This is an addendum to my talk “Expanding the Composer’s Toolkit: Towards Pedagogical Frameworks for Genre and Sound Design”. It answers some of the questions I’ve gotten related to the talk and provides links to additional resources.
What are some practical exercises I can give to my student who’s interested in electronic music?
Critical Listening and Analysis
This helps students develop a strong “sound intuition”, understanding what makes up the sounds that they enjoy and how to incorporate those sounds into their own work.
- Ask the student to select a 10-20 second clip of music that resonates with them on a sound design level.
- Ask them to listen to the clip repeatedly, writing down every sound that they can recognize, and noting any that they don’t recognize.
- Ask them to reflect on these questions as basis for a discussion:
- How do each of these sounds contribute to the music gesture being expressed?
- How does each sound change or evolve over the course of the clip?
- Which sounds complement each other? Which ones contrast?
Once students are comfortable with that exercise, you can raise the difficulty:
- Ask the student to analyze the clip on a technical level using a spectrum analyzer and stereo visualizer while listening. Try to answer these questions:
- Where is each sound positioned in the stereo space? Is its position static or changing?
- Where in the frequency spectrum is each sound located? Do they take up a lot of space, or are they confined to a narrow range? Sometimes using an EQ to isolate parts of the frequency spectrum is helpful here.
Then the highest difficulty level of this exercise is:
- “Transcribe” the sound design of the clip, either by trying to recreate it as accurately as possible, or by creating an original piece that draws very heavily from the sound design of the clip.
This approach really helps with the “scatteredness” problem that afflicts sound design pedagogy. Common assignments like “build 5 different bass synth patches” are useful, but relying on them exclusively can leave students feeling like they only know a bunch of disconnected pieces and have no intuition on how to put them together. By narrowing the scope to “focus on the entirety of the sound space, but only within this 10 second clip”, it’s much easier to build intuition about how the pieces fit together.
Another great advantage is that this exercise doesn’t require in-depth technical knowledge of electronics on the part of the professor. This music is just music, and we all know how hear and think about sound.
Ear Training with Syntorial
Syntorial is an excellent tool that teaches the foundations of synthesis with a strong focus on ear training.
Deconstructing Presets
For students that are already familiar with the basics of synthesis, deconstructing complex synth presets from preset packs can be a great way to further their knowledge.
What channels and resources do you recommend for learning music production?
If I had to recommend only one link, it would be EDMProd’s EDM Producer Roadmap. This article is an excellent overview of all the skills that go into EDM production, with a recommended order and links to many other resources.
Luckily, I don’t only have to recommend one link, so here are various other things that I like:
| Resource | Level | Description |
|---|---|---|
| EDM Tips | Beginner | Has a wealth of knowledge analyzing songs, giving topic lessons, and showing the start-to-finish process for making simple songs in a variety of genres. |
| EDMProd | Beginner | Good general resource for lessons. They also have a website with many great articles. |
| Mr. Bill | Beginner | Lessons a variety of topics. |
| You Suck at Producing | Beginner | Offers short, entertaining lessons on many fundamental production topics. He also runs a Discord server that has a great community. |
| FabFilter | Beginner | FabFilter is a plugin developer, but they also give very in-depth lessons on concepts like EQ and compression taught through their plugins. |
| Sol State | Intermediate | Compiles useful tips and tricks from producer live streams and interviews. |
| @sendaimike.mixing | Intermediate | Fast instagram tutorials that are remarkably well-explained and thorough for how fast they are. |
| sseb | Intermediate | Only has a few videos, but they are some of my favorite in-depth breakdowns of fundamental topics. |
| Oversampled | Intermediate | Has some great lessons and track recreation videos. I like the level of detail he brings to much of his content. |
| Dan Worrall | Intermediate | A lot of gear reviews with some general lessons. Dan has an absolute wealth of knowledge about digital audio that he sprinkles into all his videos. |
Where can students find presets and sample packs?
Start with Cymatics. He has excellent free resources.
How do you recognize misinformation and bad advice?
It kind of just balances out over time. The advice that’s more useful and correct tends to get amplified and the bad advice gets phased out. Learn from a variety of sources, and if something isn’t working for you, don’t be afraid to drop it.
Is there any common misinformation that students should be aware of?
Beware old-school analog mix engineer adages that have been incorrectly ported to the digital domain:
- “Gain staging” – Digital is linear all the way up to 0Dbfs, so gain staging is only needed when using non-linear plugins like saturators and hardware emulations.
- “Reverb units can only be used on sends” – Using reverb directly on individual tracks is key for many common EDM sounds. Computers are strong enough to run hundreds of individual reverb plugins these days.
- “Don’t mix with your eyes” – Mixing with your eyes is great. The advanced visualization tools that are available today are an excellent way to analyze complex sounds, particularly for new producers who are still developing their ears. Your senses lie to you all the time. There’s a reason professional colorists use scopes.
- Dan Worrall is particularly great about breaking down these kind of misconceptions.
Should students learn how to mix?
Mixing for music production is vaguely similar to engraving for composition. You need a basic understanding of the concepts and tools to get your ideas down. But it isn’t necessary to be an expert mixing engineer in order to make a beat.
I recommend against having beginner students focus specifically on mixing. I’ve found that developing an intuition and understanding for sound design first makes mixing vastly more intuitive later.
This is all very EDM-centric. What if my student is interested in hip-hop/pop/video game music?
There’s a ton of overlap. The concepts, techniques, and pedagogical approaches are philosophically the same. It’s just the specific aesthetics and some pieces of cultural knowledge that are different.
What gear is necessary?
Music production can be done with nothing except a laptop and a DAW. Even a modestly powered computer can run music production software. I’ve seen professional artists record instruments and vocals on their phone. And legend has it that Skrillex produced his iconic remix of Cinema using earbuds.
That said, there is some additional gear that is helpful to have. The following table breaks down some common gear, what it enables you to do, and my recommendations for a beginner.
| Item | Why it's useful | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Portable keyboard | Playing notes on a keyboard is way better than using a piano roll or using your computer's QWERTY keyboard. And a tiny keyboard is nice for producing on the go. | midiplus AKM320 |
| Mixing Headphones | Quality headphones allow you to hear more detail in the music you're producing. This becomes important when you get to the higher levels of mixing. | beyerdynamic DT 770 |
| Audio Interface | An interface allows you to record audio into your DAW. Although USB microphones exist, an interface will give you higher quality, streamlined monitoring, and lower latency. They're also handy for using electronic instruments in a live performance. | The smallest Focusrite Scarlett that suits your recording needs |
| Microphones | Microphones enable recording, and even cheap microphones sound great these days. Expensive microphones won't add very much until your recording skills are fairly advanced. Choosing the right category of microphone and knowing how to use it is much more important than buying expensive studio mics. | Pyle PDMIC78, Neewer NW-7 (advertised as drum mics, but works remarkably well on many other instruments), Sennheiser e609 |
How much do specific tools matter?
The number of tools available for music production is huge. But many tools are somewhat interchangeable.
EQ, compression, saturation, and reverb are the main workhorses of music production. General purpose versions of each of those tools are perfectly sufficient to get started. These often come built into the DAWs, known as “stock plugins”. There’s a whole video genre of professional producers showing what can be done using only stock plugins.
I encourage mastering one DAW and a small set of good tools before exploring all of the variations that exist. The mastery of one tool significantly outweighs a surface-level understanding of many.
However, some tools are deeply and uniquely intertwined with the sounds they create, and it’s hard to emulate those sounds in any other way:
- Soundtoys Decapitator: This saturator, widely used in film scores and EDM, has a distinctive gritty fingerprint.
- OTT: An extreme multiband compressor that has become synonymous with certain electronic music sounds.
- Soothe 2: A resonance suppression tool that manipulates audio spectra in adaptive, complex ways.
As students develop, they will learn to discern and seek the subtly distinct characters of specific tools and plugins.
How do you teach in a way that’s “DAW neutral”?
Instructors can navigate the varied tool environments of their students by adopting a DAW-neutral teaching approach. The essence of this lies in emphasizing the underlying principles of what a tool does, rather than tethering instruction to a specific tool or platform. For instance, when exploring compression, consider instruction with a general purpose compressor like FabFilter’s Pro-C or a stock compressor rather than a more distinctive compressor like the 1176. Students will be able to follow the content of the lesson and apply it to any compressors that they have and are comfortable with.
It’s entirely possible to instruct using one DAW (like Pro Tools) while students execute and learn using another (such as Ableton or Logic).