I'd love to see tutorials about frequencies, fundamentals of sound waves, how our ears hear and stuff like that. Information that gives people knowledge to approach making music from a different perspective other than the whole "do what I do and you will sound like a professional" vibe these tutorials give off. If I knew how our brains fill in missing artifacts in reverbs, or how our ears hear a soundstage and allow us to pick out which side information is coming into that soundstage, I would be able to apply this knowledge to how I would approach a certain mix or parts of a mix. On the other hand, a newbie reading this would have no idea what I am even talking about lol

 

if you have an innate connection towards a style of music, making that style should come naturally with experience. For instance, nobody taught me, or showed me how to make ambient music. sophmore year of HS i discovered ambient music and never stopped following that sound. Since I have an internal connection to that sound I can turn a raw guitar track into a lush ambient soundscape without watching a tutorial on how to make a soundscape LIKE THE PROS DO!

 

Last edited: Nov 29, 2022

I'm not convinced. How do you learn what a reverb or a delay is unless someone shows you one? Perhaps if you know other musicians and you're making music with them collaboratively, but I had no clue such things even existed until I saw somebody deploy one in a tutorial video.

And there's a whole load of stuff like that. You're just not aware of it (or at least, I wasn't) until I watched somebody else do it. I have no desire to 'sound like the pro's' -- I just want to make the kind of music I like listening to. But there's very little about that that's intuitive. You have to learn it somewhere. And you can't 'experiment' with a reverb if you don't even know that such a thing exists.

 

lol... I thought your first paragraph there was sarcasm, but, in fact it is not. I still have somewhere the first song I made in grageband in 2007. I didnt know what midi was, I didnt know how to "click in midi". I knew what the metronome was and how to turn my keyboard into musical typing. That blew my mind and I started making unquantized random electronic music (not techno but like elektro beats because I was into total science and newcleus when I was 17). Then I started going thru all the stock garageband fx (myself - not some "producer" on youtube because youtube was in its infancy at this time).

I already knew terms like echo, reverb, flanger, phaser etc.but I didnt know what compression, eq, limiters, and gates were. I knew if I wanted to make a sound "big" I had to use the reverb, if I wanted a sound to echo I had to use delay. If I wanted to make a crunchy sound I would add distortion... I mean... thats just basic stuff... Basically from 2007 til now I fuck around with fx and have always played things into the computer, not clicked in midi. And it started from literally clicking on things and turning knobs while i mashed my keyboard to see what that effect ACTUALLY did.. it wasnt til a couple years later on that I started doing "experimental things" like running a hi hat track to a flanger and then having a delay on the flanger bus... another thing nobody showed me how to do, just simple curiousity is how I learned mostly all this stuff. The only tutorials I watch are on synths to see where things are so I can modulate stuff properly and come up with my own work flows

 

Last edited: Nov 29, 2022

I get what the message you're trying to send but just because you learned things this way doesn't mean it's the only way. And like @BuntyMcCunty mentioned, unless you're collaborating or in the process with other producers you won't really understand, let alone know these things exist. Had I not collaborated with people, I wouldn't have even known what a DAW was until maybe later but because I did, I got into it earlier. I worked with brilliant engineers and producers and learned from every one of them during sessions. Time is of the essence and although it's great to tinker and experiment, there's no doubt it's an inefficient way to learn things. We accelerate our learning process quite a bit if we learn from other people because they have already made mistakes for us. Of course, we will make a few of our own but why hinder it to ourselves? The internet is an awesome place to get share information quickly so it's best that anyone and everyone should take advantage of it.

Also, you're coming from a place that already has your fundamental understanding of production and mixing techniques, but someone who really has a passion for music and just doesn't have the skill for it yet won't, so it's unfair to judge them in that manner. I believe beginner tutorials should exist, no matter how easy or simple the genre is. Let them get a feel of actually making something that sounds like what they listen to. It'll inspire them to work harder or pursue it. The problem OP had was that they were of low quality, which is the most disappointing aspect. I also don't think OP meant to be sarcastic and was expressing genuine concern for missing out on understanding how effects work for example. Like for a long period of time few years ago, I had been using reverb but had no clue how to use pre-delay properly. It was only until I saw a video that explained it thoroughly (and gave examples) that I went back and tested it for myself, on different material I work on until I was confident in what I was doing.

The problem only lies for the beginners who stagnate and follow blindly but an experienced producer is gonna take the information he learns from others and see how it fits into his/her own workflow.

 

Yeah, I wasn't being sarcastic at all. It took me a really long time before I got a grip of how synths actually worked. What the knobs were doing. All the twiddling in the world wasn't helpful to me.

I generally find that I learn fastest by reading. That's how I've always learned in the past so it seemed obvious to me that this would be the best way to learn about electronic music would be by buying and reading books. Could I have even been more wrong? I can read the books now and get important stuff from them -- but things like envelopes, LFO's, filters, etc. I could read about them until the cows came home and be none the wiser about what it is they did and why they were important.

It was really only through watching tutorials and, just as importantly, following along on my own computer, that I finally got any sense of what those things where, how they worked and what role they played in the process.

Compressors in particular. I swear I had no idea what they were -- and even after watching umpteen videos that tried to explain them, I was still no clearer as to what it is they were doing and why. Make the track louder? Why not just turn up the volume? It literally took years before I had a grasp of what they did and why you'd use one.

I think part of the problem is that you aren't just learning about one complex tool -- you're learning tons of them and all at the same time. What a DAW is, how it works. What is Midi? Audio? Why use one rather than the other. Some VST's are instruments and others are effects? What do the effects do? Why do you need them? Tutorials break down that process, allowing you to focus on one component or one aspect of the production process and experiment with it, seeing what it does if you do X and how that changes if you do Y.

I didn't find any of it intuitive at all. Prior to that, my only experience of making music was acoustic instruments. You pick up a guitar or a violin or whatever. You practice hard every day and maybe after five or ten years you don't sound terrible.

 

If you'd like, I have a full PDF on everything about synthesis, since you like reading. It's super stacked with information but you really gotta test it out yourself too. Just like learning music is split up between theory and practical. You gotta test your theories out so they stick and further your understanding.

And with all the plugins that are coming out all the time, I really like to read manuals, so it pisses me off when a plugin release doesn't have a good manual (or stupid online manuals). Also, we're blessed to have plugindoctor to really analyse what our plugins are doing. It's so great having

 

Last edited by a moderator: Nov 30, 2022

I'm actually pretty good now -- I've been doing this since I discovered Rebirth -- Propellerheads 303/808 emulation software, and really got into it when they released Reason 1 or 2.

I think I eventually started to grasp what I was doing re. synths when Rob Papen wrote an e-book on the Four Part Subtractive Synth. And I bought my first hardware synth -- a little Arturia MicroBrute. It was kind of useless for making music, but really helpful as a learning tool. I've got a bunch of hardware synths now. I have to try to stop myself buying them because I don't have the room. And we live in a big house!

But I'd still like to check out your PDF. Can you upload it to a sharing site and DM me the link? I'd give feedback if you wanted it.

 

I thought the tutorials might be good, because they have many obscure interesting indie producers, but the quality is not really the best .-.

Yeah I think that's a little weird. Generally 80% of the tutorials on sister site are techno (including tech house), or hip hop/trap. Tutorials for other house genres or trance are much more unfrequent, and tutorials for other popular electronic genres like hardcore, hardstyle, synthwave, future bass, ambient ect. are even more... uncommon.

 

I completely agree to the OP. I think for the last few month I came across far too many really bad tutorials. I even think most of the tutorials were just bad. I have been thinking about it and maybe we should have a thread where only the best tutorials will be listed. I guess it might be a bit subjective if a tutorial is very good, but still it should be easy to know if tutorials are bad. So i would suggest that we could have a thread where only the best tutorials will be listed grouped by topics so that people can get useful information fast.