or OP-1. The former is a very practical machine, the latter is a marvel of design, very fun and great for experiments.
Or you could go for a workstation. FA-06 has pretty good UX, although it's closer to DAW-on-a-keyboard than other things I mentioned here.
Find a device you like and learn it inside out. It's a very rewarding experience. Also, try to buy a used device. You can save tons of money this way.
If you are just starting out, in my opinion, the best way to get into working things out is to just dive deep into a software based music DAW, you can try Garage Band or Fruity Loops, which have a slightly lower learning curve than other tools, there are also tons of tutorials on youtube. Ableton is a bit overdone and technical as a starting point, but then again, most valuable skills don't have very easy entry/starting points in life.
No malintention meant here, and as far as electronic instruments go I agree with what you're saying, I just know several drummers and guitar players who would by quite incensed by the comparison with their instruments to rotary phones.
When I was younger I was a serious musician but stepped away out of creative frustration. Getting a used OP1 on a whim many years later reignited that drive. It’s helped inspire writing my first full album—which isn’t “electronic” as most would associate with it, it’s just such an inspiring tool to get things started and make soundscapes and beats etc.
That's one of the things I'm not sure of too. I technically can afford basically whatever, but there's a lot of opportunity cost and I'll feel really bad if I buy something pricy and it ends up collecting dust.
This thread has been great for getting me to think about why I might want hardware and what my actual goals are. If it's to produce finished, polished songs, I think using a DAW is a better workflow for me. If it's as a sound source, I'm not yet convinced that real analog is worth the complexity and cost.
But if it's a fun box to get inspired by and play with away from the computer, then something that has an interesting UI, can make some sounds, and has some amount of sequencing is what I should focus on. That sounds like an OP-1, Digitone or Deluge to me.
> Also, try to buy a used device. You can save tons of money this way.
Great advice. Thank you!
Its great, when I flip on the little machines I know is music making time and I wont have to deal with any hurdles.
EDIT: sorry, my question was about whether Linux supports VST. I would assume that Bitwig did at v0.1 :-)
Bitwig is quite similar to Ableton in terms of capabilities, I never tried this myself, but there seems to be a way (assuming you want Windows VSTs on Linux) https://answers.bitwig.com/questions/624/vst-windows-on-linu...
I am perfectly happy with the built-in stuff however. Because of bitwigs extremely strong modulation engine the standard effects are probably the most powerful and expressive ones out there.
You can absolutely make VSTs for Linux, but I imagine that very few people do.
The software itself works well, it's really great, but with VSTs it's quite tricky. I got a couple to work that explicitly support linux, but for example Serum I couldn't get to work properly.
Recently I decided that it's not work all the hassle, and setup a windows computer again. I want as little friction as possible, because the process of making electronic music is already hard enough by itself.
I found it a pain to set up in the first place, and it's hit-and-miss which plugins work in it, but once up and running it actually works smoothly enough, in my experience. (Larger, more complicated VSTs seem correspondingly less likely to work. Of ones that don't immediately work, some can be massaged into working with some tweaking of your wine setup. There's a webpage somewhere with a list of what plugins are known to work and what you need to do to get them to work.)
There are other ways of running windows-based VSTs, but that's the one I'm familiar with.
Bitwig, started by former developers of Ableton, supports Ableton Push and many other MIDI controllers[1], and is probably the most advanced DAW for electronic music production currently available.
It's not as popular as Ableton, because it's much newer and most people rarely switch DAWs they are used to.
> Other than that Reaper needs a mention, it is the best DAW[1] in terms of functionality and power.
That's true, Reaper might be the best DAW for any non-electronic music oriented workflows. But this separation is essential: they were designed with different primary use cases in mind.
I wish Reaper supported Linux natively (without Wine).
It is supported as far as the Bitwig scripting API can support it. The experience is not the same as using Push natively with Ableton.
I have a Push 2 with Ableton.
Could not agree more. I'm a voice actor, and Reaper is my secret weapon for speed and efficiency in non-music-based audio production. I love it.
I'm a beginner, so don't know much about Ableton or Bitwig.
When Bitwig was on sale, I got it (and as a nice surprise found that my Bitwig 2 license also included Bitwig 3 now)
How many bitwig users here use it in a live performance context?
I probably use 10% of bigwig and 2% of Ableton. So the important factor is whether something is missing in Bitwig, and how polished/intuitive the bits I do use are.
Also they should call it Bigwig since everyone’s autocomplete seems to insist on it.
I was also blown away by their pricing - you can pay as little as $1 for the full version, which is what I did, but after seeing how well it works, I did a donation to match the recommended price of $45.
It's also possible to, for example, 'apt-get install ardour' and get a similar version in Debian Buster. I presume there are lots of other operating systems that this is built for, so Ardour does make a significant contribution to free software.
Bitwig works on a subscription program for updates. You want the latest you buy a subscription and it lasts for a year. After the subscription is over you get to use whatever version you are on for life, but no updates.
Just asking out of curiosity. Thanks
They are suitable for hobbyists to professional level.
I personally am a hobbyist musician and programmer by profession. I'd imagine many others here are like me as well.
Cubase Artist: ~ $340
Reaper: Free/$60/$225
Pro tools: ~ $600
It's priced in the same league as its competitors.
Arturia midi controllers (eg Minilab mkII: ~$100) come bundled with a license for Ableton Live Lite which is pretty functional and might satisfy hobbyist needs.
NI Komplete 12 Full - $1600
(obviously, this analogy breaks under pressure; software still lacks the concrete permanence of a physical instrument)
1. What would one miss if using Bitwig over others, if anything?
2. Same question as the above for Reaper?
3. How would the two compare with each other.
Note: I have already noted the comments child to yours.
Thanks.
What I mostly love is that through plugins you can find virtual versions of existing hardware modules!
[0]: https://vcvrack.com/
https://www.twitch.tv/dronehands
https://www.twitch.tv/nitewurx
Access is through Max for Live, which is a dataflow language "programmed" by joining little object blocks to other object blocks - like Scratch. There's unofficial Python support, but it's poorly documented.
Many things are possible, but many other things aren't possible - even though they're available on Push, so obviously the hooks are there.
It would make me unbelievably happy if Ableton opened up the LOM and included a properly documented hook for absolutely every important feature - preferably one that could be used from any language, maybe via OSC, rather than M4L.
To be fair Live at least has a LOM, while other sequencers/DAWs don't. So that's a plus. But it's still a shame it isn't more complete - because that would make all kinds of cool things possible.
Frankly thinking of it as a sequencer is a limiting mental model.
Think of it as a instrument to jam with.
When I used cubase I spend about 20% of the time with jamming together a basic idea and then 80% with arranging.
Ableton flipped that for me...now I spend 80% of the time jamming (and loving it) and only all the way at the end I quickly create the arrangement once I am already super familiar with all the parts I created during jamming.
It’s had a really super positive on my creative quality!
Cubase has a much superior audio and processing engine like Logic Pro for mac users, and is in a similar pricing range. It has less quality built-in dps etc. ,but most DAWs lack on that.
Renoise for like 50 euros is super cheap in comparison, and most dps it has have awesome performance and quality.
That being said, ableton does offer a better 'live' environment for live/performance based things.
on workflows, bitwig is really the innovator, as it combines workflows from different daws like cubase and ableton and lets the user itself choose its work-flow instead of forcing it upon the user.
I think some of the renoise devs used to work for cubase, so maybe this guy even whent from there to renoise to ableton. :) thanks for the info though, interesting always :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renoise
> I started coding 2 years ago with this project, so I'm more musician than coder I started making music with protracker
https://web.archive.org/web/20020803155023/http://noerror.sc...
He is listed under his real name (Eduard Mueller) here in 2004 on the ableton website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040816022620fw_/http://www.abl...
https://web.archive.org/web/20040914164146/http://www.ableto...
I recently bought a Maschine MK2 to get into the music making thing. It surprised me how easy to use it is.
My wife is a professional acoustic musician, and although she firstly was a bit hesitant with this 'instrument' she quickly turned around. And we started making music together.
It's perfect for me since it is very well arranged, the buttons make sense in my head.
I play a bit of guitar and always have trouble making sense of the notes in my head.
I've always been intrigued by MIDI, but always felt "limited" by piano-style keyboard MIDI controllers. Maschine really helped me break open my writers block and made playing music fun again.
I can put Maschine in front of my 5 year old and he can figure it out. It makes more sense to him than my 61-key MIDI controller does.
"Running on Web Audio, WebAssembly and WebGL. Made with three.js, Tone.js, anime.js and React using TypeScript and much "
I started composing about a year ago using general tools like CuBase and Garage Band and wow, it's tedious, even when the initial sketch is worked out before hand on a keyboard.
There are just a ton of ideas that come to mind on how it could be an order of magnitude more efficient. Maybe there are apps that don't focus so much on production, that do a better job solely for the writing music part?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqjeNSNuNPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9QU5-9DFC4
Can we do it using Ableton? How does one even approach trying to do something like this?
Although I like Imogen Heap, I don't see why she's so deserving of a special mention.
[0]: http://flotools.org/
https://soundcloud.com/hit8run/happyathens-finetune/s-dWSSq
So you can achieve alot with the productive workflow of ableton. I also bought Logic but never finished a full song with it and always felt restricted by it's workflow.
I really like this idea. This is something I want to explore as a non-music person.
They all start and stop at the beginning of a measure so that it sounds natural/intentional no matter what you click on and when.
Not to diss on PO. I was super hyped about it as well, and would have liked to know about its limitations before buying it. Anyone of the numerous phone apps would be a cheaper and better replacement for a PO.
What got me started in music was Garageband. It's free (for macos users) and quite simple and intuitive. It's not as fully-featured as something like Ableton, but quite capable for making professional-level songs.
I bought an interface for my guitar ($20) and have played around with Garageband on my iPad and just playing with the amps is a lot of fun. It's a very low friction way to record myself playing while practicing and since I'm using headphones, I'm not irritating everybody around me with my terrible playing.
One complaint about Garageband (and Cubase - a copy of that came with my Yamaha amp), is the lack of tutorials for people like me. I'd love a start-to-finish tutorial for recording a toy song that includes recording my instrument on top of simple drums and maybe one or two other virtual instruments.
That's per design. They don't stop arbitrarily, but at bar boundaries, so that they stay on rhythm. In other words, it's not a sample player pads, it's clip launch pads...
And it can load modules directly from modarchive and modules.pl, too! e.g
https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.m...
FWIW, that's how I learned making music, just learning the commands and making things I like by ear. Though being a kid with no internet probably helped.
Any ideas what am I missing?
EDIT: I was supposed to add a sample (in the Edit Samples tab) in case anyone was confused like me.
seq24 for sequencing/block-style arranging. Reaper for recording tracks. VCVRack for synthesis, Hydrogen for drums.
In fact, its kind of amazing what tools a budding musician has available to them - for free - in the Linux ecosphere. I hope to see more articles describing these tools soon .. or maybe I should do one of my own ..