I’d like to make music, techno, electronic music, beats, whatever you want to call it. How can I start easily? I remember that I made some basic beats 15 years ago. It was straight forward but I can’t remember the software. I tried a couple of DAWs but they have a steep learning curve and I couldn’t find good introductory videos about it. It’s incredibly hard to create just a baseline for me.
To narrow it down, I’m on linux, I spend most of the time with zrythm. Any advice or help into the right direction would be highly appreciated :)
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If you want a DAW with bigger community and a lot of tutorials then obviously you could go with FL Studio or Ableton on Windows/macOS (or maybe you could try to run those with Wine), but on Linux it seems that Ardour is the most popular one. Most tutorials should be quite easily applicable to other DAWs/plugins though, you will just need to put a little more effort into it, but I guess it also means you would learn more. So I wouldn’t care about DAWs too much, because it doesn’t really matter and it’s obviously kinda hot topic in music-making community (just like which distro topics in Linux community haha). Just play with some of them and pick whichever you like the most. Maybe later you will feel that your DAW limits you in some way, but then you will already know what to look for.
Regarding learning resources, just off the top of my head I would recommend watching some videos of unfa. It is a really good channel about making some music on Linux. There are probably some more channels that focus on that too, but I don’t really remember any right now. There are also sites like linuxmusicians.com and linuxaudio.org that may be helpful, especially when looking for plugins and stuff like that. And there are some related communities back on Reddit. Other than that I’d just go and watch some “general” tutorials, e.g. how to make bassline, how to make kick, and try to adapt them to your Linux workflow, as I said earlier, and just try and have fun.
Just remembered that Bitwig also exists. It seems it is quite popular DAW and also kinda similar to Ableton (IIRC it was created by some former Ableton employees), so there should be a lot learning resources for that and it runs natively on Linux. It also comes with a library of sounds and MIDI clips AFAIK, just like the other comments pointed out. The downside is that it’s a paid software.
To add to this, I use Bitwig on Linux and it is really nice. MIDI controllers pretty much just work and when I was swapping between Jack/Pulseaudio/Pipewire, things worked within a few clicks. Finding help for it online is really easy, as well.
Thank you so much!
LMMS is free and works on Linux. It’s far from the best DAW out there, but a great place to start and is pretty similar to FL.
Bandlab is pretty decent. I prefer garageband, since the producer packs add a lot of good sounds. Play around with the synth keyboard and a bass sound effect until you find a cool lick.
That’s it
A DAW that has a lot of sounds/patches that come with it would be the easiest way to start. I know you said linux, but something like garageband gives you a ton of drums/beats and sounds you can use without having to install anything else or buying additional sound packs.
