Introduction to Electronic Music

As you might guess, this is one of my favorite things to talk about. In the lecture below, I've condensed my normal lecture on this down a little bit, but you still get all the main points. If you are going to be making electronic music, you should know your roots.

Summary and recap of video 2.

Electronic music production as come a long way since Max Matthews. Like I said in Lesson 1, the fundamental principals are the same. But we don't need a computer the size of a building any more. In fact, by todays standards, you don't need a particularly fast computer. You need something speedy, but not super top of the line.

What kinds of hardware and software do we need in order to make some music? In this lesson we explore the options from several perspectives - including price.

Summary and recap of video 3.

You can kind of think about all the work we do as producers being the crafting of 2 kinds of material: Audio and MIDI. That's probably a big over-simplification, but it holds true on a general level. In our first 2 lessons we talked about working with audio, and in these next 2 lessons, we will talk about working with MIDI.

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) - how to use it, how not to use it, and how to incorporate it into your music.

Summary and recap of video 4.

In this lessons we are going to look at building some music using the piano roll editor in Ableton. If you are not an Ableton Live user, don't worry. Everything I'm going to talk about in this lesson is pretty universal on the different DAWs. So you should be able to apply it in whatever you are using.

Summary and recap of video 5.

In this video: Working with loops. We talk about file types, file formats, and other general production tips.

Summary and recap of video 6.

In this lesson: Reason (another app), ReWire (a way for apps to talk to each other), Flattening (a way to simplify your session) and Exporting (a way to finish your tracks).

Using Reason, Rewire, and Exporting to complete and polish your tracks.

Summary and main points of video 7.

Synthesis, generating our own sounds in a synthesizer from scratch, is a very important aspect of Electronic Music. It's fairly tricky to learn and can be daunting. In this lesson, I try to simplify synthesis into it's four most important aspects.

The basics of audio synthesis, how to use a synthesizer, and how to program your own sounds.

Recap and Review of Video 8.

Hurray - you made it to the end of Introduction to Electronic Music - Online!

In this video, we will take a preset in the Subtractor in Reason and pick it apart. We will walk through what makes it tick, and how slight adjustments can have big effects.

In this video, we will take a preset in the Analog Synthesizer in Ableton Live and pick it apart. We will walk through what makes it tick, and how slight adjustments can have big effects.

I've been asked to talk a little about Audacity - a free program useful for audio editing. Here is a short overview of it. Its a great program!

There is so much more to learn!

It looks like the handout has gone missing from earlier lectures. Here it is again in case it doesn't show up above anywhere.