What applications can you suggestion for music production?
* Scorewriter program like Sibelius, Finale?
* or a digital audio workstation like FL Studio, Cubase, Pro Tools?
Maybe someone also knows some good blogs, tutorials for beginners.
* Scorewriter program like Sibelius, Finale?
* or a digital audio workstation like FL Studio, Cubase, Pro Tools?
Maybe someone also knows some good blogs, tutorials for beginners.
The unlimited potential of modern music software will cripple you, and the first step in this is the impossible choice of which software to use. It gets worse from there on out.
If you are already a musician then it makes sense to seek out the powerful tools which will allow you to implement your already fully-formed musical ideas. However, if you want to just create "electronic music," the way to do this is by trial and error, and extensive practice with one tool, which tool is not important.
Skrillex, Basic Channel etc did not come up with their distinctive sound palettes by imagining them in advance and then seeking out the "best" tools to implement them. They did it by turning all of the knobs on the 2 or 3 tools they had, plugging them all into each other backwards and upside down until a sound came out that they liked.
If you want to make "electronic music," that's how it's done. However hard you try and do it deliberately, you will eventually come back to letting the machine play its proper part.
The other universal truth is that when you discover how your favourite producer did something that sounds incredibly complex to you, it have been via an incredibly simple technique that they didn't really understand. "I just plugged the output back into the input, turned it up to 11 and that sound came out." They were able to discover this because they weren't worrying about tutorials and decisions, they were too busy turning it up to 11.
(Note that this is what guitar/piano/etc musicians have been doing for centuries, because they had no choice. How much great music do you think beethoven would have written if he'd had to choose from 10,000 pianos? Would the music that he did write be better or worse?)
EDIT: so, practical advice: try some tools. As soon as you find a small set of tools which you find intuitive, stop looking for more. Use the tools intensively until you have pretty much exhausted them, or got really bored. By then you should be pretty accomplished, so the search for new tools will no longer be painful and limiting, but fun and empowering.
If you're brave, choose a software package at random. Or go to your local pawn shop, buy the first piece of music gear that catches your eye, and force yourself to write 10 tracks with it and only it, no matter how pitiful it might be.
I am still searching for a tool that doesn't limit me. I went from experiments with Reaktor and FruityLoops 3 (~ 10 years ago) to MIDI and score editors with virtual instruments. But that was the wrong direction.
Things have apparently improved and there are now professional tools available for Windows. I already played around with a virtual Swarmatron and reproduced sounds like in Social Network and the iconic THX sound. And I will simply try some tools and choose the one with the best interface :)
In terms of tutorials, honestly, YouTube was enough for the basics, and from that I just started trying to copy other songs. Hope that helps at all!
I used other more advanced MIDI (score) tools with virtual instruments working. But this was a roadblock as you can only compose boring last century style music there.
I did some research today, and I will try out FL Studio, Pro Tools, Cubase and Reaper. Hopefully there is one that has an intuitive interface.