The key to learning music production 

Find Oscar's video courses here: courses.underdog.brussels 🖤🖤🖤 Join the Underdog Discord channel: discord.gg/z5N9CTA 👾👾👾 Sign up to the mailing list here: tinyurl.com/yy92sx5u 💌💌💌 Pledge to the Patreon: ​ www.patreon.com/underdogmusicschool 🌱🌱🌱

This is the kind of lucid, big-picture, analogous thinking that real teachers demonstrate. The most valuable 10 minutes of tutorial I think I've seen, thank u Oscar!

It took me literally years from first opening ableton to actually doing something. Wish I saw this video back then lol.

As a hardware based producer i have to say that despite the many possibilities, ableton live is a very intuitive program

I feel so lucky to have entered the world of electronic music in the early '80s. New technology entered the scene at such a slow pace, you were forced to assimilate every aspect of a piece of gear in order to exploit it to the max. Also, with everything being hardware-based, you had to put serious thought into what would become your next purchase, to maximise the return on your limited disposable income. Nowadays, I have gone to a completely software-based studio environment (Reason 11, with various third-party plug-ins) and I can't see me every returning to hardware. However, the knowledge that I built up gradually throughout my years in the hardware world means that I can now "see The Matrix" beneath a sea of infinite options.

As a psychologist who also makes music, i love this!

You've made me realize main reason why I was so turned off by Ableton and decided to buy Reason instead.

Very good video. It was precisely for the reasons you mentioned that Propellerhead Reason made it so easy for me to enter the world of electronic music. I would still recommend anyone to start with Reason today.

I' am learning a LOT with you Oscar, thank you!!!

Thank you so much for this valuable insight!

Profound insights! Love it.

You have a way with explanation my friend…

Another superbly thoughtful video. Thank you!

This is super helpful. Your insight is incredible

You’re really ahead of your game. Thanks for all those videos 👏

I love your tutorials man, although I come from different music style (hip hop/rnb) I can learn a lot from you. Keep it up!

This is GOLD!

Looooove your approach, your videos. Thanks!!

Wow, this is really great advice, Oscar, thanks!

Oscar you are my hero. I cannot believe you are talking about affordances! So much respect. 😍

This video contains A LOT of useful information, explained in a very pedagogical way. I'm learning so much with this channel. Muchas gracias por compartir el conocimiento! Greetings from Argentina!

THANKS MAN!

These were exciting thoughts, Oscar - and you present the message in a pedagogically very good way. I'm a retired psychologist who produces electronic music, and have used Live since v.1.0 - and I became interested in electronic music long before we had computers - 40 years ago we used tape, scissors and glue. as mentioned in a comment to another of your videos I still have a lot to learn - and will follow you in the future. Thank you for your commitment and enthusiasm 🎼

Sound advice. On every level. 👍🏼

Once you understand why something works in a certain way, you learn better and never forget it because it makes sense to you. This is what I like about Oscar and his vids. He is smarts and explains simply and clearly the reasoning behind what he is teaching. Great teacher. I will be signing up for his course for sure.

Great video, thank You Oscar!

im a Logic user and I find your videos extremely useful and inspirational. subbed

Look to the analog designers to help navigate the options....brilliant piece of advice Oscar. Your interest in psychology is apparent and certainly informs your quality content and delivery. Thanks!

This video is great! Powerful and exciting to watch Estás haciendo un increíble trabajo Oscar Greetings from Mexico 🇲🇽

That is actually so true, in FL my first tab to visit on the sampler and many other instruments is always the envelope controller (the tuning section is always visible).

This is pure gold. As an FL Studio user I always looked at Ableton over my shoulder. It seems to be so versatile, but so overwhelmingly difficult. Well I'll start my trial tomorrow! And read the manual 😅

This makes so much sense. Based on what you've pointed out I think it would benefit anyone just starting out to be purely analog before moving into a DAW.

Really nice looking Rockwool Sound Absorbers love them! I should do some of those too.

This tutorial is really helpful for me..Thank you so much 😊

This is a truly great idea.

Great tips, thanks a lot.

Thank you 👍😁

Great perspective and thoughts, thanks!

You just made it clear to me why I use reason. Good to know. Great video!

Good to see others applying philosophical concepts to music production. Coming from a human intelligence background, I find myself implementing ideas I learned while traveling the world and studying human behavior. Some of my favorite are the ideas of silence sending a message same as noise and volume and applying flow state while developing a track. I even tend to use my military background in music. There are certain strategic concepts and even equipment that I turn into musical motifs and sound design. Life is like a fractal self replicating. Haha

This is a fantastic video! As a instructor myself (in a very different field), this is the kind of explanation I both hope to deliver to my own students, and love to hear when trying to learn something new. It's clear, researched, highly memorable, immediately practical, and will instantly improve the experience for anyone that sees it. I just found your channel but am really enjoying going through your video library, I watch a LOT of music RU-vid and the way you explain things is honestly waaay better than nearly all other channels out there, it's no wonder you're seeing such success. Congrats and thanks for the library of awesome content!

I've been making tracks for many years and learn something new from each video. I love your channel... Not too many people know about Don Norman / Design of Everyday Things. :D

Really good video. Thank you. Made me sub :)

Pretty cool to be this early to a channel that will blow up

i would love to see this back in my DAW days ) it might help me to do something meaningful with it

Now that's some high quality stuff you are talking about.

Legend!

Very interesting stuff, as your channel even for a non beginner that had a long run now. 👏👏👏 (rtfm fanatic)

"That's what she said" moment xD But seriously, very interesting point of view and also very useful knowledge. Thanks!

Very interesting video! Thanks

thx alot for your Videos, you‘ve got a good way top explain and helps me to understand my last questions and help me to open the closed doors in my Head. The Video about the roumble, is the best explained video i‘ve ever seen, thats my gamechanger & now i can start looking foward After some bad years

Lovely tips 🙏😊 You know what is the Right Way how to handle Ableton 🙏😊 Thank you

It does help a lil bit even not using Ableton , I remember how overwhelming an YAMAHA RMX1 felt until my friend explained me and all of a sudden I could see and try a new world of possibilities where I could have so many variations , and I had a blast with that machine

Great video!

Nice concepts, subscribed!

Amazing video thanks Oscar

Excellent

the keys to learning music production (mostly in ableton live)

I started with FL and battled to get anything done. Switching to Ableton made things so much easier on most things. It is still really complex though

another great one. I just can't not watch your tutorials and I'm not even a music producer. that's how good they are.

I was here at 394 subscribers! :D

I did my undergrad thesis on knobs vs sliders in a virtual instrument, and heavily used the book. Shame I was more interested in programming beats vs computers...

That is the benefit of hardware for me, not to produce music, but to learn to shape of the sound. After years of having soft and hardware: take old unused hard or software and surprising yourself!!With the experience of using different gear you can use „bad“ gear really well!

Incrediiiiiiiibbuuulll.

I'm in software development. I play around with DAW when I have a bit of time available. I found this video very interesting. The matter you're talking about fall under UI/UX (User Interface/User eXperience).

Dope

Great observation and insight! But just an FYI; in UX/UI we've traditionally talked just about affordances, but this is not the full story and so another term has been introduced. Whilst 'affordances' are the possible actions an object allows, these actions are not necessarily obvious. To make them obvious and understandable, 'signifiers' are the perceptible cues that designers include in (e.g.) interfaces so users can easily discover what to do, in order to achieve the possible action/s (affordances).

More please

"...know how to use it implicitly by its design. Can we get an example of that?" Me: *shouts* "Brass knuckles!"

I live somewhere with no cell signal and only 50 gig satellite internet. Wish I could watch more internet vids

Do you have an affordance course or best practices? Like the bit crush and filter mention or the other one you mentioned about the 909

this is great Oscar! Another concept I find useful in terms of music production is Occam's razor..

I think Reason studios use a lot of this philosophy. It may be limited compared to some other DAWs but inspiring for me.

What do you think about the MPC software? You are the best.

Okay, I need to restrain a huge urge to start a really long rant here, but I do want to say two things. First, I totally love you, Oscar, for talking about affordances, and I would subscribe right this second if I weren’t already subscribed. There should be a serious prohibition on designing anything, whether physical or software, before reading “The Design of Everyday Things”. And once you read that book, you start to see how horridly most software is designed these days. And this is where I disagree with you, I guess, about software designers getting better at this. They are not, just look at your screen. Maybe 10 years ago windows had scrollbars that had those rectangular, 3D-looking areas on them, made to resemble physical sliders or faders. They even put little crosslines on them to make them look like no-slip “grip” surfaces. Those things invited you to click and drag them. And now? Look at the scrollbars in your browser window, and check if they explain themselves to a completely new user. Do they look like things you could press with your thumb and slide? New versions of Windows actually hide scrollbars in some system windows, so now they are barely visible and require two clicks to use, not one. My favorite example is a drop-down list of values such as “low, medium, high”, but the list is arranged so that “low” is on top, and “high” is at bottom. You can see such a list in Amazon’s shopping interface. Isn’t that just utterly stupid? It really annoys me, in case you couldn’t tell 😊 And this holds true for almost everything, almost every piece of software today. Buttons and other UI elements that do not look clickable and can hardly be distinguished from “static”, non-clickable bits. Skinning interfaces tend to kill affordances, too. And, from that perspective, Ableton seems just awfully, awfully designed. I don’t use it and I’m not singling it out, but the designers of FL Studio at least understand that important controls should be much bigger than less important ones. It really isn’t hard! Because it’s not true that only beginners need this kind of hand-holding. Advanced users also work faster and make fewer errors if designers truly considered affordances. Huge industrial disasters have happened because two critical knobs were too close or too similar to each other. So there, a rant. From a guy who taught himself to write software in late 1990s, not in order to create new killer apps, but only to recreate a few of those I was using all the time every day, but couldn’t stand them, because they were frustratingly badly designed. I used to pretty much clone their functionality, but give them usable interfaces. And that’s why I tear at my hair when designers of huge, expensive commercial software are actively killing usability. It boggles the mind.

Actually the Freq knob is bigger, not to call for attention, but to have more resolution when turning it. Great explanation yours though :)

Ableton has a learning curve but I think it can be overcome quickly, at least for someone who has been using a DAW for a while. There are a lot of things that make me like Ableton more than FL. I just do not know why they have made it so hard to rewind in the timeline view.

I was in serious doubt your second language was English and you lived in a country where you had to speak it on a daily basis before moving to Belgium, until you said “A to Zet” (instead of Z-eee), then I understood you’re in fact Belgian, and from Flemish origin as well. Your English is great, and your channel rocks! Perhaps one day I’ll meet you for some lessons in real life, as a fellow Belgian.

I am more of a Tracker guy. I really tried hard to use Ableton Live - but I failed, it was far too frustrating and the curve too steep and the ui was indifferent and boring. I tried Reason and understood it instantly. So much more fun for me.

you are th ebest

fact talking 🙌

Hi do you do classes on other DAWs like studio one 5??

What mixer is that? Looks interesting!

good video, but the irony of recording it in front of THAT mixer xD

Strange- but this is the same as a lecture I attended during a Product Design degree, back in 1987

lol I guess that's why I always try to make music that sounds like it came from around the 2000s era

i luv u

I dont use abletons but I think thats a usefull concept anywhere

FL Studio took me a bit, but it's much more intuitive than Ableton. I may have been discouraged if I had started there. It's sort of a bland DAW prison. Reason had a great interface as well, but FL takes the 🍰 👍

De hecho

Man hopes one day I can afford your courses. Fuck the day I born in a country where inflation is 100%

Creative constriction seems to force depth of exploration. You can't spend all of your resources picking a spot on the mountain. You have to limit yourself to an area and dig for gold. Given your interest in affordances, do you agree with this?

Ah yes. Thx for reminding me why ableton, a week of lessons, maschine, got me into buying hardware and using maschine as a sequencer, and ableton as a recorder only. I get sick of knobs on screens. So boring. Unstandable.

Oh that is my pet hate. Bloody push doors with a pull handle. Arrgghh

ik moet sneller leren wijning tijd nog anders stopt mijn kans mochen te worden de dj in nerherland en dat wil ik niet. kan mij helpen ik moet vershill in stukjes leren. maken. horen en loud en neer zetten wel niet effect er op dat is als nog

Ableton is open sea and you need to learn in a swimming pool after that.

ни хуя не понял, но очень интересно!

Ableton was *designed* to be overwhelming...? Don't you mean: Awesome? And you can do *almost* anything with audio in Ableton? I find I can do EVERYTHING in Ableton ... the limit is my imagination. What have you found that CAN'T be done in Ableton? Seriously, I'm curious.

Make yourself macros with only those parameters. Display only the macros.

Bsawr