{"id":1575,"date":"2014-09-20T23:24:08","date_gmt":"2014-09-21T04:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/?p=1575"},"modified":"2014-10-04T14:05:41","modified_gmt":"2014-10-04T19:05:41","slug":"the-cheap-guide-to-making-music-part-0-get-some-knowledge-for-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stupidamericantourist.com\/?p=1575","title":{"rendered":"The Cheap Guide to Making Music, Part 0: Get Some Knowledge For Free!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been kicking around the idea of making this kind of guide for a while. Why? Because every day on Reddit, I see 2-3 posts of the, “I want to get into EDM or EMP, but I only have 35 cents in my pocket right now. How do I do it?”<\/p>\n

First, you need to get the right attitude towards doing this. It’s going to take a while to get good at it (I’m still not good), so you need to have your expectations set at the right level.<\/p>\n

It’s Okay to Suck at First<\/h3>\n

Listen to Ira Glass<\/a>, who is talking about producing news for radio, but this advice applies to everything. See? Even he sucked for a long time before he started to get good. So it’s okay for you to suck.<\/p>\n

Now, I hope you’ve adjusted your expectations accordingly, so you don’t feel like you want to jump off of a building if nobody likes your first song, or even your first fifty.<\/p>\n

It’s cool! We’ve all been there. That’s how we learn.<\/p>\n

It helps if you focus on not sucking<\/a>. (This is a great article to keep in mind.) But it’s hard to not suck at first, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing, so don’t beat yourself up too<\/em> much.<\/p>\n

The same guy who wrote the article on how to not suck wrote this excellent article<\/a> that you need to engrave upon your soul. You really need to<\/strong> read this before you make the mistake of wasting a lot of time and money on stuff you don’t need.<\/p>\n

Step 0: Now Get Some Knowledge (But don’t go overboard.)<\/h3>\n

Before you do anything, buy anything, whatever, go get some knowledge<\/strong>, but don’t bury yourself in it. Get enough so you know the basics, understand what you’re doing, then move on to making music<\/strong>. Don’t get caught on the hamster wheel of over-training. There’s a fine line between getting knowledge and never getting off the starting line.<\/p>\n

This also goes for things like shopping for gear, talking on forums, etc. I’ve talked about this before with respect to Japanese– it’s the meta game. It fools you into thinking you’re doing X, but you’re not. You’re talking about X, you’re preparing for X, but you’re NOT doing X.<\/p>\n

With that caution in mind:<\/p>\n

Coursera has a bunch of free music classes<\/a>. Look for the Berklee classes:<\/p>\n