What a year of making EDM taught me
I published an article on January 6, 2020, about spending 30 days creating EDM. As an 80's guitar musician, EDM was a whole new world for me and one I was fascinated with. If you want to the entire back story, read the article and then come back.
There were many lessons along my journey. In the end, you might be surprised where I landed. Let me back up a bit and give you details of my 1 year + production journey.
Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)
The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is a very important part of making music in any genre. I remember in the ’80s, the cost of studio sessions was not for the faint at heart. With today’s systems, it’s something you can set up for under $500 in your home. There are also a few free DAW’s if you do some googling, but I’m going to talk specifically about my picks. I chose to start out with Ableton Live 10 Standard. I really liked the interface in Ableton, but it became apparent that Ableton has not yet been able to leverage the new multi-core hardware like the new MacBook Pro i9 8 core machines. This is a challenge with many applications but this ultimately led me to migrate over to Logic X from Apple.
INTERFACES and INSTRUMENTS
While you can have great success just paint music on a piano roll in your DAW (I do that about 50% of the time). There is value if you’re a musician or even an aspiring musician in buying a basic Midi Keyboard and a Digital Audio interface to your DAW. I chose to buy the Novation Launchkey 49 MK2 as it was a good price and seemed to have everything I would need for midi drum tracks, keyboard, pads, leads, and control surfaces. I initially chose the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 3rd Generation for my digital audio interface. It provides outputs, headphone separation, and a couple of analog instruments such as Guitar and Bass as direct inputs. There are better interfaces on the market than the Scarlett’s, but they are more money. In the end, many of these analogs to Digital converts use very similar chipsets. This unit was also USB-C and was a good fit for my MacBook that I was using.
VST
EDM is a fantastic genre and one that is filled with tech, music, and endless creations. Let’s start with the harsh lessons I learned with VSTs (Virtual instruments) and audio plugins (things like unique reverb, compressors, etc.).
There are core principles in each music genre; EDM is no different. However, sifting thru the complexity of what instruments, what audio units, and where to get them is a vast universe of wonder and confusion. I initially decided to just follow what most youtube producers were using and that tools with Serum by Xfer. This is one of the most widely used and supported virtual instruments being used today. There are many, and each one has a spot for the styles being used. After buying Serum, I spent time every month finding, buying, and building presets for instruments. I found several companies that were rocked solid every time I would buy presets. One such company was Surge Sounds. I feel they have some of the best presets out there for fair prices.
You can go crazy with VSTs, and I have purchased far too many that I never use. My advice; start with a few and build slowly. I also feel that big bulk packages that are really expensive, like IK media packs, are not all that great compared to many smaller boutique-style plugins.
There are also hundreds of free and amazing plugins like SpitFire Audio’s Soft Piano.
One VST that I think has an incredible sound and is widely used is KONTACT 6, and like others I have described, your mileage may vary.
DRUMS (ALSO VST)
Next up on my adventure, was figuring out Drums. There are a LOT of great drum options out there. I mentioned above that I converted to Logic. If your a logic user already, you have a pretty good drum interface you can use. Of course, I was on Albeton and wanted something that would give me reasonably good drum sounds, and that would provide me with pre-created midi tracks for the drums. I initially chose XLN’s addictive drums, a fantastic product that sounds absolutely amazing. However, they were a better fit IMO for rock, country, metal, and similar but less for EDM. I then moved over to Toontrack Easy Drummer. Toontrack has a vast expansion set of drums and built-in midi tracks that come with it. You can build a quick song in minutes, and the upgrades are endless.
Audio Units (AU)
It seems that there are many names used for this product segment, but I’ll just call them Audio Units (AU) because that feels right to me. An AU is just something that changes the sound of tracks, instruments, and ultimately the master final. They are EXTREMELY important in any type of music mixing, but none seems more than EDM. This is everything from EQs to compressors for sidechaining or tricks in automation effects.
I could write an entire article on the use of AU’s as it’s a very vast subject. If you are interested in that, leave me a comment, and I’ll write up something.
Production
We now have a DAW, an analog to digital audio interface, a couple of VSTs, and perhaps a keyboard or guitar to use along with painting in our songs. The next step is something that I didn’t fully grasp the value of until I had been playing around for over 6 months, trying my hardest to create a Spotify banger (Still working on that one). What was that next step? It was understanding the value of a reference track.
Reference Tracks
Reference tracks are very important, especially for someone new to producing music. This holds true IMO regardless of the genre. If you don’t know, a reference track is simply a track (song) downloaded to your computer that you can drop into your DAW and use as a reference to the song your making. The goal is not to make a copy of the reference track (however, that is a great way to start learning), but rather a way to understand how the song is composed, mixed, and mastered. How long to the drop. How long is the intro? How long is the bridge, if it has one. What about the song makes it settle into your soul. Having an RT makes it much easier to build your tracks with a similar structure, volume level, composition, etc. This is very helpful when getting started, and it becomes helpful when you start to finalize your mix, and you want to compare your EQ settings with popular songs. This is another rabbit hole that is very deep, and there are hundreds of youtube videos on how to do it.
Remix Contests
Enter Skio Music. They have an ongoing remix contest. I was nowhere near the skillset required to win the contest (nor am I yet). I realized that it was a way to get free Stems (tracks of a song broken out individually) and lyrics from some of the top producers in the industry. This not only allowed me to add to my library of samples it was also a really great way to get references for all kinds of instruments and subgenres for popular songs. I also felt that I could do my best and just keep working to become better one hour at a time, one remix at a time. One of the remixes I was happy with was a contest for Wynona Oaks. She has a great sound, and the music was also something I could get my head around at this point (4 months in). That original remix (fairly dated) is here. To be clear, I don’t consider this song to be awesome. Rather this song is early learning that turned out….ok…
Where I am at now
So after a year plus adventure, I have settled back to mainly playing guitar and bass. I did find a combination of EDM combined with my love for guitar, and that something is known as LoFi music. It’s a genre of its own, and many refer to it as Chill music. It has a heavy influence of guitar, bass, and keyboards with some cool technical components and hip-hop-style drums. Add in some atmosphere elements and some bit crushers and you 80% there. Here is a great playlist on Spotify if you want to check it out. Here is a simple short example of my recent work in this space. Beyond that, I have paused some of my efforts in that Spotify EDM Bangger effort and started to work on building out songs where I make all the tracks and partner with my good buddy (also a medium author) Casey McMullen for vocals. My latest creation.
Thank you for reading this article. I am deciding what areas of this journey I should cover next. If you have a request, let me know in the comments, and I’ll build it out.
