Dubstepforum.com

hey everyone i've been following the dubstep scene for a couple of years now and i got Reason 4 and started to play around with it but i can never seem to get anything going like i cant put the ideas in my head onto the screen, i've looked at tutorials and read this forum till my eyes have bled about how to tweak and stuff but i dont seem to have the fundamental basic knowledge i've read the manuals that came with reason and i know like tempo and structure but when it comes to make it i just dont know lol i know roughly what everything is with EQ'in filters and stuff like that but its all the other things i need to learn really.

So in a nutshell what could i study to help improve basically, what courses, what could i read that really starts from 0 because i know a few of you are at uni studying music or what not and some of you just have done it by themselves but yeah i just want to know where you started really, how long it took because at the moment im like SIGH TOO MUCH GOOD MUSIC and i can barely make a chord

swallowed alot of pride to make this post so please dont be too harsh haha

+ ive heard some great tracks on this site from the members that should be played in gigs lol its mental

I have a good laptop and reason 4
a midi keyboard and some nice headphones
and i got the time to sit and read about the sciences and stuff but i just wanna know where to start really

thanks in advance

Chano

When starting out, it's better not to jump in with the mindset of "Right. lets make a banging dubstep tune". Put all genres aside.

Start with subtractor, as its name implies its a subtractive softsynthesizer. Inside of trying to put the sounds in your head onto the sequencer, first deconstruct what those sounds are made up from. Work from the bottom up, take a fundemental waveform (Saw,Sine,Triangle and Sqaure) and build from that, apply filters and adjust the various settings at tiny amounts, you will soon understand what each process does and how it effects the audio signal.

No amount of reading will compare to physical understanding (Unless ofcourse your looking to understand the music theory, but that's a whole other thread).

TLDR: Play around.

Astral wrote:When starting out, it's better not to jump in with the mindset of "Right. lets make a banging dubstep tune". Put all genres aside.


TLDR: Play around.

yeah it'll be ages before you can make something like what you hear in mixes and stuff, so don't approach it like that. Just muck about. Try making a hiphop beat, then a house beat. All really basic. Probably doesn't sound great. But all the time your learning stuff. No pressure!
Doing a course might be good but it also might put a lot of pressure on you, depending on how much it costs. Making music is a vague and enjoyable hobby.

Yeah, @grooki, Ive been diggin your stuff lately man

the way i started... i was 12 or 13, and i had a demo of ableton live 2 and rebirth.. i thought they were amazing and spent just hours recording lives output w/ audacity or something.. just playing w/ samples and loops and eventually making whole songs... i didn't know what automation was, so i would just do a 6 minute live PA and call it a song pretty primitive shit but i eventually learned more about it.. upgraded and started messing w/ synths, tried FL for a bit... made lots and lots of bad music. well not bad music, but i sure as hell wouldn't drop any of it now were i doing a set..

point of this post is... you really just gotta practice with it. i didn't make anything decent until only recently, and i'm 21.. the best way to learn is to have fun while you're doing it.. just find one drum loop or something that really excites you to start with.. then starting putting a couple bass notes in and see how the two instruments interact.. i think that's fun anyway

Astral wrote:When starting out, it's better not to jump in with the mindset of "Right. lets make a banging dubstep tune". Put all genres aside.

This.

When I started I had no idea of what genre I wanted to make I just opened FL and just mucked about with whatever I could find, usually just layering loops.

Practice makes perfect really, reading manuals and watching tutorials is a great 1st step.. I know producers that have been making tunes for years and the production quality is terrible because they haven't taken the time to learn to watch tutorials or anything.

So yeah, just be patient and keep at it and i'm sure you'll be making good stuff in no time.

cheers for all your tips and ima get on it

id say the most important things to learn to be putting out quality sounding tunes , is learn everything you can about EQ'ing. learn how to select good sounds that go well together (thouroughly learn how to use your synths in reason and what everything does). learn how to compress and limit and how to get all your levels exactly perfect. learn all the little tricks of how to make your sounds sound better like reverb, harmonic exciters, saturation, side-chaining, and all types of other shit. then learn all of the effects that alter your sounds to make them sound more interesting like wave shapers,flangers, phasers, delay, and a whole bunch of other shit. also learn all about automation and then you can automate all these effects then once you learned all that and have a pretty damn good sounding mix you could take the dive in learning how to master. some people get there shit mastered by others for money ,though many just master it themselves. as a beginner youd probly want to learn to do it yourself but that is seriously way down the road. focus on getting a perfect sounding mix is probobly the most important thing. and to get this perfect sounding mix you are almost garunteed to have to go and buy yourself some moniters.

narcissus wrote:pretty primitive shit

You're telling me, i started off with an MC303 playing through a guitar amp, and then trying to record it into audacity with a £3 'audio interface' i got from google. The scary thing was it was only about 2 years ago!

chronicrecords wrote:id say the most important things to learn to be putting out quality sounding tunes , is learn everything you can about EQ'ing. learn how to select good sounds that go well together (thouroughly learn how to use your synths in reason and what everything does). learn how to compress and limit and how to get all your levels exactly perfect. learn all the little tricks of how to make your sounds sound better like reverb, harmonic exciters, saturation, side-chaining, and all types of other shit. then learn all of the effects that alter your sounds to make them sound more interesting like wave shapers,flangers, phasers, delay, and a whole bunch of other shit. also learn all about automation and then you can automate all these effects then once you learned all that and have a pretty damn good sounding mix you could take the dive in learning how to master. some people get there shit mastered by others for money ,though many just master it themselves. as a beginner youd probly want to learn to do it yourself but that is seriously way down the road. focus on getting a perfect sounding mix is probobly the most important thing. and to get this perfect sounding mix you are almost garunteed to have to go and buy yourself some moniters.

how bout you learn to write a semi cohesive original idea first intead of churning out overly engineered generic paint by number fodder?

deadly habit wrote:

chronicrecords wrote:id say the most important things to learn to be putting out quality sounding tunes , is learn everything you can about EQ'ing. learn how to select good sounds that go well together (thouroughly learn how to use your synths in reason and what everything does). learn how to compress and limit and how to get all your levels exactly perfect. learn all the little tricks of how to make your sounds sound better like reverb, harmonic exciters, saturation, side-chaining, and all types of other shit. then learn all of the effects that alter your sounds to make them sound more interesting like wave shapers,flangers, phasers, delay, and a whole bunch of other shit. also learn all about automation and then you can automate all these effects then once you learned all that and have a pretty damn good sounding mix you could take the dive in learning how to master. some people get there shit mastered by others for money ,though many just master it themselves. as a beginner youd probly want to learn to do it yourself but that is seriously way down the road. focus on getting a perfect sounding mix is probobly the most important thing. and to get this perfect sounding mix you are almost garunteed to have to go and buy yourself some moniters.

how bout you learn to write a semi cohesive original idea first intead of churning out overly engineered generic paint by number fodder?

how bout u learn how to get a fuckin life instead of giving people shit that are trying to help others. sorry its not up to your standards asshole btw your tunes are shit

chronicrecords wrote:

deadly habit wrote:

chronicrecords wrote:id say the most important things to learn to be putting out quality sounding tunes , is learn everything you can about EQ'ing. learn how to select good sounds that go well together (thouroughly learn how to use your synths in reason and what everything does). learn how to compress and limit and how to get all your levels exactly perfect. learn all the little tricks of how to make your sounds sound better like reverb, harmonic exciters, saturation, side-chaining, and all types of other shit. then learn all of the effects that alter your sounds to make them sound more interesting like wave shapers,flangers, phasers, delay, and a whole bunch of other shit. also learn all about automation and then you can automate all these effects then once you learned all that and have a pretty damn good sounding mix you could take the dive in learning how to master. some people get there shit mastered by others for money ,though many just master it themselves. as a beginner youd probly want to learn to do it yourself but that is seriously way down the road. focus on getting a perfect sounding mix is probobly the most important thing. and to get this perfect sounding mix you are almost garunteed to have to go and buy yourself some moniters.

how bout you learn to write a semi cohesive original idea first intead of churning out overly engineered generic paint by number fodder?

how bout u learn how to get a fuckin life instead of giving people shit that are trying to help others. sorry its not up to your standards asshole btw your tunes are shit

As a neautueral third party, may I please hear one of your tune to compare wiht Deadly Habits amazing material lately?

Errr, basically you're saying you know all the technical stuff but don't know how to write music?

Thats something what comes with time.

Fack all the science, that don't write good music, make sounds/find presets you like and just write, who the fack cares if your music isn't perfectly EQ'd or the kick drum hasn't got enough bass in it, if you appreciate your music it don't matter eh?

This is why I think the production bible is a bad idea, its filled with to much technical information, infact I still haven't read 90% of it and i'm sure it'll educate me but honestly, I'd rather write music blindly - I get more creative that way... Stop trying to make what you have in your head and just play notes, write drums and have fun.


Thats my 2cents.

@ basic A, thanks mang

chronicrecords wrote:

deadly habit wrote:

chronicrecords wrote:id say the most important things to learn to be putting out quality sounding tunes , is learn everything you can about EQ'ing. learn how to select good sounds that go well together (thouroughly learn how to use your synths in reason and what everything does). learn how to compress and limit and how to get all your levels exactly perfect. learn all the little tricks of how to make your sounds sound better like reverb, harmonic exciters, saturation, side-chaining, and all types of other shit. then learn all of the effects that alter your sounds to make them sound more interesting like wave shapers,flangers, phasers, delay, and a whole bunch of other shit. also learn all about automation and then you can automate all these effects then once you learned all that and have a pretty damn good sounding mix you could take the dive in learning how to master. some people get there shit mastered by others for money ,though many just master it themselves. as a beginner youd probly want to learn to do it yourself but that is seriously way down the road. focus on getting a perfect sounding mix is probobly the most important thing. and to get this perfect sounding mix you are almost garunteed to have to go and buy yourself some moniters.

how bout you learn to write a semi cohesive original idea first intead of churning out overly engineered generic paint by number fodder?

how bout u learn how to get a fuckin life instead of giving people shit that are trying to help others. sorry its not up to your standards asshole btw your tunes are shit

love how people take my general statements personally
btw yo mama so fat...

^^^

Snappp


When i first started writing music, i just sat there and played some notes... and it work out fine. Do which ever way fits best.

marshy wrote:

narcissus wrote:pretty primitive shit

You're telling me, i started off with an MC303 playing through a guitar amp, and then trying to record it into audacity with a £3 'audio interface' i got from google. The scary thing was it was only about 2 years ago!

my dad has that thing