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To anyone who thinks "it is easy", try this experiment: recreate a popular song (+100M views on YT for example) in some DAW. (the songs are produced in similar DAWs.) You won't be able to recreate the vocals, but you should be able to recreate the backing track almost identically. Put the original in right ear, your version in the left ear, and iterate until switching between versions sounds identical.

Over 100s of hours, this will train you ears, and you will appreciate the production quality of today's pop music.

This just covers the production and mixing, not the writing. Catchy pop songs sound deceivingly simple, which is the point and why they are so difficult to write.

There's a long interview with Rick Beato and Pat Metheny. My opinion is that among "younger" jazz musicians, Metheny has a rare gift for writing catchy melodies. He can write melodies that sound like folk songs, or like the most advanced deep jazz tunes, or both at the same time, pretty much on demand.

He said nobody teaches how to do this. You can study composition and arrangement, but they won't teach you how to create a melody. I don't know if he was implying that it can't be taught. But it's certainly valuable.

I know someone who wrote tunes on speculation, and one of his melodies was chosen as the year's jingle for a major brand. It made him enough money to pay cash for a house. Of course this was many years ago.

Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us, and most of them have no idea how to explain how they learn/teach in ways that are useful to regular brains. I've met some of them, and they might as well be a different species. (Synthesesia is often part of it, I did a master class with a pianist who was basically tripping the whole time he played, listening to him describe his experience was so completely un-relatable to normal people.)

Some of those folks are also great teachers, but a lot of them just say the most completely useless advice because they can't even remember not being able to instantly play whatever they hear.

I’m not sure if you put Jacob Collier in this category, but I think his success has a lot to do with him attempting to make these higher abstractions of music more approachable.

There is something to that.

He reminds me of Eric Whitacre in a sense. Whitacre reached "genius" "prodigy" "best composer" status among amateurs and beginner musicians because he published his music with all kinds of markings on it (e.g. explicitly writing crescendi and diminuendi for every basic phrase, and notating all kinds of subtle tempo changes) that a well trained singer would already understand implicitly without need for the markings (which in my opinion as a well trained singer with his own sense of style, are annoying). The effect is to allow bad high school choirs to get to decent-sounding choral music.

> Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us

Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages.

Of course, this is not a proof against some people’s wiring differently, but if one could become Mozart without special wiring maybe we shouldn’t count on the idea too much.

Is "Peak" in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell or "Good to Great" which preselects a handful of prodigies across all fields then makes broad, definitive (unscientific) conclusions based on some posthoc observations?

No, if anything Peak was written as a response to Outliers, which grossly misrepresents Ericsson's work. Peak is his popular science version of his own work, presumably to correct that. It's a good read, and can act as a guide to his actual academic papers. But bear in mind, it is still only as good as his studies, which were done on pre-professional players and athletes, not on the super-elite geniuses.

Outliers is a complete piece of shit. No professionals take anything in that book seriously, it's cherry picked extrapolated nonsense by someone who wanted a good story and has no idea what he was talking about.

I haven’t read Good to Great, but have read other Malcolm Gladwell books. They are written to be sensational and popular, not scientific at all. Indeed Gladwell is the one who misrepresented 10000 hours of practice that Anders Ericsson identified as part of his research. Ericsson identifies 10000 hours as a ballpark around which proficient practicers have practiced in their career --- nothing like a prerequisite Gladwell portrayed it to be. To the contrary, Ericsson states that without deliberate practice, the number of hours of practice doesn’t matter.

Peak is nothing like Gladwell books. I recommend it to everyone interested in practice and improvement.

A good way to summarize it is: Gladwell implied that if you did 10k hours, you'd become world class, that's it! Ericsson identified that the most significant differentiator between the top performers at conservatories and the rest was how much of their lives they had spent doing rigorous practice. Those are two totally different things. To paraphrase Ericsson in a way that is meaningful for most people, he basically said "10k hours is the average we saw of our top performers" (10+ years, 3 hours a day). He in no way implies that doing that would make you world class, or that all world class performers had done it. He never says it's either necessary or sufficient - just what they observed their top subjects had done relative to their bottom ones, so if you want to get good, start there. There are people out there who are world class after playing half that, and scads and scads who aren't and have done more than double.

I took a lot longer than 10 years to do my 10k+ hours, but by now at age 47 I've done them. So have most of my musician friends. We gig around town. lol. 10k is table stakes.

Thank you for this very good summary.

I have read his work, and also am friends with many university and conservatory music teachers who have know some prodigies. I'm sorry... you're wrong. The world is full of thousands and thousands of musicians who had 10k hours perfect deliberate practice from age 3 with world class teachers and don't become those people. Do they become great musicians? sure! Do they become the Pat Methenies? very very rarely. Even among jazz elite, Metheny is known as special.

And there are also has many cases of people who did not have any of that perfect-practice upbringing and and have aural awareness that is on a completely different plane from regular people. I know some of them (I'm doing a Master's in Music Tech right now). I know folks who, without the proper years of deliberate practice, are able to do things I and 99.99% of musicians will never be able to do. That does not mean they will necessarily become famous or have great careers, but they can do shit that is out of this world. One of Canada's best jazz musician's recounted to me chatting after a masterclass about music cognition how he had a college student who came to him for her lesson and could remember EVERY SINGLE NOTE of Keith Jarrett's concert the night before and play it for him. That shit is not normal, it's crazy savant stuff. From what I have read, Metheny was in that category.

Music is a funny thing, deliberate perfect practice is obviously the most important thing, but there absolutely are geniuses who do not have the same brains as us, and the top 0.001% or whatever has a lot of them. Savantism occurs (relatively speaking) often in music. If you want a counter balance to Ericsson's "practice is everything" stance (and there is lots of excellent material to take from Ericsson's work), I suggest reading Oliver Sacks, "Musicophelia", about the music related clinical stories from his career as a neuroscientist.

> I'm sorry... you're wrong.

> deliberate perfect practice is obviously the most important thing

I said that we shouldn't count too much on the idea of brain wiring. As far as I understood, the second quote above agrees with me. I didn't mean to disregard the presence of savants or other phenomena not explained by practice, deliberate or not. If my previous reply suggested so, I would like to correct it here.

No worries. I've just happened to have read about Metheny. He is a genius, no doubt about it. Even among the super elite he is considered a special case.

"Musicophelia" was really eye opening. I think it's attuned me to noticing more of the interesting differences among the (mostly amateur including myself) musicians I play with.

If someone is reading this and is getting demotivated to apply yourself to any field that you like because you think you don't have the skills, please, don't. Parent isn't saying that you shouldn't try. We're usually terrible to estimate our own abilities. How many times you thought you were incapable of doing something and you end up doing it?

My own anecdotal example. I stopped playing music years ago because I thought I wasn't good, despite liking it. I started playing again because I had no games and I noticed that I should have gotten back to it sooner, despite not being music material. Not only I was able to play stuff that I liked, I learned stuff that I thoroughly enjoyed. Some music were really hard at first, but as I progressed (very) slowly through weeks, I could see my skills improving and I was very satisfied to watch it (slow as it was).

If you like it, I think you should do it, despite of others. Because it won't matter, in the end. It may take time and a lot of effort, can be painful, but it's worth it.

I think this advice by Terrence Tao translates well to other areas: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...

Thanks, you're totally right to point this out. One should no more give up music because of the geniuses out there than one should stop playing golf or basketball because becoming Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan isn't going to be just a matter of practicing hard.

Most adults overestimate how fast they should improve in the short term and really underestimate how far they can get by just practicing regularly and consistently over many years.

Where are you studying Music Tech? What was your undergraduate background? I’m curious if you found a formal tech education is as important in what today is often more an applied art compared to when these tools were so expensive and esoteric.

The older I get, the more I'm attuned to the limitations of talent like Metheny. It's like how there are great mathematicians, and many of them can be strong problem-solvers and do great work, but can still fall short of "genius", because - and this is my hypothesis - they're too strong at tackling fine-grained details immediately, so they don't actively seek out the kind of abstractions that would lead to a different perspective. It's like trying to explain how you walk: "it's obvious." (even though at some point you did struggle with it) When I hear synthestites talk, they are trying to explain how walking works - it's tapping into neural pathways that are wired into the subconscious, skipping over any preliminary decoding. So they often create things that sound marvelous, bring in tons of techniques, but are at their core heavily improvised with minimal "concept" - elequent baby babbles.

For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us explain our results when we get them, and highlights using structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just "sit at the keys" and get swept away.

All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm, scale or harmony.

I've struggled with the accuracy of statements like this as someone who writes a lot of music. Writing the melodies is always the easiest part (lyrics are the hardest). So how much is it brain wiring vs just practicing an order of magnitude or two more than most? I have thousands of hours spent improvising over random songs - just setting Spotify to shuffle and jamming to whatever pops up. It's fun for me, and something I generally do to procrastinate other work. I couldn't imagine someone practicing nearly as much if they didn't innately enjoy it. So it makes me wonder, is it fun because I'm good at it, or did I get good at it because I find it fun? I personally believe the latter, but it's hard to really tease apart the nature vs nurture in such a subjective art. It reminds me of comic artists trying to illustrate just how much art they have to produce to go from amateur to pro.

Note, I don't mean to imply I'm part of that small elite you mention. I'm no prodigy, it's just that I've had many musicians (in far less competitive circles) express a similar sentiment about my skills.

What I'm saying is more that when people like Metheny say "you can't teach melody writing", they mean "no one could teach me melody writing, it's just there". And then they extrapolate to say "no one can teach anyone melody writing", which is complete nonsense. I can, guaranteed, teach a regular person tons on how to learn to write better melodies. Can I teach a Metheny how to improve his melodies? Of course not! (Nor will my improvisation ever by even remotely in his ballpark...)

Because for me, they were never "just there". I learnt improvisation by listening, playing, memorizing, and analyzing over many years. It never came easy. So yeah, I know tons of the obstacles regular people will face, and lots of things that might get them unstuck.

A really fascinating interview is the film of Bill Evans talking about this. Surprising, he says it was never easy for him either. So damn, he must have worked hard.

Record producer/writer here. You're on the nose with this. Simplicity and clarity are skills, like writing essays, that are refined over many many years to make something appear effortless.

You also allude to it, but there is a staggering amount of unseen effort that also goes into the writing and arranging of the song. Listeners only experience the end product and the final arrangement. For simple melodies it seems very obvious that that's how they should have been all along, but hidden behind that apparent simplicity can be hours and hours of false starts, dead-end paths, and a constant paring-down of complexity in some cases.

It's not uncommon for me and a collaborator to write a full sketch for a song (verses, choruses, lyrics, etc) before hitting on a groove or turn of phrase in the bridge that absolutely KILLS. Quite often what happens is that we discard the entire rest of the song and build something new around this new inspiring nugget of musical gold. This will quite often turn into an entirely new song with a very different feel, message etc. It's a musical moment or hook that we would not have arrived at had we not gone through the whole process leading up to it.

I've never regretted having had to go through the preceding steps to arrive there. It's always welcomed by the collaborators in the room and it's easy for us not to get stuck in a sunk-cost fallacy because it brought us to the place we're at now.

Any chance we’ve heard your work just in daily browsing? Or mind pointing us to your work?

Would love to associate this comment’s context to the songs we hear

It's obviously Eminem.

This analogy is moot.

As if someone tried to justify that "it's hard to make a milshake" by saying "yeah but you couldn't make one exactly the same, at the molecule level, as this one I made earlier".

Furthermore, I presume, not even the original creator could make another track with the same sound as one of its own, if it were to start again from scratch. Akin to how it'd be almost impossible for someone to draw the exact same sketch twice.

You can use Machine Learning tools to isolate the vocals from the original song. I've done this exact thing (song recreation/transcribing) as part of taking music theory lessons.

For anyone else who would like to try this, I will share how to do it:

  1. Use one of the popular models for Source Separation. Facebook's is called "Demucs" and one of the best. Deezer's is called "Spleeter", also very good, and then there's "OpenUnmix".

There's a webservice to separate a song using Demucs here:

https://demucs.danielfrg.com/

And a great Dockerized webapp that lets you choose from several models and parameters here:

https://github.com/JeffreyCA/spleeter-web

Otherwise you can just install them locally and run them through the CLI, it's pretty easy (one command)

https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs#for-musicians

https://github.com/deezer/spleeter#quick-start

  2. Now you can take the isolated vocals, and build the rest of the song yourself

I've also found that it really helps to be able to listen to each of the parts of the song in isolation when trying to recreate them.

The drums, the bassline, the lead/synth, etc. It can be hard to distinguish notes when they all run together. You can use an EQ to try to single out instruments but it's harder.

Hope this is helpful to someone.

I used to make music as a teenager. Spending many hours in the "studio" certainly shapes your aesthetics and how you approach new music. Even understanding just the basics and tiny bits of underlying techniques makes you listen differently, makes it easy to become a snob to be honest. Overall though, and generally, making things of any sort lets you appreciate the creative process as an overarching art in itself, an appreciation you can often transport to other fields, even those not conventionally regarded as artistic.

Making music had the opposite effect on me in regards to snobbery. After years of trying to make stuff sound good and write good songs I’ve learned that it’s really really hard and I no longer judge musicians as much as I used to.

Well.. After learning how to create music I've come to appreciate certain artists more and others less. Sometimes I missed the ability to listen to music without analysing it. Other times I've wished I could hear my own music, like someone who didn't write it would. These days I listen mostly by feeling the music. Now it doesn't matter much whether it's my or another artists music. As long as it 'feels' right.

Whether you like Ableton Live or not relative to other options is a matter of preference, but regardless, the folks who run Ableton are pretty cool:

- run by real musicians who play shows, it came out of a scratched personal itch

- so far, good new owners of Cycling 74, the bug squash numbers in the last couple of releases were stellar

- totally hacker friendly, they know people release disassembled Python code for control surfaces, and basically said "we can't support individual users doing this, but we know it's out there and won't do anything to stop it" (this was what actually got me on the bus!)

- really good educational outreach initiatives, and they give away a very capable light version for peanuts (or free with many controllers)

I find their prices high, all things considered, but am happy to be a long time customer, and as a serious musician musician (university educated, etc.), I think it's great that it has become such a gateway to appreciation of instrumental music by making music creation a more accessible hobby.

And the fact that I can script the heck out of such a full featured commercial product in Scheme by writing a Max/MSP external is fantastic (plug, I wrote Scheme For Max, which allows you to run lisp in your Ableton...)

I think it’s also important to mention that Max costs $399 extra

Correction, Max for Live costs $200 extra. Ableton Suite costs more, as does owning both standalone Max and Max for Live, but you do not need the $400 Max to script Live with Max, you just need Max for Live. And given how much it brings to the table and how many community and built in devices you get for that, I would argue it's very reasonable compared to other pro audio software. (Mind you, not incredible like Reaper, Valhalla DSP or Klanghelm's prices, but very fair compared to many others)

yeah i agree with that, but i think Ableton prices are still bit ridiculous given they make a new version every year or so

They are high, I don't argue that. I don't think they are ridiculous, given the quality of the product and size of the market (it's not word processing...), the fact that they are independent, and they way they run their company (which, from what I've heard, is a very nice place to work). It is extremely stable with very very few bugs, and running an independent software company that way requires high margins. (I'm a software mergers and acquisitions consultant, so I get to talk to buyers about this all the time.) Personally, I'm happy to pay a premium to support the way the company is run, I don't think for a second they would be as hacker friendly if they got bought by one of the big PE fund owned media conglomerates.

But you're not wrong, they are pricy. If people are on a tight budget (and I spent many years being that musician 20 years ago) I would tell them to buy Reaper and either standalone Max ($8/mnth, cheaper for students) or use Pure Data (open source).

One thing to consider though is that Ableton is a Software product, so it can’t be resold unlike an actual device

This is not true. You can resale Ableton licenses. In fact a lot of music software allows sale of software licenses.

Can confirm. Quite a few pieces of expensive music software allow you to transfer ownership of licenses. I just bought a used Maschine+ hardware unit and the seller included a printout with confirmation of ownership for the software component along with the required serial numbers for the new owner (me).

Four years on average for the last few releases:

  Ableton Live 9:  March 5, 2013  
  Ableton Live 10: February 6, 2018  
  Ableton Live 11: February 23, 2021

Nice work on Scheme for Max!

Much less impressive, but I spent a bit of time building a simple M4L device a while back using Typescript, and put some effort into figuring out how to make TS play nice(r) with the M4L API (the JS support in Max is pretty basic).

I never got around to splitting it out into its own reusable module but it might be of interest to anyone interested in playing with scripting Ableton from Max, but not interested in learning Max’s visual programming paradigm: https://github.com/tomduncalf/livefader

Would be interested to know how Ableton’s scriptability compares to some other DAWs… I know Tracktion and Bitwig have some degree of JS support, and Reaper has its own scripting language. Personally I’d love it Ableton made the Python API etc. a bit more official but I can of course understand why they don’t.

thanks! :-)

Ardour uses Lua as its scripting language. But then of course, it's also 100% open source, so you don't have to rely on what is made accessible via the scripting language. You can just change the actual source.

Of course, some people don't see things that way:

https://discourse.ardour.org/t/is-open-source-a-diversion-fr...

  > "Would be interested to know how Ableton’s scriptability compares to some other DAWs… I know Tracktion and Bitwig have some degree of JS support, and Reaper has its own scripting language. Personally I’d love it Ableton made the Python API etc. a bit more official but I can of course understand why they don’t."

There's nothing that really holds a candle to REAPER's scripting API.

For interpreted scripts, it supports Lua/Python/Eel (simple C-like language):

https://mespotin.uber.space/Ultraschall/Reaper_Api_Documenta...

It also has a C/C++ native extension API, and a community Rust API. I have translated the API into C# and D.

https://github.com/justinfrankel/reaper-sdk/blob/main/sdk/re...

https://github.com/helgoboss/reaper-rs

The total number of (stock) API functions is ~1,000. Some core parts of REAPER itself like it's piano roll and media browser are written using it's own plugin API.

It supports making audio plugins with GUI's that hot-reload and have a realtime variable + debugger panel using the Eel language (called "JSFX"). Many of the user-created JSFX are better than paid plugins I've used.

https://www.reaper.fm/sdk/js/js.php

The scripting community is very large and active.

https://forum.cockos.com/forumdisplay.php?f=3

It has an in-DAW IDE with intellisense. There are multiple community GUI frameworks, including bindings to ImGui, etc.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2416501

https://github.com/cfillion/reaimgui

Really blows your mind.

(I am familiar with the docs for Tracktion's JS API, know about Studio One's hush-hush JS scripting, Renoise's Lua scripting, Ardour's scripting, etc.)

Wow, impressive, I had no idea the scripting capability was quite so deep. I’ll be reading up on this some more, many thanks for the great post and all the links!

I always liked listening to edm and when I first got to know that you just need a laptop and DAW to make tracks the idea of becoming an edm artist sounded exciting and glamorous to me. (like alan walker, martin grx)

I installed FL Studio and tried my hand on making some beats (https://youtube.com/channel/UClKt2vzomuegCDA45SU6FbA/videos). Before I spent too much time on it I released it's actually less about making catchy beats and more about the marketing, connections in music industry etc. Now, I'm writing code again.

> it's actually less about making catchy beats and more about the marketing, connections in music industry etc

If you make good music you can throw a couple tracks towards a small, local label and stand pretty decent odds of getting signed.

Getting on a tiny little label with some people you like isn't going to be enough for it to be a career, but it's definitely a lot of fun and can be creatively enabling.

Coding can still pay the bills, though!

It’s about the same as building a startup I’d say. Luck plays a huge role (and there are lots of people trying to divine rules extrapolated from their lucky experience to help you) but I’d also say the music (product) really does need to be incredibly good for you to make it. But maybe it isn’t needed initially as long as you get feedback and develop product market fit for your music, but that would be considered very uncool in the music industry.

That's a pretty common beginner's trap, to have your motivation be to release music rather than in creating music itself. For basically any beginner you need many years to get to the point where that should be a consideration. Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making the music. Ironically this is what actually differentiates the greats from those that struggle: the former make music primarily for themselves, the latter make music primarily for others.

"Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making the music."

On principle I agree with this. Tracks made following a tick list of successful tropes with an eye on getting released are liable to be highly forgettable.

Having said that, as someone who tinkered a bit with production some twenty many years ago before lapsing, and tinkering and lapsing once again a couple of years ago, I would argue that some form of shared community outlet is essential in persisting and making something of greater merit.

I tend to think that the best music is emergent from real-life communities: people, time, place, culture, politics. That is, communities that have an aesthetic and reason for being that goes far beyond, say, craving new synths after watching youtube reviews.

Music that is not performed and shared, ever, is somehow stillborn. Fun and enjoyment come from the attribution of meaning, and to me, meaning ultimately comes from real human context. I feel that the lack of this killed my desire to keep making it and improving. It was just an expensive way of shouting into the void.

If you are playing for an audience (can be tiny too!) you will always be much more motivated to produce quality and improve your skills.

That being said it can also put pressure on you to the point where you also lose your joy due to stress.

I guess some middle ground can be found but as with everything that is easier said than done.

> Having said that, as someone who tinkered a bit with production some twenty many years ago before lapsing, and tinkering and lapsing once again a couple of years ago, I would argue that some form of shared community outlet is essential in persisting and making something of greater merit.

Still most of your time with music will be solitary. If you accept that, anything social is just a bonus.

> Music that is not performed and shared, ever, is somehow stillborn. Fun and enjoyment come from the attribution of meaning, and to me, meaning ultimately comes from real human context. I feel that the lack of this killed my desire to keep making it and improving. It was just an expensive way of shouting into the void.

Well you basically just proved my whole point here. You stopped making music because you weren't happy doing it alone. Learn to be totally content doing it alone, and you won't have this issue. It is possible, because I was stuck in your situation for a long time, and thought myself that music was pointless if not socially shared. I realise now that it just isn't true, and in fact that mindset puts huge pressure on yourself and indeed on the community around you. It is possible to enjoy making music without the need for social reinforcement.

> Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making the music.

It's much like brain surgery. People assume you should start out treating people's illnesses and curing them, but the successful brain surgeons know that you should spend your early years just having fun and enjoy playing around inside people's skulls. It's such a rush the first time you probe someone's central gyrus and see their arms twich. Don't waste your time planning for "in network" glory and how to calculate billable hours, just power up that bonesaw and start shredding.

I don't think my music is bad enough that it will make people braindead

Quite agreed. Granted, I come from the world of analog music made on alcohol powered instruments. But in my circle, the vast majority of musicians are delighted with finding non-commercial outlets for their musical interests. This includes some people who are quite skilled, and a few who have music degrees.

Possibilities include: Playing in church (a huge portion of both amateur and commercial music is religious), entertaining oneself at home, jamming with friends, exploring and even performing esoteric music that can't be commercially viable. Even many otherwise successful professional musicians have noncommercial side projects that need volunteers. For instance if someone is willing to compose something new, or dig up something interesting and weird, I'm willing to chip in and help them try it out, just for the spirit of adventure. I'm satisfied to perform for just a small handful of people who share similar interests from the audience side.

It's not all that different than people who are into extreme sports, cooking, etc., without any expectations of ever being competitive at it.

What I keep thinking is that "making X primarily for others" is intended to mean "other people are the driving influence on what kind of X you produce", in a sense that you lose your individuality by creating only what other people want.

However, I often think it's intended to mean "producing X so that other people can consume X, regardless of what results."

And I have frequently heard that it means "producing X so that other people can critique your work and tell you how to improve."

These interpretations seem to be at odds. I've had instructors in creative bootcamps tell me that the difference between the strugglers and the greats was that the greats released their work to the public, got critique on what to improve, and integrated that advice into their next work. In their minds, remaining solitary means you won't get that critique and will always lag behind someone who communicates with others to find better ideas and improve on their own.

So it really isn't as cut-and-dry as "screaming into the void is better", in terms of how I personally frame the distinction.

At an overarching level, my primary wish in life is to leave something in the world that serves as an artifact of what kind of person I was. Maybe this wish is at fault and I ought to get a better wish instead, or I'll be destroying my drive for creation at every turn. But in the present, this is how I honestly feel.

Put another way, if I were to write a thousand pages worth of novels over the course of my life, never releasing any of it, and just before I was about to kick the bucket I were to pour a bucket of gasoline on the entire pile of paper and burn it to ashes, I would probably feel the worst I'd ever felt about myself up to that point. I would have destroyed a significant product of my existence, and in a sense, destroyed a part of myself.

So maybe this way of thinking is flawed, and this clearly indicates that I am overly attached to my work, and perhaps to the idea of social acceptance as well. But this is why I cannot force myself to create if I know nobody is ever going to share a space with my work. Why would I be doing this if I was only going to keep all of it to myself?

And this doesn't even have much to do with the solitude that creating something necessitates - I am capable of weathering the darkest, loneliest storms alone, but only if I believe that there is someone at the end of the tunnel who would be able to see what came out of it all. Otherwise, the entire effort is nothing but toil with no sense of reward.

> At an overarching level, my primary wish in life is to leave something in the world that serves as an artifact of what kind of person I was. Maybe this wish is at fault and I ought to get a better wish instead, or I'll be destroying my drive for creation at every turn. But in the present, this is how I honestly feel.

Yes, I'm saying you would be better off dropping that, and instead just engaging in pure creation without any dependencies.

> Why would I be doing this if I was only going to keep all of it to myself?

That's my whole point. You shouldn't need a reason beyond "fun" or "just because" or even "keeping the hands/ears busy".

People are unreliable, having reasons that depend on other people are unreliable. Letting go of that and having only reasons that depend on yourself is reliable.

> Otherwise, the entire effort is nothing but toil with no sense of reward.

Once again, it is entirely possible to just do it without any sense of reward. I know because I've developed this mindset, while I used to crave reward.

Not sure how to interpret your comment. What made you come to that conclusion?

> I installed FL Studio and tried my hand on making some beats (https://youtube.com/channel/UClKt2vzomuegCDA45SU6FbA/videos). Before I spent too much time on it I released

From 1990 to 2007, I owned a (vinyl) record store (B&M then ecomm) that catered to DJs. I got to listen to quite a bit of "dance music". The early, mid, and even late 90s was jammed packed with creativity and innovative sounds.

Eventually things changed (as Ableton and similar became popular). More and more tracks were "half baked". As you noted, workable / good enough, but the extra time to create magic was not being invested. As digitl came along, it got worse because non-vinyl releases lowered the bar further. In a addition that noise, that glut made the good stuff hard to find.

I'm not a snob. Taking anything more accessible is generally a positive. That said, for "dance music" too easy cause problems. The higher bar of the 90s was a form of quality control. If you invested in gear, you generally did your best to get the most out of it. The culture was quality. Then ease and a lower investment bar put the emphasis on quantity.

Dance music seems awful simple but if it's being played live there's a very simple quality test which is, are people dancing to the music?

If you're just on your computer in your room, making beats and perhaps not even moving to them because to you it seems trivial and all about the marketing, you might be glossing over a fundamental part of the music. Seeing what moves an actual dance floor full of real people is important feedback.

True. But there is a difference between minimal (e.g., Detroit legend Robert Hood) and something that is half-baked (e.g., too many examples to list).

Dancing or not, the music is still music and it has to stand on its own, at least in the context of its peers.

When something is cheap and easy to produce and release, there is an overabundance. That glut clogs up the environment (read: the haystack buries the golden needles). Plastic seemed like a great idea at first but then we've (kinda) come to realize cheap and easy ain't such a good thing ;)

I hope you know this already, but just because making dance music became more accessible and it took more time to find the stuff you liked does not mean that it stopped existing. All of the 90s sounds that you've loved have evolved, been rediscovered, died out, evolved again. New genres have been made and then fallen out of fashion. By volume, there is probably more amazing dance music being made now than ever before _because_ it has become so much easier to make, not in spite of it. Not only that, it is probably easier than ever before to discover all of it. That obviously benefits someone just listening to the music, but also all those producers now have access to previously hard to find regional sounds and so the past decade in electronic music is defined largely (just like lots of other genres) by a massive cross-pollination, deconstruction, and incorporation of global dance sounds into new and insanely creative music.

No. I didn't know that. Thanks. (WTF? Smh). After 17 yrs of selling music - to say nothing of the loads I consumed prior and since - the evolution never crossed my mind.

But to take your insight to the next logic step...where is all this innovation and creativity? If the means raised raised the tide, where is the result? The trend, again following your observation, should be a continuous spiral up? Now should be The Pinacle of the craft. The most golden of all golden ages. It should be the late 80s to mid 90s endless stream of "WTF was that?" on steroids.

I still know DJs and working high profile producers and to the best of my knowledge none of them is seeing that.

What are we all missing? Where should we be looking? (That's not sarcasm, like the opening line. It's a serious inquiry. Tia)

I’m confused why you took such offense to that, I was just trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that perhaps you were exaggerating on your distaste for modern dance music. Maybe I misspoke.

If you’re aware of the evolution and still connected to the music scene, I am not sure how you could look at the state of electronic music today and not find a slew of artists and albums released in the past twenty years that at the very least pique your interest. Just in the Detroit milieu (since you mentioned Robert Hood in another comment), artists continue to innovate on the Detroit minimal sound (Omar S, Theo Parrish, Kyle Hall, among others), electro (DJ Stingray, The Other People Place). Admittedly some of these were also releasing music in the 90s…but they didn’t stop then.

Since 2000, we’ve seen the creation of dubstep and footwork (RIP DJ Rashad), and then seen the sounds created in those genres incorporated into the jungle/drum and bass sound among others to create a very fun and interesting array of artists (check out the Astrophonica or Hyperdub labels if you haven’t)

To give you an overview of the entirety of innovative and interesting music that has come out recently would be near impossible because there is _so_ much of it, I don’t know all of it, and I’m nowhere near a musicologist. But even not having sold music for any years of my life, the idea that there is not interesting electronic dance music being released today is laughable. Where should you be looking? Everywhere. Any sound you have ever been interested in probably has people releasing new and interesting music in it all the time. Popularity waxes and wanes but people don’t stop creating.

Everywhere? But that violates my point. The lowering of the bar has lowered quality and thus increased noise. The signal to noise ratio sucks. I would hope you know this already ;)

Maybe go back and reread my comment? Keep in mind it's based on 17 yrs as a shoppe owner, in addition to the years prior and since as a dedicated music aficionado. It's not a perspective you'll get often, as it's not a life many have lived ;)

> you just need a laptop and DAW to make tracks

You just need pen and paper to unify gravity and quantum mechanics.

You just need a laptop to write the next TikTok.

> less about making catchy beats and more about the marketing

That's a common complaint from unsuccessful artists. Michael Jackson spent a ton of money on marketing his last album and it was a total flop.

In a market oversaturated with good talent, marketing has to be the differentiator.

I don't think what you said is all that different from people who want to be a successful writer but don't really want to write.

FWIW, the notion that Ableton is just for dance music is very far from the truth. Sometimes they don't help themselves with their marketing, but the software suits all kinds of music making from dance to classical to ..whatever.

Also FWIW, it's without doubt in my mind the best DAW by a long stretch. For me there are many reasons for this but the killer one is that the time and effort from idea to laid track is miniscule.

When you're dealing with initial ideas, they're extremely fragile. I've had so many of these slip into the abyss in the face of crap software. Ableton - once you've learnt the basics - has you getting stuff down within seconds of booting. That's immensely valuable IMO.

The quality of the scale limiting is beyond any DAW I've used. That's great for me as someone who can't seem to memorize scales. I've heard FL Studio has a good scale limiting feature, but I can't figure it out. Ableton's is 1-3 clicks and, to me, intuitive. I wish they would steal Reaper's ability to load scales from files. Live comes with a lot, but sometimes I want to experiment.

Bitwig doesn't have it at all and they broke the paint scale->nudge to -1 workaround (which still works in Live) the last time I tried the demo.

That's really cool that Live has it built in to the piano roll now. I've been using Bitwig with the plugin Scaler 2 for this purpose.

By scale limiting you mean showing you the scales? It's a setting in the piano roll which highlights the notes in the scale you select. Alternatively showing you which scale you've placed notes in if you've made something yourself.

I mean scale limiting as in restricting to a scale. The highlighting was all I could find in FL Studio. Reaper has it in the form of scale snapping. Ableton starts with highlighting, but can fold a clip down to only show notes in the scale. Bitwig doesn't have it at all and, last I checked, broke the only workaround.

The contempt shown for people who can't remember scales on DAW forums suggests most developers don't support this either out of fear of their vocal users or because they agree. Even highlighting brings the knives out.

Ok I see what you mean. I haven't really frequented any DAW communities though. The hostility to people not already good sounds like a shame. I certainly don't know scales by heart like that either. So even highlighting helps.

A good hardware controller makes it even better. They make the Push, which is great if you have that kind of money, but I bought a Novation Launchpad Pro for half the price and it transformed how I use Live.

> Also FWIW, it's without doubt in my mind the best DAW by a long stretch

You did try to add some caveats to this, but I think it's really, really important to stress that there is no "best DAW". Workflows for audio production vary dramatically, and while Live is a very, very cool program, there are plenty of workflows for which it be inappropriate at worst, and not the best choice at best.

Fortunately, these days there's a DAW for everyone, and it sounds as if you've found yours.

I'll take that!

I feel like this crowd would be more interested in Pure Data: https://puredata.info/

It's an open source visual programming language for music (with some plug ins for visualizations, too). Years ago, I had fun with it, taking Rock Band guitars and turning them into synths, or "scratching" wav files with a DJ Hero controller.

It is an interesting language, but it is very low-level and it lacks many functions that you have to implement from scratch. For example, as I remember, there is no filter with custom response curve. Or there is a low-pass filter but you cannot choose its type, rolloff slope or modulate it with an oscillator. There is no spectrum viewer.

So you will have to reimplement functions that are built-in into modern DAWs. And it is not an easy task, for example, to implement filters you'll have to deal with equations with complex numbers.

I’ll also plug VCV Rack[1], an open source emulator for modular synthesizers. It takes the cost of exploring modular synthesis down from “prohibitive” (thousands of dollars easily) to “zero”. Really cool project that’s come a long way in the last few years.

[1] https://vcvrack.com/

The most fun I remember having with this kind of tools was with Audiomulch. Dunno if it’s still alive. Almost zero time-to-fun, no need for tedious pre-setup before your patch is playable.

All you need to make music is an iPhone and some ideas. I make music like this on my phone after the kids has gone to bed. I simply use Garageband and a couple of plugins. Sometimes I connect to a physical keyboard.

https://youtu.be/iS-gRUzPrKI

Agreed! Sometimes being restrained in what is possible opens up a myriad of ways to get creative.

Start with very very basic equipment/samples etc. and very rarely add to your setup.

It's crazy how much you can achieve with just a drum tracker, EQ, compressor and a dozen samples.

Ableton seems to have the in-the-know buzz though. Just looked at the UI for Ableton for the first time today; know how it's preferred by some over Garage Band?

There are quite some videos out there from famous producers showing their craft, and many use Ableton (Deadmau5, Timbaland) or Logic Pro (Armin van Buuren). It helps develop the buzz.

They're not competing with each-other... Ableton's a pro tool. Garageband for iOS is a fun app aimed at beginners, which allows one to experiment, record, have fun and maybe even produce some tracks. It's surprisingly capable, although it's focused on loops and presets.

Ableton is really two softwares in one, for composing and for performing

You can think of GarageBand as a simplified version of Logic which is used by a lot of professional producers, so GarageBand is maybe not as amateur as it might seem. More of a simplified entry point into music production to get people eventually into Logic when they get more advanced. Ableton includes a lot of more professional features, but if you want a more serious comparison I might compare Ableton to Logic where you can basically accomplish the same things in each one with different workflows etc.

Ableton has a radically different interface from previous DAWs

If you’re into this sort of thing — a few years back, a little-known artist named Grimes posted a really great tutorial on using Ableton to make music.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150831081620/http://actuallygr...

You can sometimes get a free Live Lite license from apps or on Splice. You can get one cheap with a controller, which I recommend having anyway. It's a lot easier to demo sounds you make/find while working on music with pads or keys.

Yeah, I remember that tutorial. For those who do not know: she's married to Elon Musk now.

Edit: Apparently broken up by now.

They broke up recently.

Previously:

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14299628

2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965386

Also by Ableton folk: https://learningsynths.ableton.com/

Ableton was one of my Lockdown amusements last year. A few weeks playing around with it resulted in this https://youtu.be/I3XrZOw8ZJA

really awesome sounding!

yesterday i’ve had some fun replicating Nightcall by Ravinsky, really recommend that if you’re looking for something (easy) to reproduce next, it also helps, that originals stems are made available by author

i’d also suggest using side-chain compression, which basically gives the synths the ducking effect (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fOlOAqgBNM0)

This is very inspiring. Sounds so great! Would love to see a video about your process, including the failures and dead ends that you must have also hit in these weeks.

Guess this is still written in Elm btw https://mobile.twitter.com/abletondev/status/861580662620508...

Question: with pre-made loops it seems fairly easy to make something that sounds decent. Is it okay if it’s really that easy? Could you put a few of these together and release a track? Should it be “hard”? I’m sure most producers have fiendishly complex arrangements. But do some producers basically paint by numbers?

Not sure what "paint by numbers" means in this instance, but making beats is ridiculously easy nowadays. Go listen to the top 10 singles right now. If you have a good ear you'll notice that most of the arrangements are very simple - indeed something many home producers could put together in a couple of hours with just a laptop.

But that's just what the genre requires.

Here's a taste of how (good) producers can take a given sample and create something completely unique...

https://youtu.be/7JUNnmehy8k

Today a lot of the hard work is done for you. Many people who produce hip hop or electronic music take advatage of pre made loops and beats, so yes people do actually publish tracks based off of pre made sounds and thats ok. The tricky part then comes into mixing it all together and getting it to sound the way you like it or just different from others. Sometimes simplicity just sounds good. For me mixing and mastering is the hard part, but even that is becoming automated with software like iZotope.

Music has almost become like successful No-code, where you can just click everything in without even touching the keyboard. However you need a good understanding of what you want and how its done based on music knowledge to get something complex done. Also you might find transitions a little challenging.

Tastes have changed and the bar seems to be set lower, but still the sound has to be interesting or the appeal will be limited.

I believe that whatever enables you to make music that YOU like to hear is the important part. Forget the audience and make something that makes you feel, evokes your emotions, or just helps you relax. This is your advantage to be able to create something that is tailored to you.

With that said, sometimes its better to put a project aside or listen to it in your car and see how you feel about it then, your opinion may change.

Hope this made sense.

If you're using well known loops, people will notice. I hear GarageBand's old loops sometimes to this day! Man, I really have to get around to extracting the ones from 1.0...

If an artist uses premade samples (by "samples" here I'm talking about loops, not normal sampling) and do nothing to transform it, it's generally really easy to hear.

One, because it's usually quite boring. Two, usually because we've heard the samples a hundred times before and know roughly where they came from, or at least where they've been used before.

That being said, most large artists do percussion and whatnot from scratch, perhaps re-using individual sounds but almost always coming up with their own arrangements.

A notable artist (group) that used sampling almost exclusively is Prodigy. They're famous for coming up with unique ways to arrange old breakbeat samples and whatnot. I would be surprised if anyone had any issue with it.

On the history of breakbeats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJf9Jptq7VY

It's unfortunate the guy who made the drum pattern so much modern music is built on apparently died broke and unhomed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_C._Coleman

Make the best songs you can make with the skill level you have now. Too easy or too hard is irrelevant really. Is the song good? And maybe more importantly, are you having fun? When you ask a musician about what is the best song they ever wrote, it is fairly common for them to say that their best song was the easiest to write.

A small anecdote: Back when I was still a little kid I had an awful music teacher in school. He would throw all the theory on the whiteboard but never explained how it actually relates to the music itself. I would've loved to know so I asked how this strange mathematical stuff of 4/4ths makes music and he told me to learn it or I'd fail but nothing actually relating to my question. So I always had a bit of antipathy towards the subject and never looked it up or even asked somebody afterwards, even to just satisfy my younger self's curiosity because the whole subject's been tainted.

If those classes ever even mildly resembled even how well this little interactive tutorial presents and explain thing I probably would've joined the school chorus or learned to play instrument in an extra-curricular fashion. Which I regret never doing.

Eventually when I got my hands on a copy of Reason at age 11 or 12 (can't remember) and started messing around with it, I got to a point where I kind of understood the concepts -- the whole process was kind of similar to how this tutorial is put together, it just took way longer to figure out. :)

Sometimes teachers have a negative net value huh?

Brings up the point that if the education system can't properly teach a subject, maybe we're all better better off with it just not teaching the subject.

What you needed was something more like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygn7ORgPbEE

(some snippets of composer/conductor/pianist Leonard Berstein explaining some musical concepts to young people using examples from pop/rock music).

The quality of music discussion on HN is incredible to me and some of the best I have encountered. Is there a frustrated muso in all engineers?

I’v commented on this before, I wish Ableton would phrase this differently.

This is the basics of a certain very narrow subset of music making.

I'm sure the target audience knows it's not the only kind of music.

This is a nitpick.

For clarity: the company/vendor is Ableton, their flagship product is Live. Ableton Live is its full name. Ableton Live. Compare Apple Logic Pro, Steinberg Cubase, Image Line FL Studio, and so on.

Respectfully, please try not to refer to the product as Ableton, e.g. "I made […] in Ableton". It was done in Ableton Live, or just Live in a pinch.

(This used to really wind me up back in the old days, but I've calmed down about it. I can't begin to imagine how the Ableton marketing/branding teams feel about the mismatch. Maybe it's just me, this isn't a hill to die on.)

Yeah well, that's what they get for choosing a bad name. They can wear that one. (I love the product and use it every day, but come on, "Live"??? no wonder everyone calls it "Ableton")

>but come on, "Live"??? no wonder everyone calls it "Ableton"

I did say it was a nitpick. Besides, before it was a DAW it was aimed squarely at live performance, hence the name.

But... why? Why is important that people use the technically correct name rather than the more convenient one that's in common use already?

I have fond memories playing with Garageband on the first iPad

now, imagine what could have happened if more operating systems came with a DAW pre-installed

i’d like to believe it would spawn generations of new artists

I’ve been working on an IDE for music composition https://ngrid.io. Launching soon.

Interesting project, got any screenshots so far?

I’m polishing up the UI as well as the analysis algorithm. I’ll be done by the end of the year.

I haven't been tinkering with audio/ browser for a while. I'm surprised latency got down this much.

The lessons seems very well done. Personally I use Renoise Tracker to create music, but it's a little hard to explain to new-comers. So whenever a new comers asks me for a proper introduction, I'll have 'm look a these lessons.

I'm absolutely terrible at anything music related and can't hold a beat to save my life but I love the world behind songwriting and how music gets made. Best podcast I've heard is Switched on Pop https://switchedonpop.com/

Try Arcade, it's gorgeous and no prior music ability or knowledge required to make genuine music tracks. https://output.com/products/arcade

I wish there was something like the teenage engineering op-1 but aimed at children (100-200 dollar range). I really feel like my kids would love this stuff but I know nothing about them. I though maybe iPad apps but they lack the physical knob and button feedback that something like an op-1 has.

Get a midi controller for the iPad.

On iOS this is an affordable app - Korg Gadget[0] and you can get a controller[1] for it.

[0] https://www.korg.com/us/products/software/korg_gadget/

[1] https://www.korg.com/us/products/computergear/nanokey_studio...

This might be way more basic than you were imagining but I gave a couple Stylophones as christmas gifts to my younger cousins and they seem popular enough. It's an electronic instrument but it is also a tactile experience and you know how to play it in about 5 seconds.

The songs artist/song they've used to teach the music concepts are astounding. (A Tribe Called Quest - “Award Tour”, Grimes, Joy Division, etc.).

They must have really talented people working with them, it's Ableton afterall.

This style of music making reminds me of https://www.incredibox.com

I have no idea how they make so many loops that all sounds great together.

Not quite the same, but along the same lines in terms of showing what tracks are made of - https://www.incredibox.com

Does making music de-age the brain?

Why do you ask?

Playing (physical) drums reduces my stress/anxiety.

But I suspect creating music, like reading, writing have to be good for the aging brain.

I started with Ableton about 12 years ago with zero musical training and consistently am having fun with it mostly learning by doing. I think just playing around, seeing what sounds good can get you incredibly far. Sometimes tutorials how to do something specific help; but I have found that there is always a million ways to achieve what sounds good to you. Very similar to code.

Tl;dr: Experiment with Ableton, you can have a lot of fun just f**ing around.

No sound on safari, anyone else?

works fine on my Safari (macbook).

No sound on safari/iphone.

Is your phone muted? I assume this is using the Web Audio API, which doesn’t sound on iOS if the iDevice is muted (requires a hack of playing silent HTML5 Audio in the background).

suprisingly thorough, thanks for the initiative :)

Pretty cool. If you like Ableton but would prefer to use a more obscure underdog for some reason, there's Bitwig.

which is also by far the best DAW that runs natively on Linux (warning: it costs money, though well worth it)

Bitwig is amazing and awesome, but this still applies:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060000

Obscure, and yet technically superior in all ways...

Bitwig == Ableton++, after Ableton management vetoed engineering's desire to do a major and much needed architectural rewrite. As I understand it, they didn't see how tearing down all the legacy code and building something more stable and modular would help them sell more licenses the next year. Hence, we have Bitwig.

I like it as one of the rare examples of engineers wanting to fix problems and create something great winning out over the desire for predictable annual returns.

Bitwig was founded in 2009 (from Wikipedia). Seems like it’s worked out fine for both Bitwig and Ableton.

Sorry, I don't understand your comment, I mean, I don't get the point? :)

I guess it was founded in 2009? (who am I to argue with wikipedia!), but wasn't "real" until 2013 or 2014. I know this because I was there, working our booth at NAMM, and chatting with the Bitwig devs about the architecture. :)

And yeah, it's worked out fine for Bitwig and Ableton. Though I'm still not that impressed with any Ableton release after 7.

Also Ardour (which is GPL'ed and runs natively on Linux as well as Windows and Mac) is currently growing Ableton-like features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiwUN7hz6eU

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