Let's Play Music

First things, first: An introduction

Hi everybody! If you've ever interacted with me online you probably know that talking shop gives me great joy! You also definitely know that I'm a very vocal advocate of musical education. Anyone can put a simple song together but making art is about making choices. Yes, you can choose to use just a couple of chords, and yes, they might produce something nice, but if those chords are the only ones you know, it's not much of a choice, is it?

For a while now I've been meaning to start an series of tutorial videos on various aspects of music composition & production covering things I've learned during the years I've been a student of both disciplines. Now, I'm not a scholar, and I'm definitely not done with learning—that is literally impossible—but sharing the few things I know might inspire some of you to keep on learning, which is the best possible outcome of this whole experiment!

It took a few failed attempts, and a couple of awkward first videos, but I'm happy to announce that the "Let's Play Music" series is now a thing! Keep in mind that this is not an endeavor of regular frequency by any means. Videos will go up completely at random and I have zero plans of keeping any sort of schedule. That said, the more feedback and interest I get from you, the more likely I am to keep at it.

The topics will probably have a slight bias towards in-the-box* music making, since this is how I work. But I'm happy to take suggestions and talk about anything music-related, as long as I feel I have something to say about it.

For some of the videos, I will be posting additional text here, especially when I feel it's meaningful to sum up a technique & tools in simple and discreet steps so that people don't always need to go back to the entire video. Other times (like the first couple of videos about drum programming) that might be pointless so I will mostly leave this space blank, with just a few basic notes on what the video covers. (By the way, you can subscribe to this blog's RSS but I will also be posting these on twitter and facebook if you prefer).

* if you're not familiar with the term, it refers to music production using primarily software, commonly abbreviated ITB. As opposed to "out-of-the-box", or OTB, referring to music produced using external hardware equipment (mixers, effect units, etc.).

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Let's Play Drums (part's I & II)

But enough with the reading; let's get a-watching! In this first post I give you the first two videos of the series, in which I talk about MIDI drums. In Part I, I tackle routing settings so you can use your DAW's mixer on your drums (instead of the plugin's internal one) and in part II, I talk about programming a realistic MIDI performance. (This is something I have spent a lot of thought and time on. Even though the video is rather long, I still feel I barely touch on the subject and will likely revisit it in the future. Hopefully there's still some good insight in the video to get the basic philosophy of it.)

DISCLAIMER: I apologize in advance for the non-existent amount of polish in the videos! As I've mentioned, the first few are awkward and I'm obviously finding my way through this: the mic sound is awful (I used the camera mic...) and there are several edits because I wasn't really prepared... I promise the next videos are getting better! I hope you will still find them interesting and get something useful out of it! Enjoy, and if you like it, why not subscribe for more and share it with your friends! ;)

If there's anything in the video you don't understand, please leave a comment on YouTube and I will try to explain it in simpler terms. Also, don't forget to suggest topics for upcoming videos!

Thanks for watching!