ANYONE can make electronic music 

Oh look, here are some concepts that helped me when I started making electronic music: bit.ly/FREEcompositionguide

I suffered a bad fall when I was a child that left me with impaired motor skills in my hands. I never could play sports like baseball, football or a musical instrument like the other kids. But I never let that stop me from playing ice hockey or electronic music. Electronic/ambient has been a way for me to participate in making music. Just recently got back into it after selling everything decades ago.

I've been making music in a DAW for about 15 years now, I actually really would've liked to see a well argued video about why anyone can make music now. I know it's often used as a derisive thing, but honestly this hobby is accessible to anyone who wants to participate and I think that's sort of amazing

"Building your own canvass to paint on", I feel like that's the most accurate take on synth programming and how it leads to sounds, and subsequently songs. It's been my experience too.

"electronic music is like building the canvas as you're painting it!" So crazy! I literally had the same thought last night!

I finished my masters in classical guitar 3 years ago and I just started out with electronic music. I feel so stupid, I never thought I’m gonna be a beginner in music ever again in my life. Thanks for this video!

I’m self taught when it comes to music theory and the chords progressions, scales, and drum patterns. Electric music is all about vibes and texture because people want to lose themselves in the music then trying to understand what we are doing. I hide my jazz chords under the synth sounds that I make. I feel it’s like the saying, “give them medicine in the candy.”

I've written choir pieces based on accidental harmonies I heard from a generative synthesizer patch. There's a lot of room for cross-pollination between sound design and traditional composition.

Good tip about separating out sound design and composition. I tend to do that myself. In practical terms it means spending some time at the start of a project creating a template for my piece, including named tracks and synth patches/effects/etc. Then when I start writing/recording I have my palette of sounds ready to go. It really can speed things up as I find myself inspired by the sounds I have crafted and can imagine the composition before touching a keyboard or mouse.

YES! Dividing days into sound design, creation, mixing, etc. That's what I started doing too, hopefully it'll help me to actually complete stuff

I once went to a Kraftwerk concert in the early 1990s with an elite classic music student. He was completely shocked by the performance and basically walked away when the robots took over (those who have seen Kraftwerk live, they know what I am talking about). He declared that electronic music was basically evil and had nothing to do with creativity and art. I wish I could share your video with the student to educate him on the complementary aspects of both worlds. I cannot as I lost contact with the student.

For me as a hobbyist, Music is a healing process and electronic music has been instrumental to express my deepest thoughts, emotions through musical vocabulary using natural given human creativity. I have also learned to appreciate honest musicians more who pave the road for the never ending journey and discovery through their musical expressions.

Thank you. Your videos are helpful. I've decided to start saving up for your class bundle. I aspire also to a fusion of Classical style and electronic musics. I'm looking forward to seeing more about your process in depth later this year

Great point about starting your mix with the sounds you use. I have heard that before but I think you really do a great job here of explaining that in context. Thanks!

Lovely video! Thanks for that!

An interesting thing about electronic music is that its focus on timbre is a clear departure from the idiom of especially classical music - which is that (1) melody, harmony, and rhythm are **what** you play, and (2) timbre is **how** you play it or expect someone to play it. This is why it seems to many that sound design is so removed from composition. When in practice, there's a lot of sensory thought put into modular jams built around LFOs or sequencers outputting random notes. The timbre is a big part of the vibes we electronic fans listen to. At the other extreme, the patch you create or sample you choose is what you say, and the notes (if any) are how you say it. And when you think of it... that's how speech works. "How you say" something has more to do with the volume and pitch of your voice than the timbres, which correspond with vowels (what you say). And just because someone sounds angry to you, doesn't mean they necessarily are (they could be on the spectrum or have a foreign accent that for some reason sounds aggressive)... just like how people are free to interpret whatever they find meaningful in the music. Electronic music is such an open philosophy that you can't really generalize to a single set of techniques. Some people stereotype it as "just taking other people's beats and tunes and plagiarizing"... which is just a cynical way at looking at SOME electronic music, such as Daft Punk (though phrase sampling DOES take talent and can breathe new life into a stock loop or other popular song)... or "just random bleeps and bloops"... except DeadMau5 is very "composer-like" in his production, and there is sentiment that goes into the "Randomness", just as there's sentiment in the opera singer who doesn't plan out every vibrato undulation. And a lot of it is performed - on MPCs, Kaoss pads, Launchpads, theramins, good old fashioned keyboards, voice-to-MIDI, etc. And if it isn't - Renoir only needed to paint each of his paintings once. It's a fine art, not a performing art.

lol, its not only about the sound design and composition, its also about learning how to mix well which is yet another skill that takes a lot of years to do effectively. That skill lets you take sounds and make them fit together even if they seen like they don't.

I recently simplified my recording into the DAW chain, and this really helped bring out problems much earlier in the process, i.e. in the sound design and arrangement stages. I could visually see the difference in the waveforms of the single-stereo tracked recordings. Very informative for me.

Good stuff, keeping things simple helps with creativity.

I don't know how to describe it, but I could listen to you for hours. The way you share your thought processes, changing old behaviors, how you yourself got inspired by electronic music, all this influenced me to start studying digital music production. As someone who has beginner guitar skills but a passion for all kinds of music, especially classical and scores, your vids inspired me to dive deeper into the world of music theory, harmony. As you mentioned, combining classical music with electronical is like stepping into a unlimited world. Therefore I am starting to learn the piano in a few weeks, too. I am so thankful to have found your channel and hope to learn more🤘👍.

One of your best posts! Loved every minute. 💥

Super helpful perspective. The idea of where sounds sit in a mix may seem basic to more experienced music producers, but it's a lesson that takes a long time to really appreciate in electronic music. It's really easy to go patch-blind.

That is an important notion to understand a holistic approach of composition. Sounds used can be simple or even boring by them selves but when layered they really make up something. sometimes it is hard to know without testing which sounds would fit together. You run into that same concept in mixing and mastering. Most of the time different sounds are spectrally and volumetrically sectioned and while you listen to them on solo they usually sound thin and weak but yet they sit in the mix perfectly.

Love listening to the thinking process 😊

I was exactly like you till I started playing around with synthesisers in an iPad. Just GarageBand,where you have the tools to sound like a serious composer of symphonies with rudimentary music theory

I love your videos and how you don’t sacrifice saying something meaningful and helpful to the RU-vid pressures. I come more from the computer and sound design world and right now I’m inspired to finally learn piano more because I think it could help me in the same ways your discussing in this video! Thank you for what you do man!

This is very well done!

Great video Jameson, thanks :)

as always. great tips. I do not have the musical background, and it takes me even more trial and error to achive something that I like and sounds good

I love your approach and it's right on. Whole working on my music degree, I took all the recording studio classes. Fitting things across the frequency spectrum and giving each item it's own space is fundamental.

Fantastic vid! Thanks 🙏

Hey, Jameson. Your videos and book have been very helpful to me. Thank you very much!

Thanks for another thoughtful and useful/inspiring chat. When you talked about scaling back presets to make room for other elements I had a little epiphany (an epiphanette?). I realized that I mark atmospheric and ambient presets as faves because I like the worlds they suggest. Well, if they already suggest a world, they’re essentially self-sufficient. Would I just be plopping ‘characters’ into a pre-existing scene? That’s a really reductive thought but it prompted me to think about how I choose sounds for my projects - presets or my own sound design. Electronic music, to me, is about world building; it’s akin to what science fiction and fantasy writers do. When I begin with a busy preset, it might be more than it’s too-broad texture that’s problematic (an arranging and mixing issue). It can also be that too much is defined in terms of world building. So, scaling it down does more than just make room for other sounds, it makes room for creating a different world.

Most useful type of the content on internet: people reflecting on their "mistakes" in learning path and how they got where they are, told from the perspective: "how I was thinking at the moment". Thank you for sharing, Sir!

Thank you!

That re-enactment piece was fire ❤️‍🔥

I'm a classical musician to. And what you said about the difference between electronic and acoustic instruments, music. This is absolutely accurate. Electronic music has a different type of musical movement, composition. These things, which are different from academic music, can even be confusing, because it uses completely different instruments to make music. And it's just incredibly exciting. The new way. That's why you should stop being snobbish about it.

Everytime I watch your videos I lean something new that gives me some kind of comfort in my own developments, thank you Jameson

First video I ever saw from you but I somehow understood and agreed with everything you said. Its like you said what I've been thinking, but you managed to put it in to english words, and online I loved it. New subscriber. Moving on to another vid you made.

Great post! 👏Thank you for your insightful reflections. I think the elements of traditional music has been extended with electronic music. Some artists are blending both: traditional and electronic instruments, producing incredible new genres of creative music. I started playing piano (intermediate level 😊), but later I got electronic instruments and enjoy playing and blending both.

I’m with you 100% on everything you said

Interesting as always Jameson

I also have found it really help to keep patches simple and layered. Each sound might actually be not particularly pretty on their own but are bespoke for their role within context. I do love making my own presets for libraries of go to patches and sounds - often fairly basic but they seem to layer well. I highly recommend making your own sounds - not only will you sound unique because you are using sounds no one else has, but you will have an intimate understanding of how that sound works, which will help immensely in arranging and mixing.

Your videos are really good man

"back up to the sound design stage and see what you can simplify"... fantastic advice!!

First time on YT one said - “memorable”! Happy to hear that and will be happy to hear more music that has music also made with unlimited sound design …. buffet

This was great!

Inspiring and commendable journey .Great video ,hope you get a million views and more .

Inspiring, thanks.

Thank you for your valuable thoughts. Although we have a great variety of different electronic gear today, I find some inspiration in the music of "older" composers/performer such as Eliane Radigue or Else Marie Pade. Sometimes very minimal but full of fascinating textures.

establishing fluent workflow is 90% of the battle

This was great... 🙏

I properly started trying to make music in late 2022. I've finally now got to the point where I have finished songs in the genre and style I've been aiming for, and they're still not good enough to actually release. It does take a long time to learn this stuff, although to be fair I had to learn much of the basics of music theory at the same time as well.

I am always happy to see a new video of yours popping up. It feels like going to the gas station, but in this case you are refueling my energy to keep making progress on this path. Thank you for that, one big hug :)

Very interesting and inspiring.thank you

Man, just saw this video of yours. Fantastic! So well put into words and a catching storyline :) The art of sound design, for sure. Muddy. The biggest trap of all the options we have. Too many, ie, less is more 👍🏻

Nice presentation, cool humour.

Great video ! One of my favorite artist/composer is Trent Reznor of NIN's. He dose exactly that, he makes music using sounds and textures. He also has a back ground in classical music. Which I believe helps in arrangement of sounds and textures.

Subscribed and made my way over to Apple Music to your new single - nice!

I really needed this video, I started making electronic this year as a NYR for my mental health. I wanted to start something new and be back at the very beginning of something, and so I picked up bitwig. I really love how you calmly laid out this decision between making sounds vs making songs, and I think because I'm so new to this it is a little overwhelming. How do I make a nice sound if the notes I'm demoing don't sound good in the first place? You also described my thoughts on presets, they sound amazing but unless they are the main focus and I choose others that were watered down to compliment them, I could never really find 2 presets I liked and have them go together in the way I wanted. Going to keep going and do as you say, dedicate some days to sound design and just play around with synths and see if anything sounds good enough to invoke creativity.

Good points there, I found it useful to spend some time (like 10 years) on learning how to mix and master music. It taught me to avoid many mistakes in the arrangement and sound design stage. It's an exciting, never ending journey!

Brilliant & well explained video on how to think past the different patch banks we all tend to use to create our music. I use a large amount of different patches (mainly Arturia V Collection & my Korg M3 with a radias attached) in order to see how the patches can fit together and produce a song etc. I will now attempt a different approch to find out how your concept works

Great video, top content. Thanks very much!

4:04 that would make a wonderful ambient for a a highly stressful event. Like in a game where you had to do something irreversible and now feel guilty or stressed about it.

It’s wonderful to hear your observations Nathan. As a fan and part time creator of electronic music I’ve been saying much the same for 40 something years… right now, my feeling in a nutshell is that less can be more … in almost every regard … Nigel 🙏

Great video! Speaking the truth!

the possibilities are endless

This is ❤

I also come from a classical music background (studied classical guitar for years) and I find the classical world/teaching very limiting (didn't have any synthesis courses, just harmony and fuga). Now I am exploring the electronic music world and everything to me is EXACTLY as you described it. I can relate 100%. It's much more fun but I have to rewire the way I think about music. To put it better, I now start to understand music.

Always great to transfer skills and talent to a new instrument. Helps approach composition and sound design from another angle as opposed to endlessly scrolling through the palette of presets. Dolby Atmos is a great way to separate a mix from an new perspective and it transfers well to the stereo frequency spectrum and placements

Thank you.

I do not have any formal music education but I know when I like a sound or sequence of sounds/chords. I LOVE those beautiful massive synth soundscapes, I remember back to the 70's (1970's) when they were fresh and have enjoyed the synth evolution ever since. I have always held myself back, coz, I do not know this or I do not know that but you've kind of told me that I don't need formal music training to explore and enjoy myself..... Thank you for pointing out the snobbery, these people have made my love of music & sound in to something I must be ashamed of coz of not knowing all their BIG words; I can now look forward to having fun 🙂 Thank you Jay (South Wales)

For me when I learned keep it simple, use space and frequency space for sounds or frequencies range, really made a huge difference. Experimental sound design still requires space for frequency range and it can transition through different instruments. I learned so much about that from studying Miles Davis’ compositional approaches.

I am the perfect example, no music theory, not one instrument learned. All I do is improvise on a synth thinking i've created something worth listening to. But all that has caught up to me now. And I realise now that in order to progress I have, I must learn music theory. That's why I start learning music theory with a privatie teacher this week. I consider myself more a sounddesigner, soundscape-creator then a musician, to call myself that is an insult to people who studied for years to master an instrument or music in general. That's why I love the music of Blade Runner. Vangelis is a master composer but also created atmospheres and feelings thru soundscapes. Yes, he created a lot of musical masterpieces but I focused more on the feeling you get when you hear a massive drone sound coming from a Yamaha CS80 with 8 seconds of reverb. If you have created an interesting, epic sound, it can take you to a place of great inspiration and you don't need to know what chord you are in. Anyway, great take on the subject.

Thank you so much for this inspiring video! I've geared up the last six years or so, both hardware and software. I know I have more than I actually need, but now I need to get my thumb out my ... and just start. Your video may just be the last push to get me there. When I release my first album, I'll name one of the songs after you. 🤩

What I like about this guy is although he is educated he speaks in a creative way which inspires you. I think he must spend hours creating. I think I need to get into sound design cos I want all my instruments to sound exactly like what it sounds like in a live environment.

While i had the typical piano lessons as a child, i come from nearly the opposite site of the spectrum, with an early disregard for the complexity of the arts. Partially driven through a talent for math, allowing me to reduce musical complexities into a formulaic world view. Obviously, I've evolved since my long-gone teenage years, but your explanation and your view of both music and sound design as a whole is wonderfully accessible and truly resonated with me.

That iridium patch sounded very NINesque

People who didn't know notes, made music at home since 1986 on AMIGA. I used Protracker (Amiga) and FastTracker 2 on PC. Both of them uses samples.

Gordon Freeman, you speak?

I learned “classical” guitar at 12yrs (1972) then learned electronic music in JR collage while 19yrs (1979) so i saw the benefits of both approaches… while also learning first traditional drawing & painting, sculpting and (eventually) composition… then I got a computer in the nineties. Now AI comes along which cuts me out of the process of creativity… so I feel there are downsides to chasing tech and embracing the “new”. Theres a lot going on in the arts these days… it can get a bit difficult to sort out what works and what doesn’t. I will admit i can hear when people “forget” to include the nice aspects of the past as they chase new tech. Art is often knowing when NOT to play a note or add more brush strokes. Art is balance. That can be a challenge when things keep changing at the fundamental level.

Very inspiring 🌚🖤🎶

A great viewpoint 😉I'm not a musician by any stretch of the imagination but I do have an interest in all things related to electronic music. Your point about sound design and how it can inspire your creations was something that bought home the aspect of this 'hobby' that I enjoy so much. I always seem to gravitate towards the all-in-one solutions like grooveboxes in the hope that they will somehow bring out a hidden talent that I never knew I had 😂 Inevitably though, I just end up churning out fairly mundane 'compositions' that never really provide me with any sense of achievement. However, sitting down with a single low cost synth (Behringer Crave in a lot of cases) I can somehow seem to generate 'sounds' and textures that lead me to create things that I feel quite proud of....................completely subjective of course 🤣Thanks for posting such a thought provoking video 👍

Great video. I think one challenge of much electronic music is that there is little if any significant distinction between composition and performance. In classical music the performers can help manage some of the issues of layering, tone, and presence. Which is to say that the performers are collaborators with the composer in the full realization of the music set out in the score. I suppose in electronic music, the role of the "performer" might be more akin to that of the "producer" or recording engineer, which is, for most of us, the same person as the composer. The problem is that music production is a set of skills unto itself, and one that I personally find less interesting, but that is unfortunately necessary in some form to create electronic music such as we are discussing here (not necessarily "classical" music for electronic instruments).

Needed this video. 🎉 . I went from the metal head kid who dreamed of being a guitar god. To making music on my computer. Learning the basics of mixing and going down the rabit hole of design has me shrugging at music my nerd friends who scoff at the process. Its 100% a skill with a very high skill ceiling.

I have these random thoughts of sitting at a Rhodes late at night accompanied by a pocket trumpet. This video got me back to those thoughts again. I don’t know why but yeah.

Thanks for this. I love composing but hate sound design. I'm obsessive enough that I will easily waste an entire afternoon futzing with the portamento on a bass synth patch or editing a sample. So I'm a preset man through-and-through. You've given me a lot to think about.

You've hit on something with your vulnerability. Thank you kindly, friend.

There is a very interesting fact about the electronic music duo, Erasure, who are known for Vince Clarke's intense approach to analog synthesis, even creating most of his drum sounds by patching analog sounds together. He even formed the much more famous Depeche Mode and wrote all of the songs for their first record, Speak & Spell. So, what interesting is that Erasure have shared that almost ALL of their songs were written outside in the garden with just Vince on his guitar, and Andy singing and playing around with melodies. It really makes one think how one of the great synth veterans still refers to acoustics as the setting for a new idea or musical thought.

Music has been my constant companion, almost as long as I can remember. I’ve always had a facility for it, good genes, who knows. I sang as a boy chorister in cathedrals, played in orchestras and string quartets, performed on stage in everything from musicals to “battles of bands”. I’ve reached competence on many instruments only to have arthritis take that away from me, almost overnight. Thousands of hours of practice and dedication sufdenly meaningless. But electronic music saved me. I’ve been through precisely the thought process you’re describing here. Unlearning decades of classical training to allow new vistas to open up before me. My instrument used to be violin or guitar or banjo. Now it’s Octatrack or Matriarch. The journey continues. It won’t end until nail down the lid. Keep your mind open and your imagination working. That’s all you need.

If it keeps the creation going, its a good phase your in.

That deep bass at 2:12 is amazing.

I switched from mainly playing metal music to electronic music around 2014. This is basically my story, floundered around for a few years until I really stepped up my sound design game. Even Rock music that uses a lot of stompboxes is pretty simple on the sound design front compared to an expensive synth.

It is a sculpture of the imprint of each individual consciousness having a human experience.

Gotta love a Rhodes!

Very good. I’m not a musician but like to play music to the best of my limited abilities. I’m just trying to find a limited amount of sound that I can make the best of.

excellent video! i was trained to grade 5 oboe, then later played drums and bass in various bands and to be quite honest it was all pretty easy - self taught in various other instrumnest too, but electronic music is really the hardest thing i've ever learnt and will never stop learning and it will always be hard to me i think. The snobbery from people who don't actually know how to do said thing is quite shocking!

There is something interesting in the idea of electronic music producer who ACTUALY can play music and can understand score music. But the other side is not to underestimate. The electrinic bands that I fan of (like The Prodigy) have this raw and primal vibe that makes me to prefer them against classical music.

Good video.

thx :)