"99.99%" I'm really glad not to live in the same musical world as you. I discover wonderful things everyday, in every genres. Of course there is some over formuled / coded genres (and that's not about modern/electronic music at all, always been there) but there is still some really enjoyable things in those.

And that's all about point of view though. Virtuosity and Complexity aren't needed to make good music in my opinion. At all. And thanks "god" that's the case. And wtf is lightness. Even Novelty is not a main criteria. If you really think all of this is needed to make good music, of course you find everything shitty. And that's the wrong approach. You're then stuck listening to classical music or over-experimental music.

Learn to appreciate every kind, when it's greatly produced, soulful and efficient as making you feel things. Don't tell me you need all of what you said to get this, it would be really sad.

 

Last edited: Feb 14, 2017

Musicianship is much different than listership. A musician without a clear approach or tendency towards some their own pleasantnesss can not produce anything valuable that provides satisfaction for themselves. I can not limit my listenings to just some fashioned styles like the modern dance genres being provided lots of tutorials for them on our sister site.

When you listen to most of the musics in the "our music" section you see that the producers are getting influenced from the "video tutorials" form Groove3, BassGorilla, AskVideo and so on but I never did it and this is the reason for all of my differences. I'm trying to find my way in music but when a music is being labeled as EDM, what can I generally understand from it?

 

Electronic DANCE Music

 

I am a trained musician and my first attempts at EDM had way too much "Virtuosity and Complexity" in them and made them completely undanceable. Like being smaked in the face with a wall of inversions and arps. The only people that would get them would be other musically trained producers. The whole beginning of learning to write music in the box for me was teaching myself how to dumb it down and make the melodies and harmonies progress in the song parts. To make it more palatable for the average listener. And most importantly danceable

 

Last edited: Feb 14, 2017

Well, Verse > Transition > Chorus is just so good that people use it everywhere. Electronic music is no exception, you can make it less obvious though. Still works great, gets Grammy nominations and 8xPlatinum in Canada:

 

Im so glad that future bass got away from the 1 minute intros. Too hard to hook a listener with ambient oceans, lakes, woods and forests, lol circkets and birds, really?

 

Last edited: Feb 14, 2017

True true, but Verse > Transition > Build Up > Drop = Chorus is getting more and more antiquated. Your link is a good example of a modern electronic track thats works really great commercially without this code, and it is a good thing! Altrough obviously, a build-up/drop code with some new ideas in it is still enjoyable...

 

Completely agree about the Musician / Listener POV differences but I wasn't talking about average/semi pro level producer getting inspired by tutorials, I was talking about profesionnally produced / industry leader music whithin X genre.

 

Influenced? Not really, theres a difference. Im looking for knowledge. I make a completely different style of music from most of the tutorials that I watch and read. For example, I just finished reading both the Bobby Owsinski pdf re issues and watched his bootcamp vid. Highly Recommended for beginners and advanced producers. Nothing about EDM in there at all.
All my learning is subjective and selective now that Im more confident in my skillset. These tutorials arent supposed to be step by step mantra. You learn the technique and apply it in your workflow plus or minus most of their steps because you already have your way. Im always looking for new ways to make my music sound better and more interesting.

 

Last edited: Feb 14, 2017

@foster911 Seriously. You keep saying "edm this, edm that" then pretty much all music sucks for you then all the examples you consider "good music" (by the way, this is the most amateurish approach to music labeling it as "good" or "bad") as being edm are beatless electronica/ambient. This is what you're missing: the dance part. Either start acknowledging this either fix your genre database so people can understand what you're talking about.

@subGENRE The simple fact that one's a trained musician does not guarantee at all one's success in dance music.

The art in dance music is to repeat a 4-bar loop over 5 minutes without sounding boring. You have to acknowledge the audience, that are people on a dance floor that will dance to that track and those people may be drunk or on prescribed pharmaceuticals. So you have to keep it simple, but not that simple that will became boring, not too complex that will became impossible to "hum", not too old sounds and textures not too many new sounds and texture so the overall sound is both fresh and current. Then you have to think that your track may pay on smartphone speakers so you have to carefully pick the sounds and the dynamic range. And many many more tiny details that can make or break a good dance track (so many melodies in certain scales are discarded only because the bass will go too low and lose the energy for the respective notes).

Also, many classical progressions are considered obsolete in dance music. That's why in a dance track one can find a chord or sometimes two in a 4-chords progression that does not fit the scale of the song for example. "chord planing" (that is sampling a chord, then playing the sampled chord from keyboard as a chord - so chords on each note of the chord) is entirely off the charts from a trained musician perspective - at least I never met one to agree with this anyway.

One last thing, as a trained musician you can talk about a "dumbed-down" version of your idea if the track is perceived as average/mediocre by the public. But if your track was a chart topper (aka you took into account all the details involved in making a proper dance record) I'd say is just something else.

The producers' community equals zero, unless you produce to entertain them, they are not your public. Cheers!

Edit: I will admit all the details above (and more) are becoming easier to manage at a certain point, this is the reason the vast majority of producers are "breaking" it after 5-6 years of struggle. However, even if they make it big sooner, there is still a huge amount of tracks (usually well over hundred) they worked on.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Feb 14, 2017

Who said anything about success...I get excited about 100 views/plays, lol. This is my just hobby. I gave up that dream a decade ago when reality hit me

 

Lots of people want to sound like someone successful, as they feel it will make them successful. You can see this in the how to make this sound sub forum. Why people don't just experiment till they come up with something they like beats me, but it's probably people telling they have to have certain types of sounds that are modern. Although sounds play an important role, the idea is more important. I don't tend to watch tutorials on making a genre, as I'm generally not trying to do that. I prefer to watch something on general production, to help me on the mixing and mastering side of things, with my hardware. Look at the Point Blank Friday forum live stuff on youtube, as there's lots of useful stuff to be gleaned and it's usually quite interesting. They're usually discussing one part af music production each time.

EDM stands for Electronic Dance Music. The problem is that the term has been hijacked, and is manly used to describe the style of dance music that these superstar Djs play at these huge festivals. This will be what the current flavour of the moment is. At this point in time that's Big Room or Main Room House as they call it, and it is not the only thing dance music has to offer, so when you see something labelled EDM, do what I do, and say to yourself "I'll give that a miss then." and you'll be so much happier about the whole dance music thing, as you'll start to find it's real heart, the underground.
At the end of the day your probably not the dance music type, but don't think it's all bad, as there is a lot that you won't of heard yet. For someone like you, I would check out Steampunk, I think you'll find it quite interesting.

 

Last edited: Feb 15, 2017

"Chord planing" sounds like shit using temperament like meantone, werckmeister, young and others. If you think about it, the classical/baroque music is concerned with things like symmetry, beauty and similar.
Even on 12tet it sounds slightly weird, but the problem is that it gets boring after several bars.

Virtuosity or the lack of musicality- quantised notes, "melodies" that are copied from other songs/tunes, lack of expressive articulations (vibrato, trills, slides and so on).
Complexity - something may be complex, but confusing; but most of the time music out there is simple - lack of ideas, empty, missing substance, cliche etc. Striking the right balance is pretty hard.
Lightness (effortless continuity, flowing phrases, smooth transitions and flow) is always appreciated by the listeners.

 

Thanks for clarifying. Makes more sense to me as Listener point of view.

 

Dude, did you even listen to the track? It's totally Intro > Verse > Transition (when the hat kicks in) > Breakdown > Riser (snare roll, noise whoosh) > Drop = Chorus

 

We're obviously not talking about the same "build up - drop" cheesy over-used code, because it's not in this track. At all.

 

In dance music we use only 12-t so I don't see the relevance.

Some planar chords sound weird, some not - these are used mostly. Usually are used as a planar stab, rarely as the core of a production (you won't hear a "planar progression" too often), a planar stab can't get "boring after several bars" as a normal chord stab does not become boring.

One simply can't use expressive articulations in techno music for example without damaging the "industrial" characteristic of this genre for instance.
Same for virtuosity or lack of musicality, quantised notes: these are artistic choices, not producer's ignorance. For instance, in complextro and dubstep they tried to introduce virtuosity to some degree by splitting the melody over several very distinct synths. But it's not always possible in other genres.

As for melodies copied from other songs, there are pretty solid copyright laws around on melody and groove, if the song is out an no one sued is fine. But for the sake of the argument let's say you are right: this aspect has nothing to do with the rest of the list. Indeed, you can find a tune that checks all the things you've mentioned, but many great dance tracks check all the things except stealing someone else's melody.

Electronic music is now over 35 years old, I think it's time to appreciate it as a total different wing along classical, folk, rock etc. It's not worse, or better, is just different. And it's f-in complex as a whole given the fact that many people in this thread have no idea what they're talking about. It only looks simple for the ones that never bothered to deconstruct & make successful music in these many sub-genres.

PS (not necessarily related to @23322332's post): As always, for anyone thinking that they can make "better electronic music which does not sound like shit", please do. Because it's whole lotta talk and zero walk in these threads.

 

You won't see progress. For example, foster is not here to learn or make progress. He's here to tell us that everything sucks, if it isn't exactly what he considers good. You can try to explain in all detail, where people are wrong (and you do a pretty good job), it won't make them open their eyes. It's almost like the conspiracy theory scene. In this topic it became pretty clear that "I like this type of music more than the other" became "This music is good, the other is bad". Someone with such a stupid approach won't look beyond the mental room he's locked in.

 

For someone who's never proven it themselves, even when asked to, that's a big statement there. Do the words "pot and kettle" spring to mind. Because if you're not willing to put your music where your mouth is, it's extremely arrogant to expect others to. Don't you think? Be seeing ya!

 

The problem is he's very naive about this kind of music. The problem being, that he's not a dancer (I doubt he's ever been to a club, let alone got trollied) so his understanding is very limited to what he hears. Now as that seems to be EDM, which for all intents and purposes, isn't used to talk about the whole of dance music, but rather big room festival stuff, that these big name Djs play, I can uderstand his confusion.
But I will always give him a roasting, when he puts all dance music in the same box. His musical preferences lie in the darker, alternative and sometimes sleazier stuff the music world has to offer. I think he needs to take a trip to "Torture Garden". That would open his mind somewhat.