I don't really agree with EDM barriers being low. The amount of effort that it takes to produce EDM at a professional level is much higher than the other genres from my personal experience.

You have just as many people with bad ears writing EDM as you do writing pop, rock, and jazz. We just don't see much of the others here because this is primarily a dance music forum.

"Professional level" implies high barriers to entry. I thought the OP was about what's happening at the entry level. (EDIT: Also, "entry" implies entry level!)

EDM does have exceptionally low barriers to entry--lower than pop (which typically requires singing), or rock or jazz (which require owning and playing an instrument, the former at a relatively high level just to participate).

Wow a lot of responses.. I'll try to address most of them because I think it's super important that we're all on the same page here. Or at least closer... It seems that a lot of things were taken out of context.

Unlike Zau, I was not born with any type of perfect pitch...Someone like Zau who has perfect pitch would not be able to relate to beginners having shit ears in the first place because he was simply born with it.

Ok, first of all, I NEVER said I was born with perfect pitch, please don't put words in my mouth. I said I was born with strong relative pitch, or "good ears" as I put it, and as you pointed out, which is totally different. Please go back and read what I posted. I went on to say that 'through practice' I was able to turn that into perfect pitch.

If we're talking about a beginner level then you can teach a guitar player a power chord and a drummer a basic 4/4 rock beat with the bassist playing the root and they can make music that sounds decent. In pop you can teach someone to play 4 chords of a piano and sing over it and they will sound decent.

Haha have you ever actually tried doing this? Most beginners would not be able to play a basic 4/4 beat.. in drumming, you have to deal with coordination and there are a lot of really uncoordinated people out there. I can say this, because I'm a drummer by profession and I have taught lessons to complete beginners in the past. Some of them were really uncoordinated and took a very long time to just play simple 1/8th notes on the hi hat and different rhythms on the bass drum, without messing up. So really, it's not as easy as you're making it sound. "If we're talking about a beginner level then you can teach a guitar player a power chord". Really? I really don't think a complete beginner would be able to fret a power chord properly, especially if they have to 'bar' a whole fret and place their other fingers on the subsequent frets, that's hard to do for a beginner. I tried to teach a friend who is a beginner how to play a power chord and he couldn't do at the first, second, fifth or tenth try. Yes, I play guitar and bass as well.

...annoys the hell out of me.

Wait, what are you getting at exactly? You wrote out a detailed response of how your ears went from sucking to sky rocketing, all because you chose to ditch the tabs and learn/play by ear, so you're actually agreeing with me, what you went through is a testimonial of what I said! I started out playing the piano when I was 5. I played solely by ear and I'm really glad it happened that way... that I learned to play by ear before I even knew what a quarter note was and what an F major chord looked like on a staff. When I grew older, my mom had me take piano lessons because she thought it was 'only right' that I learned to read sheet music. I hated them so much at the time but as I got even older I learned to value them... I learned how to properly execute scales and stuff like that. I didn't continue the piano lessons because I wanted to really focus when I was in high school but I don't regret it either. Going to college for music ended up being a continuation of those piano lessons anyway.

If the original point was that some people should just give up, because they lack "musical ability" at all (represented as "hearing what they're doing"), then I strongly disagree.

Nope, that was not the original point at all. I said it in the original post and I repeated myself again a few posts back. The whole point I'm trying to make is the fact that ear training is as important as learning how to mix and all the other stuff we do in this production thing. When did I ever say that "people should just give up"? I never said that. That's just Lydian hearing what he wants to hear. I even mentioned in the original post that beginners should work on ear training if that's where they're lacking. I never told anyone to give up anything.

I'm arguing against promoting the idea that the music industry (which includes EDM) is in any way "fair". Zau brought up how "anyone with a computer can download a DAW and 'make a track'" and how they don't think it's fair.

Yeah, it's not. I think I mentioned too that I was over it (kinda) and that that topic should be it's own thread.

If you spend too much of your time worrying about how people who aren't as good as you (which is entirely subjective) are doing as well as/better than you, or in some way cheating the system/devaluing your craft, you'll get jaded and cynical and burn yourself out - leading to giant rants like this that probably make it harder for the person going through it to continue following their passions.

Again, this thread is about ear training and how little awareness of it there is, not about that other thing. Maybe I'll start another thread on it.

and there are genres/tracks that won't care too much about musicality at all. Fans don't care as much about that stuff, and we can't forget that while we spend so much time surrounded by other people who care just as much as we do. Most of them won't even notice.

Musicality is one thing. But just straight up clashing notes and everything else I mentioned is something else. As an experiment, I'd actually like to make a track that has all the elements I mentioned and you guys tell me whether you enjoyed listening to the track or not.

"All Buddhism makes a distinction between wisdom and knowledge. In his book What the Buddha Taught, the Buddhist scholar Walpola Rahula wrote,"According to Buddhism there are two sorts of understanding: What we generally call understanding is knowledge, an accumulated memory, an intellectual grasping of a subject according to certain given data. This is called 'knowing accordingly' (anubodhd). It is not very keep. Real deep understanding is called 'penetration' (pativedha), seeing a thing in its true nature, without name and label. This penetration is possible only when the mind is free from all impurities and is fully developed through meditation."

Really great quote there, thanks for sharing Marrow. Again, I love you.

But trying to make this into "If you're not making money off of music you can't understand what it's like to have people also making money off music that DIDN'T WORK AS HARD AS ME!!!!!" just comes off bad.

I didn't make this thread into anything. Other people who read it and interpreted it their way did. Again, the whole point I'm trying to make is the fact that ear training is as important as learning how to mix and all the other stuff we do in this production thing.

So you're ranting because this situation is 'unfair'. How is it harming you? Can you name a specific person who is cheating the system?

It has not harmed me directly, but I do have a close friend who lost his studio of 10 years because all of a sudden went the economy really hit in 2008 he couldn't keep up with the kids with the laptops that charged really low prices and cut everyones throats. I know at least three other people very close to me who went through the same thing. And since you don't make a living off of music, you would never understand what it's like for a guy like my friend who studied audio engineering, went through years of experience as an intern then as an employee at a big studio, then opened his own studio and made a nice living, all for it to be taken away because the kid with the laptop could do it for much less. I know what it's like too, because like my friend, music is my livelihood.

Zau.. I agree that ear training is important.

Great! Because that's the only point I was trying to make.

If you are reading this and happen to fall within the category of people I mentioned, please stop whatever you're doing, yes, even stop reading that music theory book you're reading.

Haha you took what I wrote why too literally. And what did I say after I wrote that sentence? I stressed that you should put ear training first, or the way that you should really be working on it, which is simultaneously with music theory. You see, the problem is that you tend to pick out certain sentences I post way out of context, without seeing the picture as a whole. You see and hear things the way you want to hear them, not how or what they really are. It's just like the way you repeatedly said that I claimed to have been born with perfect pitch, when clearly, I never said that.

I haven't taught drums. I have however taught guitar and piano.

So yeah, if you haven't taught drums, then you really shouldn't be talking about "how easy" it is as if you have taught them or have encountered a true beginner before. And I actually gave an example of how a beginner friend found it hard to play a power chord, through personal experience. But then again, I have friends who pick it up easily. Not everyone is the same, and you can't make generalizations like that. 

From my experience of once being a beginner... dance music production is just harder.

What if I told you that I have friends who picked up dance music production a lot faster than picking up the guitar? Because I do. That might be what you went through and everything, but that's not how everybody perceives it. Again, you keep on making generalizations like this one.

Now you're just putting words in my mouth.

Nope, I was quoting FarleyCZ who quoted you. So blame him then for putting words into your mouth.

What I have interpreted your thread as is a highly annoying way of saying "work on your ears".

Again, I did preface it by saying it was a rant. And if that's how you've interpreted it, so be it. You might get something out of it, or you won't. But I put it out there anyway. Because it's a forum. Actually, this has become quite a good discussion (in my opinion).. I learned some stuff along the way. It would be pretty weird if we all just agreed with each other all the time, right? Life and reality are not like that.

All of the "sad state of music" "drop music theory" "I don't check out beginners" "50 track feedback requirement" "downloading daws is unfair" is what makes reading your post make me want to pull my hair out.

Again, you're taking the stuff I said out of context.

Except the 50 track requirement. Make that 100. I still stand by that. Come on man, I don't know why you can't seem to grasp this idea, when it's been mentioned so many times before, by people much more successful than you and I. It's a proven method for progress. You HAVE to make a lot of tracks when you're starting out, and you will suck in the beginning. You will suck a lot over and over again, but with every track you finish, you start to suck less. Do I really need to post that Ira Glass video yet again, or the NGHTMRE one?

I am about to watch the NGTHMRE video and i will look into Ira Glass...

Continue to be real bro ham.

Yeah, just look up "Ira Glass on Creativity" or something like that on YouTube. It's actually been posted here before I think. I also came across a really good one that is similar, I linked it in this thread: https://theproducersforum.com/index.php?topic=1994.0 That one is really great too.

Oh, and for the record, I am not a 'bro'. I'm actually a lady. But you guys can keep calling me that though!

I apologize for the long reply. I didn't think I needed to spell this out earlier but apparently I made a false assumption. TLDR: EDM's barriers to entry couldn't be any lower.

If we're talking about a beginner level then you can teach a guitar player a power chord and a drummer a basic 4/4 rock beat with the bassist playing the root and they can make music that sounds decent. In pop you can teach someone to play 4 chords of a piano and sing over it and they will sound decent.

Teaching people instruments, even so they can play very simple music, is harder than you make it sound. (Also, they have to have the instruments!) Singing so it "sounds decent" is WAY harder than you make it sound.

You also left out the part about getting your instruments in tune with everyone else in your band.

Not only that but the instrumentations in rock or pop are often pretty established. You have  a bass, guitar, piano, vocalist, and drums.

In a DAW you can literally scroll through instruments with a single mouse-click, while looping the playback and instantly hearing how each new instrument sounds.

When you program music into a DAW, the DAW is basically a bandmate who plays any instrument you can think of, instantly on demand, and plays his part perfectly every time, without ever losing the beat or hitting a wrong note. And he can create sounds that are physically impossible for even the best human to play on an instrument. He takes direction with a very simple and intuitive visual interface. He never screws around, he never misses a rehearsal, he never argues with you or gets addicted to heroin. He doesn't even ask to get paid!

Compare this with what happens when you don't like the way one instrument sounds in a rock band. Do I need to list all the differences?

Any way you spin it, it's way easier in EDM.

Now in EDM you have square waves, saw waves, sine waves, triangle waves, plucks, strings, guitars, piano, bass, claps, reverse crashes, ambience, special FX, wobble basses, growl basses, and the list goes on...

As I said earlier, you can scroll through with a single click to see what you like. Many DAWs and plugins even have instruments with names like "EDM lead" and "EDM kick". And then of course there's tons of free tutorials online, not to mention blank template project files.

I can't speak much for jazz because it isn't my forte (Although I love the time signatures & harmony) but EDM takes a lot more work at a beginner level to not sound like garbage.

Have you heard what saxophone players with less than 100 hours of practice under their belts sound like? Even high school jazz bands are often grating, and most of those kids have been playing for 5 or 6 years.

After 5 or 6 years producing EDM, if your music doesn't at least sound easy on the ears then you just must not really understand music at all.

I also forgot to mention that DAW's, samples, and plugins need to be purchased the same way as instruments. I can buy Logic Pro X for the same price that I can a beginner guitar, or a bass. (Leaving piano's out of this cause those things are expensive af.)

Any 13 year-old knows how to download DAWs, samples, and plugins for free. And they do.

You also left out the fact that getting music to the point where you can share it with people (i.e. recorded) is harder if you play instruments. With EDM you don't have to buy any mics, mic stands, or cables, or find a suitable place to record. Your whole band or orchestra lives in your computer already.

So yeah, EDM's barriers to entry basically couldn't be any lower.

Good points nadav.  Not in the mood to finish this I'll just add in that you're absolutely right.. 

Thanks. To tie it back to the OP, ear training will become less common as EDM and other electronically-derived genres (e.g. rap) become more popular.

Ear training happens when you use your body to create pitched music in real-time, whether by singing or manipulating an instrument. It occurs because you have to adjust your voicebox or your fingers or your lips or whatever to get to the note you want and then to the next one, and so your brain learns where the notes are and how they should sound. Wrong notes stand out instantly to people with ear training.

It used to be nearly every family had a piano in the living room. Somebody would peck out notes and the rest of the family would sing--that was the evening activity because there was no internet or TV.

Aside from pianos, people tend to buy instruments based on whether the music they like uses those instruments. As electronically-derived music becomes more popular--especially electronic music that doesn't emphasize singing--fewer people will buy instruments or approach singing seriously. More kids will grow up never having to use their bodies to create music, and they will have no reason to ever think about how two notes are related. Inputting music can be done entirely visually now thanks to the DAW "piano roll". (I'm being very general here--of course there will always be some exceptions--but hopefully you see my point: I'm talking about trends.)

So if there's any irony in an EDM producer complaining about lack of ear training among the youngsters, that's it.

Quote from: Lydian on February 29, 2016, 01:31:01 am

Now you're just putting words in my mouth.

Nope, I was quoting FarleyCZ who quoted you. So blame him then for putting words into your mouth.

No, guys, come on. I was refering to Lydian's inreptretation of Zau's original post. He made a point that it might sound as elitist picking. That I'm against. (= agreeing with Lydian's post) But if it wasn't the intention, then forget my post.

...damn this discussion got complicated.

It has not harmed me directly, but I do have a close friend who lost his studio of 10 years because all of a sudden went the economy really hit in 2008 he couldn't keep up with the kids with the laptops that charged really low prices and cut everyones throats. I know at least three other people very close to me who went through the same thing. And since you don't make a living off of music, you would never understand what it's like for a guy like my friend who studied audio engineering, went through years of experience as an intern then as an employee at a big studio, then opened his own studio and made a nice living, all for it to be taken away because the kid with the laptop could do it for much less. I know what it's like too, because like my friend, music is my livelihood.

Welp. That is pretty wack, and anything I say now is gonna make it seem like I don't have sympathy for your friends' situation, which isn't the case, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯