Producing electronic music

Talismanis

Senior Member
Does anybody here work at producing their own music at all?
I've messed around in Cubase for years (never finished anything good) and I like messing around making chilled out drum n bass and slowed down breakbeats and stuff. Kinda like LTJ Bukem, Bonobo, DJ Shadow, Massive Attack kinda stuff.

I consider this pretty separate from my drumming, although I'd love to one day get to the point where I can compose something good and record some drums to it.

Anyone here got a soundcloud or anything? :)
 
http://soundcloud.com/nerflad

I don't claim to know what I'm doing...

I have a microkorg and a ton of vsti's. My recording rig is also my gaming rig, so I've got ample power to run tons of plugins at the same time. I use Reaper.
 
I use mainly FL Studio 10 (Fruity Loops was it's former name) when doing my stuff. I have a lot of VSTs like Sylenth, Minimoog from Arturia, Sytrus etc

It's been ages since my last song which I thought was my best so far, so hopefully I'll get something going soon again.
 
Hi Souljacker - do you need a keyboard with FL Studio or can you create music by clicking notes?

Hi there,

You don't have to have a keyboard no. Midi keyboards are the type of keyboards used with these programs, you hit a note or chords and it transfers that note data to the program and tells the software synths in the program what to play.

But you don't need to have one, you can draw the notes with a mouse.

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I have a small 25 key keyboard but I'm no piano player, it's just for hands on use, maybe coming up with an idea and drawing it in after.

Hope that helps.
 
Oh, not as in electronica... in which case producing that is easy. 1) Choose length of song. 2) Create a few tracks with different random sounds 3) Randomly mash keys while recording for set time, varying your mashing speed and number of keys for 'dynamics' 4) Hit quantize. Congratulations, you are now probably a hit DJ.

Might I add that Sega, Nintendo, XBox, Playstation and any other gaming consoles are GREAT for increasing your electronica skill. MASHMASHMASHMASHMASHMASH. Especially if you have some sort of Olympics game on them.... Or Mario Party.
 
Thanks Soul, that helps. Can you draw in the notes the same way with drums? Sorry, I won't do 20 questions, just this one :)

No problem. Yeah, you can do the same with drums, you click a button and it changes the piano keys to a list of the different drums and cymbals (that's if you have an entire kit loaded if I remember rightly)

But it's easier for drums just to use the step sequencer which is split into sixteenths here.

Sequencer.png


You can add different percussion instruments to those basic four examples too obviously.

It's an easy way to do the drums, especially for electronic music, although you can still go back into the piano roll if you want to be more precise and add dynamics and other extras like flams etc.

And ask away if you have any more questions, I'll do my best.
 
Thanks, that was helpful. A while ago I was thinking of getting FL Studio but I didn't know where to start with the trial version. Lining up acoustic tracks when I'm mashmashmashing by cutting and pasting wave forms is tricky and the sound quality is pretty ordinary.

Since you're being good natured ... :) ... can you integrate FL Studio with software samplers? Do you know if there are tools better suited to samplers than FLS?
 
Thanks, that was helpful. A while ago I was thinking of getting FL Studio but I didn't know where to start with the trial version. Lining up acoustic tracks when I'm mashmashmashing by cutting and pasting wave forms is tricky and the sound quality is pretty ordinary.

Since you're being good natured ... :) ... can you integrate FL Studio with software samplers? Do you know if there are tools better suited to samplers than FLS?

Yeah you can, any vst will work in it so the likes of Kontakt can be opened or any other 3rd party sampler. The sampler included in FLS is Directwave but I've never used it. Its much of a muchness really, a sampler plugin is the same in Cubase, Ableton, Reaper etc, just different interface. I know a lot of people like the time warping file sampling in Ableton.
 
I got involved a few months ago when I purchased an SPD-X sampler to replace my burned out keyboardist.

I record short segments (via garage band cause it was easy to learn) from a keyboard and place them into the sampler to be triggered during live play with my 3 piece band. It's working out great and has helped me get more into writing music.
 
Yeah you can, any vst will work in it so the likes of Kontakt can be opened or any other 3rd party sampler. The sampler included in FLS is Directwave but I've never used it. Its much of a muchness really, a sampler plugin is the same in Cubase, Ableton, Reaper etc, just different interface. I know a lot of people like the time warping file sampling in Ableton.

So FLS has its own sampler as well? But not as good as Kontakt's? Boy do I have a lot to learn! Thanks heaps for trying :)
 
Oh, not as in electronica... in which case producing that is easy. 1) Choose length of song. 2) Create a few tracks with different random sounds 3) Randomly mash keys while recording for set time, varying your mashing speed and number of keys for 'dynamics' 4) Hit quantize. Congratulations, you are now probably a hit DJ.

Might I add that Sega, Nintendo, XBox, Playstation and any other gaming consoles are GREAT for increasing your electronica skill. MASHMASHMASHMASHMASHMASH. Especially if you have some sort of Olympics game on them.... Or Mario Party.

That is really really really wrong, haha.
Check out guys like Noisia, or Pendulum's old stuff, or Rockwell. Some of these drum n bass guys have absolutely top-of-the-world sound design going on.
 
So FLS has its own sampler as well? But not as good as Kontakt's? Boy do I have a lot to learn! Thanks heaps for trying :)

Yeah, it's actually meant to be a good sampler, I've seen a 9/10 review of it. I can't really compare as I've never used it properly. As for Kontakt, I've used the Kontakt player which is free. Kontakt seems to be the unofficial industry standard sampler though, a lot of sound designers will have Kontakt formats for their stuff.
 
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