u/wirenerd

Pros and cons of each?

I use Reaper but I know Ableton is likely similar in regards to this workflow.

Since I've started, I've sequenced my drums by putting the samples directly on the grid. It can be a pain in the ass and takes up a lot of visual space throughout a project but the level of control feels exceptional: volume of each hit, one track per sample so FX chains and mixing is very powerful, sidechaining easily, gated reverb easily, routing easily, envelopes per single item, etc. Haven't tried it but processed sections could be bounced/rendered to clear up space.

There are the downsides of course, if I need to change out a kick or snare, I can't just drop a new sample on the pad, and the end product is cluttered and ugly as hell compared to a clean midi item.

I know it comes down to preference and taste, but for those of you that use samplers and MIDI, how do you achieve the level of control that you'd get by sample on grid, track per drum sample? Is the level of control achievable with free plugins? If you use something paid like Battery or whatever, what ways are you using it that can translate to a free sampler/sequencer?

If you are someone who does it all on the grid no sampler/sequencer, what do you do to make it more efficient?

Right so, for some odd reason the various tutorials on synthwave I've watched are not helping a whole lot. Dont know if it's me or the complexity of the genre but I feel like there's a lot of "here's me making a synthwave track" and when I try to go make my own, the results are odd at best.

Right now I think my biggest issue is figuring out how prominently actual chords are expressed in synthwave.

My approach is finding a good progression, and laying it on thick, throwing some bass on there, and trying to find space for melody.

When I go to listen to synthwave though, I can't tell if I have a bad ear but I'm not hearing the chords come through as prominently as bass or melody, quite a few songs I feel like I can't hear the chords at all, just a lot of arps and soft melodies. I can definitely hear the way the melody/bass follows a progression but as for the voicing of the chords, I'm just not hearing it.

Should I be putting less emphasis on voicing the chord progression and letting other parts like melodies, arps, basslines, carry most of the progression? If I do this would I be right in assuming the chord can or should be voiced in a soft pad instead?

I guess I'm just a bit confused. When my chords are very upfront and noticeable, it feels like it's a lot. Also it doesn't seem to leave a lot of room for expression, it almost gets exhausting just having the chord progression repeating and other elements fighting with it to be heard.

Any advice would be appreciated, or any reference materials, or tracks where the actual chords are prominent or not.

Thanks!

I see this question being asked all the time by beginners like myself and now that I'm walking away from the DAW with pure awful, I'm going to share my process, from the mental to the actions to take.

I hope this helps some of you find a new way to keep pushing.

I'm not gonna lie. I feel defeated. I spent 8-10 hours on this little loop. I don't make loops, but in this case I needed to make something "complete" so that I could trash it and move on. I made all my own patches for this. I made my own chord progression from basic principles. I made my own bassline, and a little lead. Musically, it kind of works. Music wise, it sounds horrid.

This leaves not feeling accomplished but feeling all the awful things we can feel sometimes. Like this is the best I'll do, it wont get better, and it hurts. It hurts to think about, it hurts to listen to it, and I lost motivation to try again.

The solution:

Fuck all that. The "project" is done. It was a failure, but lessons have been learned, lessons have to be learned in order for my next attempt to be any better.

I dont have to play it on repeat, I know what's wrong with it.

* The lead patch sounds awful. Next time I make one I'll have to just put a bit more thought into it.

* The chord progression is musically solid but it just doesn't sound right, it doesn't move right. It's awkward. There are plenty of resources I can check out, or I can just design a new progression. I know better now what doesn't work.

* The bass is ok, the patch could use a little work but it can be salvaged.

That 8-10 hours wasn't a waste, I learned some things. I definitely learned what didn't work. I skilled up on the keyboard just a bit. That's 8-10 more hours put into working with the DAW, a little better for it.

I need a break, tomorrow or next day I'll go at it again. It's a relief knowing I wont have to work on that again, and I'm a bit excited to come up with a new progression.

This is how you do it. Nothing worth doing is meant to be easy. I feel better now than I did 30 minutes ago.

I hope that helps some of you struggling. There is no shortcut for this. Getting good at something means being bad at it and pushing forward anyway. Not every attempt will succeed.

Dont ask "How do I make my music not sound like shit?" You already know the answer: take stock of what you've done and what you need, and get back in your DAW.

For some reason this has been difficult for me to find good longform resources on (whether written or video)

I'd like to up my drum programming game and I know some basics like downbeat upeat offbeat etc but that's about all I have, and I can only get so far with noodling in the sequencer.

Are there any good resources out there that teach the absolute fundamentals of groove that can be applied to a wide range of genres.

Like ideally if learned, fundamentals that could be applied in a way where it's understood exactly what you're doing. For example, if you have a 4 on the floor kick pattern, you would ideally know how to arrange your hi hats for a certain vibe or feeling, which percussion to use and ways that syncopation or swing can lead to different feels and rhythms.

I don't want to just copy paste, I want to be able to understand at a deeper level what's happening with a groove, why the kick drum can be doubled up in certain spots but not others, when the kick drum can be omitted, when snares can be moved or when they need to stay on 2 and 4.

Short of just buying an electronic drumkit (which I've seriously considered), how can I gain a deeper understanding of rhythm and groove?

EDIT: The only resources I've found are either 10-20 minute youtube vids that tell you what drum pattern to use for a specific genre without much depth, or resources specifically for drummers. There's not much I've found in between these two.

Kinda curious how ppl are producing with these in the box. They make a world of sense to me in a DAW-less setup but as much as I'd like to use one in a DAW, I'm having a hard time finding a reason to.

It's not like my mind is made up or I'm against using them, it's more so that I have a few I really like the control of (TX16wx, Grace, etc) but anytime I'm using a sample I'm just dropping it on a track and doing all of sound processing on it there. If I wanted to I could route a sampler to individual tracks for FX and finer control for each sample, but at that point what have I gained in comparison to just putting the waveform down?

This also seems to be the workflow from a lot of producers I see and maybe there's a bit of copying in that, I'm more used to seeing a ton of tracks with waveforms than MIDI.

Besides the most obvious method of taking a longer sample and chopping it up and editing it, what are your use cases for a sampler plugin and how does it go into your workflow?

Maybe I'm looking for an excuse to use these nice samplers I have sitting around that's better than "just use one then dummy" :)

More sidechaining fun

I was throwing together a quick and dirty lil jungle track mostly to work on my dnb basslines so I wasn't going for fancy drums I was using different breakbeat samples (only used like the first bar of the amen for transitions and a couple others as the main breakbeats).

Once I had my sub bass lined out it was drowning out the kicks so I tried a method I thought would work but it didn't so I think I need a more precise/surgical method.

If I wanted to I could just create a track of ghost kicks to line up with my breakbeat kicks but I feel like that would be extra and take up too much time.

I added ReaEQ to my breakbeat track, I found the kick frequency hanging out around the 60hz range, so I set ReaEQ low shelf to kinda clumsily grab anything below 80hz and set the FX routing to 3/4

I routed 3/4 from that to 3/4 on my sub bass track and used ReaEQ parameter modulation sidechain, it seemed to work as it was being triggered by the different kicks but nothing else, and I was able to have the sub bass EQ dip in response to that trigger.

Two issues tho:

1. Certain kicks didn't cause as much of an EQ dip in the low end on my sub bass I wanted, on the more pronounced kicks the low end of sub bass would cut pretty nicely but on the less well defined kicks it wouldn't cut as much.

2. I switched to my kilohearts compressor and tied the same 3/4 to its sidechain but every single hit was triggering it as if it was being triggered by audio signal and not EQ range I selected.

What am I doing wrong in this scenario? I've read up on it, done it before, watched Kenny G vids on it, it's just not doin what I need it to.

What I'd like to accomplish is a clear sidechain signal triggered by a spike in an EQ range. Lets say I'd like a snare to come through and it's inside of a drum loop encompassing a large range of frequences and I only want idk, a hit between 140-180hz to send a trigger, what's the best way to do this?

Also I like ReaEQ but I'm feeling like there might be some other free options out there that might work better, let me know.

Thanks yall

Some other fellow beginners seemed to appreciate my last tip thread so I thought I'd share what I've found, I hope this helps some of yall as much as it's helped me.

Please read if you are starting out and struggling with the process!
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Understand this is coming from someone who wanted to make electronic/EDM (various genres) since I was 18 years old. I'm 40 now. I tried twice in my lifetime and gave up both times with less than 6 hours spent in total because I could not figure out how to make anything that didn't suck.

That's 22 years of loving electronic. And I mean loving it. I mean despite growing up on Metallica and playing guitar from the age of 14 and playing blues lead, 75% of my music intake was electronic. I went to festivals, I rolled, I adored all of it. I was hearing dubstep when it first started hitting big. I listened to the later evolutions of dnb and trance.

I wanted more than anything to make it. I could play guitar so well, why couldn't I produce electronic?

Now I know why: because I held unrealistic expectations of what could and would happen in a DAW when I opened one. I didn't think it was meant to be easy, but I didn't realize it would be so hard. I thought with the right synths and the right DAW that it would just, work out. It didn't. I could make a cheap drum loop and it'd sound so cheesy and if I tried to pair it with a synth I had no idea what I was doing.

I was listening to Ott ("Queen of All Everything"/"Adrift in Hilbert Space"), I was listening to Carbon Based Lifeforms, I was listening to the jungle I had listened to since 2000 (Shy FX, Adam F, LTJ Bukem), and when I opened that DAW, those are the things I wanted to come out of it.

Uhrealistic expectations.

So if we're beginners then where does that leave us? What do we do? We learn to enjoy the journey.

And that sounds trite, and maybe it is, but I promise you from personal experience that if you do not learn to enjoy the aspect of learning to produce and slowly accumulating new skills and techniques, and put all your focus on "I wanna be like Sub Focus!" then you are going to quit.

It's not wrong to want those things in the future. I'd love to put out dancefloor dnb like Sub Focus and Dimension and Delta Heavy. I want to put out trance like Sunlounger back in 2013 or so. I'd love to have a track end up on State of Trance. Those are the smallest handful of things I listen to and I want to make that.

But I can't, not right now. So what do I do then? I focus on what I am capable of doing. Which is recognizing I am a beginner, and that my energy is spent on learning the artform.

So how am I supposed to enjoy making dogshit in the meantime? Well the shift in focus has made that really damn easy. It's no longer about finished/polished tracks it's about bits and pieces and small techniques and forward momentum in the various areas of music production.

That has turned nearly everything I do into an extremely enjoyable process with small goals and results I am extremely happy with. I haven't been at it very long but I am nailing milestones and feeling great.

I put Vital aside to learn synthesis on a slightly harder mode (Surge XT) and I've been having a blast making patches in that. I can get really lush wonderful sounds from it. Making a great sounding patch from Init patch is a great feeling, and usually inspires me to put it in a sloppy track but it doesn't matter because damn that synth sounds good.

I've been wanting to make jungle for 22 years well I took some various kick/snare/hat samples and put them together and did some light processing on them, I took the Firin break and layered it underneath and found that it fit perfectly but the whistle in it was too much so I spent hours fumbling around chopping it up to remove the whistle and fill it in with a hat trill. That was fun! And I learned how to sample slice from doing that, I taught myself and my technique sucks but I'm very excited to learn a better way now.

The cherry on top is that in my DAW right now is what for me is a very complex breakbeat that sounds fucking amazing and I play it to myself constantly. There's no bassline there's nothing else but I made that and goddamn it feels good. And it feels insane to open my DAW and see all these tracks lined up and mixed and routing to a drum buss and fuck I feel like I'm truly getting somewhere.

And now I'm struggling to get a bassline to go with it. I've been building a reese bass but I keep encountering obstacles and problems and my bass sound isn't lining up to my reference tracks but it's getting closer. I could use a preset patch, I could use the sample from "Terrorist" but I find enjoyment in the DIY, because that's really what all this is.

If you were like me 10 years ago when I tried, or 22 years ago when I tried, then I hope what I've shared here can help your perspective. I don't have to finish tracks right now to be happy. That is one way to get better, and if the "make a hundred tracks" method works for you, by all means, do that.

Either way, you have to learn to enjoy the process, even the earliest parts when you feel like you'll never make something according to taste. Because if you do learn to enjoy that process, then like me you will reap the benefits and you will be hungry as fuck to keep going. And when you make that first chord progression that sounds close to like something Above and Beyond might have made and you're really feeling it, you will stop feeling like you can't do this, you will see that hard work pays off slowly, and you'll be on your way.

I hope this helped someone. Don't be like me and stay musically silent for 22 years. I promise you there is pure joy to be found in your earliest stages. You just have to look for it.

Much love yall.

EDIT: RESOLVED, Surge XT was using up multiple channels (1/2, then 3/4 and 5/6 for Scene A and Scene B) meaning I had to send sidechain signal to 7/8 where it finally recognized the kick input.

Prepare for a long one

I learned how to do this from a Kenny vid and it's worked perfectly fine everytime I've done it before.

The problem: ReaEQ is not getting triggered by kick drum sidechain.

OS: Windows
Plugins used: Surge XT, ReaEQ

My current project setup is I have a track for each drum sample (kick, snare, hat, etc), all of which are sent to a Drum Buss, and that sends to the master.

Here are the steps I took to sidechain EQ, step by step, ones that have worked before everytime I've done it.

1. Kick track has ReaEQ already on it and is on channels 1/2 for EQ purposes. Sample is mono but in kenny's vid his is mono as well.
2. I add another instance of ReaEQ (I have tried having it before and after the other instance, no luck there). I rename it so I don't get them mixed up. I put a low pass filter on it down to about 150 or so, and then in the channels portion for the plugin (next to Param button) I open that, add two more tracks and switch output from 1/2 to 3/4, the EQ no longer affects the kick.
3. I drag the routing button from my Kick track to my Surge XT track, and set up the send as follows : Audio 3/4 -> Audio 3/4 (had to be added thru this dialog they were not already there). Change to pre fader post FX (I tried it Post fader as well no luck). I turn off Midi send, as in the past I've had midi get triggered this way.
4. Send is successful, routing in Surge track shows a new receive on channels 3/4 from kick track.
5. Add ReaEQ to Surge XT track.
6. In ReaEQ I set to Low Shelf, only adjustment made is band is at 150ish.
7. Touch gain knob.
8. Click Param, select paramater modulation and select sidechain. This expands the typical sidechain dialog and I select channels 3/4 for sidechain.
9. Increase output slider to middle.
10. Change option from positive to negative.

No signal is received when kick plays. In the past when I have done this (tbf I dont think I have done it with a kick sample but I cant remember, I know for sure ive done it with a sampler plugin track with a kick on it in midi.

The window to the right with the diagonal line through it should show a pulse everytime the kick is triggered, always has before, mine now does not.

I've tried everything I can think of. I do not know what I am doing wrong and I legit wanna pull my hair out, I like sidechaining EQ because of how subtle and transparent it is. I don't want to have to change to compression just because for unknown reason Reaper isn't functioning correctly.

Am I doing this wrong? Is there another way?

What's your process for making your own synth patches when you put a song together?

Curious to see what others do, is it an entirely separate session for you, or do you do it on the fly while putting a song together?

I've been kinda gunshy about trying to do it while putting my song together for fear it'll destroy my momentum so I usually end up using presets that I'lll tweak a bit but wanting more control over the sound, I'm considering devoting sessions to building a bundle of presets for whatever my song is gonna be, then composing/arranging another time.

How do yall like to do your sound design? What works for you and what doesn't?

Idk if maybe dual 24inch monitors are insufficient but I keep finding my workflow getting really goddamn crowded.

I have a primary monitor and then secondary that's just off to my right (I need a better setup to bring it a little closer but its ok for now). On my secondary I have a floating mixer taking up the bottom half of the screen, and top half is media items. Media items takes up probably more real estate than it should but its the only place it makes sense.

My primary monitor holds my TCP, piano roll gets docked to bottom half when its opened but when its open it takes up a ton of space for it to be usable.

Things get really crowded when I start opening plugins and plugin lists, if I'm not 100% in a VST then it either gets closed or pushed off to my secondary monitor and then the track plugin windows start to crowd up there and overlap each other then get lost behind other floating windows.

My workflow sucks! And I dont know if its because my monitors are too small. I do have everything at maybe 115% or so because 100% is tiny and also the fact you cant make the fonts on the File, Preferences etc menus is absolutely criminal.

How do yall keep your shit under control?

EDIT: Keep in mind I'm still relatively new so I dont use many tracks and plugins so this will get exponentially worse the more complex my tracks start to get. With piano roll open I can see 3 tracks of midi above it without needing to scroll to see more. Makes it feel very crowded

Hey yall, wanted to share some things that have helped me so far in hopes maybe they'll help you as well!

I'd consider myself heavily neurodivergent, if you are as well maybe some of these will resonate with you. And remember, all of this is with a grain of salt, I don't have years behind me. Some of this is obvious but is important to remember.

1. You get out of this what you put into it and you progress quicker the more you dedicate yourself, to a point . Diminishing returns apply here.

2. Try and get yourself at your hardware / DAW of choice everyday. You may not feel like spending even an hour today, but if you hop in, you might find yourself spending 2 hours.

3. Youtubers are monetized to keep your attention. If watching tutorials scratches the same itch as creating in your DAW, be careful how much time you spend.

4. You can still absorb a lot through tutorials. We are extremely fortunate to have the vast free library of videos dedicated to every aspect of making music. This wasn't really a thing in 1999. Use it wisely and be sure to apply it immediately. Know the difference between watching for enjoyment, and watching to learn.

5. AI sucks. One thing it doesn't suck at is answering common questions about using your DAW. Just type into google your exact question and it'll tell you step by step how to accomplish it.

6. Producing electronic music covers a wide array of skillsets. Be patient with your progress and recognize that time spent working on your craft is progress, and your growth is not always obvious. Trust that you are better after 50 more hours than you were before it.

7. Plateaus happen in every form of learning and skill building. Don't let being in one burn you out. Keep pushing, try new things, try new genres, new techniques, new creative approaches, you will break through it soon enough.

8. Take breaks. Take a walk. Take a day or 2 off. Reset.

9. Don't be afraid of learning how synthesizers work and how to create the sounds you want. You can go far with presets but I cannot stress enough that what you will learn in synthesis will make you a better producer. You will understand music differently, you will hear better exactly what is happening in your favorite tracks and be able to recreate it. A powerful synth like Vital or Surge XT can do some seriously heavy lifting in composition.

10. As a caveat to #9, do that in moderation if your goal is to pump tracks out quickly. You can spend 3 hours chasing a patch that you could have spent composing a song. Whether or not this matters depends on you and your goals.

11. If you do not enjoy the process of learning and creating, quit. There is no shame in this. This is not for everyone. It's not the destination it's the journey. You can love electronic music and fantasize about creating the music that moves you, but if you find the actual process uncomfortable and it doesn't bring you joy, then let it rest.

12. Play your instrument. Some people can program electronic without ever touching a midi keyboard, you will know if you are one of them. Most of us aren't. Load a VST load a preset and just play. You don't always have to record or punch in notes. You can just let some great synth sounds wash over you. These sessions can inspire you as well and you might find yourself desperately wanting to flesh out what you've jammed into a track. Go with that.

13. "Just keep making tracks" is hollow advice, especially when you're brand new. You're learning, it's ok to spend a night making drum loops. It's ok to spend a night putting down some nice leads. Record them if you want. Not everything has to be finished into a complete track. Completing a track is another skill entirely, it's a sum of different skills in producing. It is ok to work on these skills in isolation. You will create tracks as a part of the process, don't stress it. You will naturally want to take that fat lead you've been messing with and accompany it with a bass line, and a drum track, and you will end up wanting it to be complete. That is when it happens.

That's all I got for now. I hope it helps some other beginners find their footing. I didn't really have this kind of help when I started. No one really told me where to start, I just downloaded Reaper and looked for instruments and started clumsily working things out.

Give me a shout if you wanna chat, and share your creations in here, I'd love to hear them!

Yep it's another odd question from me! I promise it's related to theory :)

I don't play piano never have but I'm going to start when I can get the money for a full 88 key weighted keyboard.

I produce all kinds of electronic but my interest in composition and playing ranges across literally everything, if you hand me an instrument I want to play it.

As of right now I have an Arturia Keystep Pro, I believe it has 4 octaves but I can't remember off the top, also it's small keys so it's great for programming in simple stuff and producing, but not great for playing, which is ok (it's a wonderful piece of hardware!)

My question is, I'm learning all this theory and it's sinking in and I'm starting to apply it but I'm struggling a bit. I feel quite a bit blind when I look at the keyboard. I'm still committing the keys to memory, I almost have instant recognition of what note a key is by sight.

When it comes to chords and scales though, I'm very very blind. If I want to make a song in a certain key, I'll kinda have the notes in my head somewhat from the scale, I do not know chord shapes, I build chords from the diatonic, but I quickly lose them.

What kinds of things can I do to start seeing the keyboard more fully with its scales and chord shapes? Im fumbling around blind and it's stifling my creativity. Fumbling around does eventually work, but constantly playing notes that sound awful in a piece, having to carefully sketch out chords rather than just playing them, etc.

What would you do in my spot to get more fluent given the hardware limitations?

I need some help, of all the fundamentals of production this is currently my sloppiest and least controlled aspect and it feels way more complicated than it probably is.

I use HD560S headphones thru a Focusrite Solo with Reaper as my DAW. In windows my volume is at 100% but I'm pretty sure since DAW is set for ASIO that doesn't matter and I use the volume knob for adjusting in general not just inside Reaper.

So as I'm putting a track together, I'm usually finding instruments way too loud. There's also so much chatter about LUFS and gain staging etc that I genuinely don't know what levels my individual tracks should be at and what the master should be reading.

On my individual tracks I keep their meters going no higher than -6dB. Today I learned how to set my master mixer to LUFS and have it use 14dB as a reference which to my understanding means if it hits 0 on the master then that's -14 LUFS but I'm not 100% sure.

On top of all that, I just don't know how to set my volume levels for monitoring while I'm making music. Everytime I open a VST shit hurts my ears and I adjust it's volume down.

My confusion comes from the fact I feel like I'm working with two different volume settings, my track volumes, and my headphones volume. I can have loud ass headphone volume and be well below the threshold (seems like I'm at -6dB or less so that's well below -14 LUFS I guess???), and I can turn my headphones down but I dont hear details as well.

Idk yall I'm just confused as hell with this. I'm not trying to mix/master yet I just wanna know what should be coming through my headphones and how it is meant to reflect what will eventually get rendered.

I need something stable/consistent. It's overwhelming and confusing in a way that literally nothing else in this process has been.

Alright, in the beginning I decided to put off making any changes to default behavior especially in piano roll because I wanted to get to a point where I needed it. Well, now I need it because making edits and navigating in the piano roll is grating and slowing me down.

Should I look for changes in the manual or is there a more comprehensive tutorial? The things I've seen on YT have mostly been small behavior tweaks.

Im looking to do stuff that wont be as simple to find like "dont shift the piano roll around to follow the track while playing", zoom behaviors, editing behaviors, copying/duplicating behaviors, etc.

Some of this shit is complex and the defaults are a pain. Copy and pasting doesn't feel intuitive, having to adjust the size and zoom of piano roll everytime I open it, navigating in it.

It's shit! Will the manual teach me everything I need to know or is there a more in depth video guide I should seek out? Kenny Gioia is always my go to but the stuff I wanna do seems like it would span 5 videos of his at least if its even covered.

Thanks yall

EDIT: also I literally dont know how to find some answers when it comes to some things that reaper does nor even how to ask, like if a midi item goes too long and I grab it and resize it down it's like it doesn't delete it, it just holds onto that section of the midi that doesnt show but is magically at the end and also sometimes pasted notes end up in that void like a quantum midi section that both exists and does not exist simultaneously what the fuck is that?

This is not a "help me find royalty free samples" post, it is about the art of sampling** **

If I had the means I would probably be out capturing my own samples but at the present I dont. If you do it'd be cool to hear about, but also if you don't, where do you go to find sounds that inspire you or end up in your tracks?

How have you escaped the "ESSENTIAL ___ PACK" trap and found your own way in samples? Do you go out with a mic and capture sounds of nature? Do you dig through vinyls, or dig through royalty free repositories? Or do you rip samples out of soundscapes or FX from movies, TV, documentaries, etc?

(For suggesting resources its just first paragraph, if interested in helping my workflow its the long ass thread below)

I watch Kenny Gioia for pretty much everything I wanna learn in Reaper and I've learned a lot, and I've seen a bunch of reapertips vids but haven't seen any overall start to finish workflows. If you have any let me know, and if interested in giving suggestions on what I could be doing better I'll describe mine below.

I'm a beginner and unsure if I'm doing it correctly and I know there's probably no wrong way to use Reaper but I'm pretty sure the way I'm doing it is piss poor lol. A lot of what I do is guesswork and looking things up when I dont know how to do something but being that I've never truly produced before, I could be doing it ass backwards.

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I created my first real solid attempt at making a track start to finish last night, I got inspired to go beyond making singular ideas and pieces and actually make a track.

The workflow:

Started with a kick drum as I was thinking I would try and learn sidechaining for fun but it turned into an actual thing I wanted to finish (never got to sidechaining lol).

I put DR89 (909 vst) on a track, and laid down a 4 bar 4 on the the floor pattern. I think I originally wanted to just get a good kick sound and render to WAV and arrange it in the grid accordingly but I ended up just highlighting my 4 bars and then duplicating the MIDI over and over until it was about a minute and then rendered to stem, it made a WAV stem above my midi track that I couldn't rename (I cant seem to name my tracks anyway?) but I went ahead and deleted the original track with the VST.

On the kick audio stem I put some reverb FX on and got the kick sounding great. Only strange thing was that the kick waveform seemed to fill a ton of space like the next kick transient would hit on the long tail of previous kick, preFX. Maybe it's supposed to? Idk.

Next I made another track with the DR89 to fill in some other drums as I wanted to keep my kick separate for different FX. Not great with drum patterns but I did some snares and closed hats and used the 909 to get them sounding ok. Again used 4 bar pattern painted in piano roll, this time I click each individual velocity in the bottom and randomized it myself. Gotta be a better way for that? Then once happy I duplicated the 4 bar midi until it matched length of my kick stem, and left it as midi. Didn't know if I'd wanna make changes dont really know.

Now that I had a constantly rolling kick and hats I wanted a trance lead, I made a new track with Surge XT on it and found a decent preset and played on my keystep with some ideas and its arpeggiator and when satisfied, I hit record and played in the lead.

On that channel I added some FX, tried KhsTranceGate but realized arpeggios were already creating that vibe so killed it. I love that FX tho so maybe next time I'll use a far slower arp lead and use the FX.

Now I knew I needed some things for flavor and as I was mostly just experimenting I decided to use volume envelopes on my drums to fade them in. My lead started 8 bars in so I faded that in as well.

I let it play and messed with the reverb on the lead and found a jarring sounding section that sounded much better if I increased the reverb tail to wash over it and that worked. So to automate that I changed track to Touch and let the track play and as I made the adjustments it painted in the automation lane for me. I didn't want to hit record with the track armed because I was afraid it would try to do another MIDI take and I dont know much about those. Maybe there's a better way for live automation?

I used volume envelopes to give the drums a break over the washed out part of the lead.

Last was bass and that shit was slopped together. I just made a new Surge XT track and recorded a simple bassline in the right spot, used my trance gate on that. This is where it got weird again with my workflow, I wanted to automate the cutoff so I changed track to Touch, hit play and when the other tracks dropped out I swept the bass up to let it make a high saw before dropping it back down.

The bass could barely be heard so I didn't bother sidechaining. Low end was muddy as shit but I didnt see a way to give a "pumping" feel as the kick was already huge, the bass was fighting for its life against it, and I didn't know if the lead was really competing with the kick.

One final note is I made sure when making each track that the RMS on the master never went over -6db, I used the levels on the VSTs (not faders) to achieve this. Unsure if its the best approach but it didn't sound bad. I chalked the muddy bass up to poor composition.

Finished for the night and rendered it out. Success (for me anyway)
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All in all the track is extremely amateur but I'm mostly just wondering if my Reaper workflow could use some tweaking. I just really am not sure how to create in Reaper. I'm patching together individual techniques learned in Reaper tutorials but I know there's got to be better ways.

My editing workflow is not great. My automation workflow feels strange to me. I'm not sure about the drums, if I should be making WAV stems for each 4 bar drumloop and duplicating them so I can change FX for individual drums (esp kick) or if I should leave it all as MIDI.

If you spent the time with this post I really appreciate ya! I'm having a blast with this and am very happy with my first "track", as it's more a proof of concept that I can actually go on this long journey and something great will come of it someday. I'm not free of "tutorial hell" but without having been in tutorial hell I never could have made something like that.

I feel like I'm probably getting close to growing out of official servers. I'm not really sure what it is but I get the feeling there might be better community servers out there that keep the vanilla experience mostly intact but have a better population?

I'm a solo and getting to the point where I wanna have more interactions with people and it seems impossible on official, people seem to KOS at every opportunity even if you talk to them they either lie or they don't say anything.

It's a lonely life just gearing and surviving running military and stashing it away in the woods and rinse repeat.

I feel like there's more to this game and I dont know if I'll find much more of it on Official. If the server has mods, would prefer they're extremely minimal QoL or things to make the survival aspect more hardcore. PvP is fine but not PvP centered.

If you saw my last thread in here please don't throw anything at me I promise I'm not trying to be extra about this stuff I just can't help but try my hardest to fully understand what is happening in the music that sounds good and the music I want to make.

So I'm getting this from an Alex Rome video discussing chord progressions and their moods in a video about EDM production, he's a decent teacher but I don't love the way he's basically just giving a template and picking a scale and then voicing the chords differently and it leaves me with far more questions than answers.

So due to that I've been doing a lot of googling while watching this video, I've gotten some questions answered but it leads me to a broader question.

If my goal is to learn how to compose/write my own music, should I just be working on building my own chord progressions, like intuitively it seems like if I'm using a certain scale, I should be able to listen to the feelings that moving from one interval to another give, and then using those notes as the chords in my progression, and voicing them in a way that sounds best, right?

I don't know if it's better for my learning to do it this way or just cut and paste the common chord progressions based on the mood ppl say they have.

I'll be buying a license soon, Reaper has more than earned it when it comes to what I think is worth spending money on.

I'm still early days in learning Reaper but my god is it good. I tried Fruityloops 25 years ago and it felt so limiting and I don't wanna be too hard on it cause I do feel like production of electronic thru DAWs has grown so so much since then and the entire ecosystem around them (learning resources, plugins, sample libraries) really makes everything so much more user friendly across all DAWs.

Ableton felt weird too for reasons I dont understand.

Now its Reaper and a lot of people told me not to do it, one told me "EDM in reaper? lol good luck" and now that I've spent about 20 hours in it, his comment seems hilarious to me.

Yes this DAW is not the most user friendly but with AI in google's search literally anything I want to know how to do, it tells me how to do it when I cant figure it out. I also feel like I am learning more about how to create music in a DAW and less about how to use a particular DAW to do it.

I'm finding there's so many different ways to approach the same goal in creating a song, whether it be thru a bunch of VSTs and piano rolls, or raw waveforms laid out in different tracks, or a mixture of both, and Reaper seems perfectly suited for any of those.

I just cant sing its praises enough. It can be overwhelming at times but it never forces me to use any of its million features that I dont need at the time in order to do what I need to do. It does exactly what I need it to and gets out of my way otherwise.

I genuinely think this DAW will make a better producer out of me quicker than any other DAW could.

Per a recent suggestion I'm working on memorizing the natural major scales, and it seems by doing so it will be very easy to know the minor scales immediately by referencing major scales. I got tripped up on intervals for a bit and I'll be incorporating those as well.

Feel free to take my method below and critique the shit out of it, tell me its garbage and that I'm going down the wrong path or should be doing it totally different. I have a blank canvas right now and I want to maximize that early potential for music theory.

I have a poor memory, age and neurodivergence are a factor. I'm making progress I can quickly spell the major scale with the step patterns, and now that I'm starting with D major, I dont really know how to memorize these scales so my intuition is to remember which notes are flat or sharp. So would it be smart to remember that D major has a F# and C#, or is there a better way to do this?

Also, aside from being on paper is there a way I should be incorporating my keyboard or guitar in memorizing these scales and what should I be listening to/paying most attention to?

Finally, if there are other things to memorize at the start, what would that be? Any tips and tricks for memory would be super helpful.

I'm trying to learn so so much at once and my biggest priorities in music are to develop my ear more and also to translate anything in my head to an instrument. Or to have a kind of roadmap while I'm trying to come up with melodies or progressions instead of just blindly playing notes waiting until something clicks.

Right now my knowledge is very beginner level, I am an avid lifelong lover of music, lifetime player of guitar but not dedicated, and ear-wise I can kinda tell if my guitar is out of tune but I cannot tune by ear unless one string is in tune and I can reference the unison notes.

Thanks!