The best way to learn the techniques you wanna learn would be to listen to the songs you think of as the best trap songs you know of and dissect them. Write down how their song is arranged, what instruments are in which sections, what each instrument is doing - the rhythm, the melodic content if it changes pitch, what FX are going on in the background and when, how loud the different elements are.

Go look up the Ill Gates Methodology video on youtube (i've probably linked it in this forum a half dozen or so times), and follow his instructions on how to analyze songs. If you can follow the homework assignment he gives you in the middle/end of the video, you'll probably know more about trap than any youtube tutorial or forum post could tell you.

Here are some good tips to get you started in the right direction, though:

• You're on the right track with the tempo: 100 BPM and 200 BPM are identical, depending upon how you are writing the beat. A 1 bar 100 BPM loop where you alternate between the kick on the 1 & 3 and the snare on the 2 & 4 will sound indistinguishable from a 2 bar 200 BPM loop where you alternate between the kick on the 1 and the snare on the 3. You can leverage this to your advantage by writing a song in half-time at something like 150 BPM, then for the second drop you can "double time" your drop and give it that much more energy while never changing the tempo.
• If you have trouble thinking of an arrangement when you have a 4, 8, or 16 bar loop (or whatever), duplicate it out to be however long you think the song should be (3-4 minutes is a good range for trap but in no way is a hard line), and start putting down arrangement markers for the different sections. Then just delete any clips that should not be in those sections. So your intro might not have your drop lead or any sub bass, but it probably will contain some of the melodic content you've thought up and maybe some percussion. Your breakdown obviously isn't gonna have most or all of your percussion, so you can just remove it from there. As you clear away the unnecessary clips, even though you haven't changed anything a fully completed song is already beginning to form. Just start consolidating clips and making changes as necessary.
• You can either have a complicated sound or a complicated melody, not both. As you study the songs you like, you'll start to notice how the notes move - falling over and octave or rising over an octave, jumping between the tonic and the octave, or staying within 2 or 4 semitones. A simple melody is not a bad one, and if you can hum or sing the melody with your mouth you're on the right track.

Music answered the one question that has persisted in my life ever since I was old enough to actually contemplate it: "What do I want to do with the rest of my life?"

I don't care what I end up doing within the music industry, as long as I can make a living off of my work. That's what keeps me motivated - the commitment to myself that I will survive off my art, and the courage to radically change part of my life for something that has no guarantee of success no matter how scary or uncertain the outcome may be.

Who cares? Everything's a remix anyways. The idea of "original" creative content is a misnomer. What you make as a musician is directly influenced by what you heard as a music consumer, and you will make things that sound similar to things you like even without realizing it.

As long as you're not purposefully plagiarizing someone else's work as if it's all your own content, and you're not breaking the law and getting caught, whatever sounds come into your ears and out of your brain is your music. Someone can turn a 2 second loop from an old Super Nintendo game and make some crazy things with it.

When people say they're putting a low pass at 1 kHz, they're talking about the frequency where the band sits; the Q value and/or falloff slope of the filter determines the frequencies that get filtered out above that. Usually the filter will star to fall off a little before the cutoff point (unless you're pushing the resonance of that band) like this:



A steeper slope means the falloff is much faster and you lose much more information above/below, depending upon the type of filter.

Short answer: Formal education in music or audio engineering is necessary only if you think you need guided education. You will know more than you would without one, but it doesn't mean you'll be better than someone who doesn't have one. It's all based on you as an individual!


Long answer: The benefit to learning music production (i.e music theory & audio engineering) through a school like ADSR, Point Blank, ICON, or a more traditional art school or college is one of structure. Like Lydian said, all the information you'll actually need to be a successful music producer is available online - what brings you over the edge is how much work you put into becoming that successful music producer. There are risks to self-education, of course: There's a ton of misinformation (rarely intentional, of course), it's hard to know what to learn and when, it's very easy to get overwhelmed, and for most of it you are completely on your own. But there are plenty of people with no formal education in either music theory or sound design that learned enough to make a living off their tunes, so it's not impossible!

When you go to a school of any sort, you'll receive a degree planner that will show you exactly what you're going to learn and the possible orders in which you can learn them. You'll be given a syllabus with all the material you're going to learn in each class as you take them listing what that class is gonna go over and in what order, completely free of extra information that might confuse you. You'll have not only a teacher who is now being paid to pay attention to you and help you with what you're confused about between classes, but a bunch of peers all learning the same material along the same timeframe who you can feel comfortable asking questions to. If you attend a physical school, you get access to equipment and resources that you wouldn't have on your own (for example, places like ICON and Pyramind have labs where students can come in and use their studio equipment). Of course, all the formal education in the world means nothing if you can't put it to practical use, so it's not like going to one of these places is a guarantee of success.

There are three things you should consider before applying to any school offering a music production program or going to college for music/audio engineering:

• Is the school reputable? Does the school have accreditation and/or success stories? What kind of classes am I going to be taking? What kind of teachers do they have? What resources do I get for tuition? Does it look like they're trying to take me for a ride?
• How important is it for me to have the rigidly controlled learning experience in order to learn? Would I flourish better there, or would I work better learning at my own pace and studying things in the order I decide? Do I need a teacher, or should I just try to find a mentor?
• Can I afford the education the school is offering, or take out loans without putting myself in severe financial risk? Would I be better served saving my money and learning the material on my own? Do I want to pay money for what is essentially experience steroids, or do I want to spend that money on other things and rely on my own willpower to learn?

We already had a thread, dude.

Gonna bump this super old thread just so that we can try and have one "Inspirational Videos" thread. Can a mod sticky this thread, please?

And to provide content, check out this new video from Novation about finishing tracks.

A few things that should be pointed out for anyone looking at Serum that might not be immediately obvious:

• You can import LFO shapes as single cycle waveforms by holding Option/Alt and dragging them to the oscillator window. Great way to get basic waveforms a few seconds faster than digging for the Analog->Basic Shapes wavetable if you have a bunch of custom wavetables, and you can do neat little tricks like drawing a waveform and applying warp modes to it based on that waveform, etc.
• If you're not using the dropdown menu of serum often, you might have missed the Resample Osc A/B Warp and Resample to Osc A/B. Resample Osc X Warp takes one sweep of that oscillator's warp mode from 0% to 100% and creates a new wavetable out of it, and Resample to Osc X takes the entire patch you've been working on and creates a new wavetable out of it.
• Serum's "Hyper" FX mimics a sort of global unison for your sound, so if you're making super saws instead of having a high unison value on the individual oscillators you can utilize the Hyper FX as a means of splitting per-oscillator and per-patch FX: anything you want to affect the individual voices of your synth goes before the Hyper FX module, and everything you want to affect the entire patch goes after.