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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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")
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...)
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)
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).
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).
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.
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.
> "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):
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.
(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!
151 comments
[ 880 ms ] story [ 4978 ms ] thread2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14299628
2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965386
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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)
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.
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 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29060000
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/iS-gRUzPrKI
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.
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. :)
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.
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).
But I suspect creating music, like reading, writing have to be good for the aging brain.
Tl;dr: Experiment with Ableton, you can have a lot of fun just f**ing around.
This is the basics of a certain very narrow subset of music making.
But that's just what the genre requires.
https://youtu.be/7JUNnmehy8k
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150831081620/http://actuallygr...
Edit: Apparently broken up by now.
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
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.
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.
[1] https://vcvrack.com/
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.)
I did say it was a nitpick. Besides, before it was a DAW it was aimed squarely at live performance, hence the name.
- 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...)
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).
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.
Of course, some people don't see things that way:
https://discourse.ardour.org/t/is-open-source-a-diversion-fr...
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.)