but if this does get set up I'd be hesitant to try and piggyback on another channel;

Let me expand on this: If we try to piggyback on another channel, there will be people who come there from this forum who do not know that it is a channel for a different site (in this case, the EDM production subreddit). You'll have people asking questions and referring to things that people who are normally in the channel won't understand, because they're not on this forum. This'll lead to a lot of confusion, and as a resource for producers of all skill levels to connect I don't think that's a good idea. Making our own channel also allows us to establish our own identity, be moderated by our own community, and gives people a central place to jump between the forum and the chat.

As far as "if no one will stay", I gotta reference that classic Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come.

Well remember the point isn't to reduce the posting on the forum, but to facilitate it. It's why I'd rather have a separate chat room than something embedded in the site. Besides, embedding the chat means you can't open any forum link without disconnecting or opening a new tab (and if you're doing that you may as well use a mobile chat client that takes up the whole page). That would separate the forum.

It could also help eliminate the clamoring for a general discussion subforum - people could go onto the chat room (where it won't take up nearly as much server space, and is easier to dump the archives of) for their smalltalk, and it would give people a place to go and ask questions before making the tenth "How do I make the Madeon Bass?" thread.

Like Nala said, with proper moderation and rules that prohibit self-promotion and spamming and all that good stuff, it can be a really valuable asset to a forum-based community.

You can always scale it down, or spread it across multiple days, or work it into your weekends! The idea is to establish a routine that allows you to divide up your workload while laser-focusing the progress you make in those areas.

In the spare time I have between semesters at university, I find myself procrastinating way too much. I fall into the black hole of reddit or youtube, and spend almost no time making music until it's about 2 hours before I go to bed and I feel incredibly rushed. I can motivate myself to do random things here and there, but it's difficult to operate without a consistent structure. So after writing down a whole bunch of stuff based on various tutorials and pieces of advice I've seen posted on here and elsewhere online, I've come up with a daily schedule to make sure I am always doing something to instigate progress and development within myself as an artist, while helping speed up my workflow and instill a deeper sense of responsibility and time management. Each day I set a 90 minute timer, focus ONLY on the task at hand, then take a 30 minute break where I force myself to get outside and walk around the block once or twice just to clear my head and keep my body from getting too sedentary. I have four separate days with four separate goals, and I cycle through them repeatedly:


Day One: Learning Day

• 90 Minutes of Manual Training - Start going through all your manuals one by one. Experiment with the things the manual talks about. Write notes about what seems interesting, or questions you have about something. If you learn a neat trick, make a preset that uses that technique just so you can build it into your memory. Start an R&D folder with all the projects for every manual you read, just so that you can refer back to it when you need to. When you finish the manual, see what questions you can answer on your own. Anything you can't, google! Either way, as soon as it's done just start another manual.
• 90 Minutes of Synth/Effect Training - Pick an instrument or effect (ideally one you've read the manual for) and load a session of your DAW where you open two copies: one for presets, one for experimentation. Try to recreate every single preset. If it's an effect, put a few different loops through to see how each preset affects them. Write notes/questions to add on to the ones you got from the manual, and see if you can answer questions from the manual from random experimenting. Don't forget to make R&D projects for these too. After all the presets, make sure you have clicked every button or moved every knob at least once to see what effect it has. Then make a new project: If it's a synth, make a song using ONLY that synth. If it's an effect, make a song that uses the effect in three different ways.
• 90 Minutes of Theory Practice - I recommend going to musictheory.net. If you don't know theory, go through each of the lessons while your DAW is open and try to connect everything you read with physical action in your DAW to hear what everything sounds like. Take a lotta notes, and when you feel comfortable switch to this routine: 15 minutes of note identification, 30 minutes of key signature identification (15 major, 15 minor), 15 minutes of interval identification, 15 minutes of chord identification, 15 minutes of practicing scales (with an instrument ideally, but otherwise just practice drawing out scales in the piano roll so you can get used to their look and sound).
• 90 Minutes of Ear Training - Skip this until you're starting to feel confident in your theory, but it's a CRITICAL skill for producers: 20 minutes of note ear training (a.k.a given the reference of C, identify the played note), 20 minutes of interval ear training, 20 minutes of scale ear training, 20 minutes of chord ear training, and 10 minutes of trying to identify notes in popular music or songs you like.
• 90 minutes of Song Analysis - pick a track you like, open it in your DAW, and start putting markers in for the different sections of the arrangement. Start putting in blank clips (in Ableton I just make a bunch of color coded empty MIDI clips) and label them the various elements of the song. Start with big clips, then start refining them down, separating them into their various layers, and work your way back until you have an arrangement that to the untrained eye would look like a finished track. Then put it in a "To Be Remade" folder and start swapping this every so often with remake practice, where you start replacing all those MIDI clips with the actual synths and samples (or as close as you can approximate).

Day Two: Sound Design Day
These will all go in their own Sound Design projects so that you can go back and look at the source for each thing if you need to in the future.

• 90 Minutes of Drum Loops - Set a goal for the genre and number of loops made for each genre, as well as trying to recreate loops you already have with your own samples or recreating loops from songs that you like.
• 90 Minutes of Lead Sounds - Just make a bunch of presets. Try to make at least one lead that would fit in each genre you made a drum loop for.
• 90 Minutes of Bass Sounds - See Above
• 90 Minutes of Pads and Atmospheres - See Above
• 90 Minutes of FX, Fills, and Transitions - This is the time to just mess around, do a lot of really weird stuff that will be good one shot SFX like blips and bloops, various drum and synth fills, and big risers/falls and other transition effects.

Day Three: Composition Day

• 90 Minutes Writing Song Ideas - Get a notebook or notepad app. Pick a genre, a BPM (or general tempo guideline), and at least 10 emotive and/or descriptive words. e.g. "Dubstep, 145 BPM. Razor-edged, Aggressive, Heavy Metal, Killer Scorpion, Angry, Sudden Drops, Fast Drums, TalkBox, Alone in the desert, Murder." Things that you can keep in mind when sitting down to produce. Then pick the element that will be the focus: The drums, the chords, the melody, the bass, or the vocals (if the track has any). If you're just starting out, pick one to three artists who you're gonna imitate or use as inspiration for the track. Write down the skeletal song arrangement. e.g. "16 bar intro, 4 bar break, 4 bar build, 32 bar drop, 16 bar break, 4 bar build, 32 bar drop, 16 bar outro." Write down some hooks or lyrics, or use your phone and record a few ideas for some of the musical elements. As soon as you run out of any information to help flesh out one of these points (or feel like it's ready to be made into a song), start working on a new idea. Get as many ideas as you can before you sit down at your DAW. Keep in mind remixes count for this!
• 90 Minutes Writing Chord Progressions - Can be informed by song ideas or just noodling around. Every time you have 4, 8 or 16 bars that feel good, label and save that MIDI file. "8barHappyFMaj" "4barMelancholyEbMin", etc.
• 90 Minutes Writing Basslines - See Above
• 90 Minutes Writing Melodies - See Above
• For these three, mostly make original ideas but at least once per cycle try to see if you can build a Chord, Bassline, or Melody off of one of the others you've already made, then pair them as a larger stack . "Chords_Bass_8barHappyFMaj" "Melody_Chords_16barMelancholyEbMin". If you can finish a stack of all three, label them and put them in a "Quickstart" folder." Make sure to use a piano VST or very simple waveforms like sawtooths or squares, so that you're focusing on the musicality and not the sound design.
• 90 Minutes Writing Sketches - Pick one of the song ideas you wrote at the start of the day and just get to work. Spend at least 90 minutes working on it, and when you feel brainfried for the day just save the project for tomorrow. This is not the time for any critical analysis. It's okay to stay in loop land, but if you can flesh out something larger go for it!
  

Day Four is more freeform - just sort of go at your own pace, but try to stick to the 90/30 intervals to ensure that you stick to the routine your brain is getting comfortable with and again, to make sure you GO OUTSIDE AND MOVE AROUND. I cannot stress how important your health is as a producer.

Day Four: Songwriting Day
If you don't have a song you're already working on or you weren't feeling the sketch you had going last night, pick one of the song ideas you haven't started or start fiddling through your MIDI files to find inspiration. If starting from a MIDI file, spend some time before starting to make music writing down a general song idea based on the MIDI file. Give yourself a direction to go in before you start working. Pick a section of your song that you want to start from, and try to create that as if it were completed. When you're done with that, go through and make your sample selection and sound design decisions. Use the song idea notepad to inform your decisions, and try to get them to all feel like a cohesive sound. You can layer now or when you're refining, whichever feels more natural to you.

Then, duplicate that section out to fill up your entire arrangement for however long you want your song to be. Mark out the sections of the arrangement based on your skeleton. Tweak them if need be, then start removing the sounds that would not show up in that section of the song. Sculpt your arrangement, and start renaming/consolidating clips for their various sections. Listen back, and decide what needs changing. Keep refining until your last 90 minute cycle. Even though your ears are exhausted, develop a rough mixdown of whatever you have and find a reference track that you can use for the next day.

If you're already working on a song, just focus on finishing the song. Use your first 90 minutes and your last 90 minutes to worry about the mixdown, and the rest of your time should be spent doing the arrangement. If you're getting too frustrated with any particular section, go to a different one for a while and see if you can find it. If you're really getting frustrated with the project, pick up another project you've been working on or start a new one. For this routine, you can only have a max of 4 WIPs at any one time. You cannot start a new one until you've finished at least one track in your queue. Only reference the song at the end of the day, to see if it has the same impact and quality. If you feel like it's ready, put it in a "Polish" folder and start replacing one Songwriting day a week with one Finalizing Day a week.

Day Four (Alternate): Finalizing Day
Pick three songs that you think sound similar in genre and/or style to yours that you think would make good reference tracks. See if your track stands up to theirs in terms of their mixdowns and loudness. Focus only on the final polish of your track (additional sounds for transitions, bouncing if necessary, cleaning up your FX, mastering for release if necessary, etc) - If you think it needs more work, put it back in your WIPs folder. Listen to your song in both stereo and mono on at LEAST 3 different speakers, 1 pair of headphones, and if you can 2-3 listening environments outside of your studio like your car or someone else's house.






I think for people who have trouble knowing where to start or how to go about their process, this could be a good foundation for your own methods of growth. Feel free to share your questions, comments, opinions, and other thoughts if you'd like!

I have the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and a pair of KRK VXT8s. I've kinda had it with the noise feedback issue KRK monitors have with the 2i2, so I'm on the market for a new interface. I've been looking at the UA Apollo Twin, but it's at the upper limits of my budget as a student. Does anyone have recommendations for audio interfaces that don't have the feedback problem that's either comparable in price to the 2i2 or within the $100-$400 range?

I think making a channel on the same server could work just for ease of use, but if this does get set up I'd be hesitant to try and piggyback on another channel; the idea would be to connect people from here in a faster way, and allow people on the IRC server to discover the site.

Give out enough free music that people don't feel like they need to steal the stuff you ask them to pay for.

I'm definitely gonna follow the progress of people doing it, though I'm gonna have to wait a bit - the semester starts in 3 weeks and I'd hate to have to mix the two. Gonna be the first thing I do when the semester ends, though. Good luck to everyone that starts it!