# Advice on Getting Started Please!



## OriginalJunglist (Dec 30, 2022)

Hello!
I have dabbled here and there with music throughout my life, such as taking piano lessons for a few months 3 times in my life and violin lessons once.
I bought the original, first version of Reason back in 2000 and played around with it but never created an actual track.
I spent a year or so in 2008 really trying to learn Reason and create some ideas and eventually created one actual track.
( if anyone would like to reference this and provide feedback).
I also studied theory a bit during this time.

I got busy with work and moving from one side of the globe to the other, and then I purchased Live with Push 2 when Push 2 first came out. Again, I played around but never really learned Live or produced anything of substance.
Got very busy with work, the busiest I ever have been in my life until COVID really.

So, it took a few years to get over the burnout and now here I am.
I built a new PC for work purposes, and I just started to get the itch again after spending some time researching what PC/platform/CPU and such would be good for music production, which lead to seeing BF deals in reddit threads.

So, now I upgraded to Live 11 and purchased EastWest Opus Diamond, All Samples from MARS, the complete SoundTools kit, Scaler 2, ReMidi, Serum and some packs for that, Melody Sauce 2, Cthulhu, and RapidComposer.

Regarding styles of music, I grew up listening to A LOT of Kitaro. I was also infatuated with MARS Pump Up the Volume when that first came out. I discovered Jungle in high school, and I would say that has been my primary style since. That was what I wanted to create as well (even bought Renoise for that purpose, but same pattern as always).

I still want to create Jungle; I particularly like modern Jungle from Scientific Wax and would like to produce stuff like that.
However, I really want to create cinematic-style music now. I am a huge fan of Secession Studios, for example.

In terms of hardware, I have a Push 2 as well as an AKAI MPK49 I purchased in 2008 I think. 
My wife also has a Yamaha YDP-162, which I will use for practice.
Interface is RME Babyface Pro.

I am overwhelmed and excited with how much I need to learn to even start attempting to create something.
I don't want to repeat previous mistakes of trying to jump in and create what's in my head when I don't even know the basics of the software and such.
I bought an annual subscription to MacProVideo for the purpose of learning Live and going through anything else that interests me.
I also selected the 2-month membership to ProducerTech as the free gift when I bought some of the plugins.
I also purchased and have started the Piano for All program.

So, finally, with all that out of the way, my main question is: Given I have virtually non-existent piano skills, minimal ability to read music, very basic understanding of theory, zero skill in Live, zero skill in how to use what I bought, particularly EastWest Opus, and zero understanding of how to write for orchestra, what would you recommend to study (books, online programs, whatever) and in what order to get where I finally want to go, which is producing music similar to Secession Studios and Kitaro's Kojiki (highly recommended!)?

I have read some threads here already, and so I found mentions of Thinkspace and Christopher Siu and such.
Christopher's program looks interesting, but I feel like I probably am not ready to start there.

Other questions of lesser importance:
Also, do I need a better controller to really be able to take advantage of Opus?
Do I need 88 keys? Would hammer action actually hinder playing Opus?

Anything else I should grab while things are on sale? 

I really appreciate anyone that takes the time to read this spiel and provide useful feedback!


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## proggermusic (Dec 30, 2022)

Welcome, and good luck! And most importantly, have fun. 

You don't need more gear. You have plenty to get going. Yes, learning to play a bit more piano would be good. Start by trying to figure out simple music you're already familiar with by ear. Transcribing music (by which I mean figuring out how to play it by ear, you don't necessarily need to write it down) is the best way to build your musical vocabulary. As you learn how to hear and play a few things, you can start reading about basic theory: intervals, chords, rhythms, etc. None of it is particularly secret and there are numerous free resources out there about those concepts!

It's never too soon to experiment with improvising and writing. Just mess around and save anything you come up with that you like. Think of it as a two-part process that starts today and never really ends: study great music that you didn't write; then experiment with making your own; rinse and repeat!


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## mybadmemory (Dec 30, 2022)

The only thing you need is the dedication and time to start trying, failing, trying again, and don’t stop until you’re not failing anymore. You’ll figure it out along the way.


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## mybadmemory (Dec 30, 2022)

My only other advice would be to not get stuck in the trap of believing you need to acquire more gear before you can get going. All you really need is the computer, DAW, and Opus. A pair of headphones. And you’re all set. A midi keyboard is nice if you can play it but anyone will work. There are loads of people here who do fantastic music with nothing more than that (or even less).

Reference stuff you like and either try to recreate it to learn how it was done or try to create something similar if you’re more into writing your own stuff. Personally I try to do a bit of both. Recreate a track. Create one of my own. And so on. When you hit a roadblock Google it, check YouTube, or ask here. People are very helpful!


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## mybadmemory (Dec 30, 2022)

Ok. One more thought. There are literally millions of ways to approach learning or creating anything. No one more right than the other. You just need to find what you’re naturally drawn to regardless of what that is and dive in. As you progress you will understand where you need to learn more, but where you should start is truly individual and probably best guided by pure curiosity and joy. ☺️


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## jneebz (Dec 30, 2022)

Runnnnnnnnnn farrrrrrrrr awayyyyyyy while you still can.

Or yeah, do what he 👆🏻 said.


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## SchnookyPants (Dec 31, 2022)

The answer is not acquiring more schtuff.
That seems an excuse and avoidance.

The one, single thing that you need is to actually START.

Put in the effort. Do that, and the rest will fall into place.

Good luck, and _have fun_.


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## tc9000 (Dec 31, 2022)

You don't need a weighted keyboard to write music with Opus - the only thing you need a weighted keyboard for is if you want to be able to play a real, physical piano someday. 

My advice is to identify some reference tracks you really like and try to decompose them and replicate them in your DAW. Doesent have to be the whole track - if you like some chords, try to work out what they are, if you like a beat, try to match the sounds and the MIDI in the DAW.

I recommend learning some piano, and some basic theory. How far you go into theory is up to you. Train your ears to recognise common chords and intervals and learn to play some common standards - I think piano for all will cover that nicely.


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## tc9000 (Dec 31, 2022)

Make lots of tracks! I make and abandon loads and loads of tunes. My DAW is littered with half finished tracks and I'm OK with that - I'm not aiming to finish lots of tracks - I'm aiming to play around with some chords and a melody mostly.


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## OriginalJunglist (Dec 31, 2022)

Thanks everyone for the feedback and encouragement.
I was hoping to get some specific recommendations on books or programs, but I know there are other threads on that.


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## OriginalJunglist (Dec 31, 2022)

tc9000 said:


> You don't need a weighted keyboard to write music with Opus - the only thing you need a weighted keyboard for is if you want to be able to play a real, physical piano someday.
> 
> My advice is to identify some reference tracks you really like and try to decompose them and replicate them in your DAW. Doesent have to be the whole track - if you like some chords, try to work out what they are, if you like a beat, try to match the sounds and the MIDI in the DAW.
> 
> I recommend learning some piano, and some basic theory. How far you go into theory is up to you. Train your ears to recognise common chords and intervals and learn to play some common standards - I think piano for all will cover that nicely.


Thanks for some specific feedback!
I agree that I should try to decompose some stuff I like. I have absolutely no idea how to go about doing that though, but I'll give it a go.


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## tc9000 (Jan 1, 2023)

I should say - I'm very much on the same journey as you - still figuring all of this out!

For being able to listen to a melody (and / or chords) and then reproduce that on the keyboard or in the DAW, I would recommend ear training - learning to recognise intervals, chords, etc. The Ear training section of the Tenuto mobile app is great for this, but tonegym also seems to be v good (i've only looked at the free part). One more app that has been useful to me is FlowKey - but it has also allowed me to avoid learning the theory (e.g. by learning to play piano peices by rote), so yeah - not so good.

As I have learned to "play" guitar and piano without knowing the theory, I have tended to learn shapes - chords and scales - but this has only got me so far (e.g. stuck in four chord town haha*) and I know that learning intervals and gaining a better understanding of harmony will help me move forward.

I suspect learning all the major and minor scales in all keys and learning to play them, hear them and name the notes in them (moving up and down) would be great training also (then doing the same with the modes), but I'm way too lazy and end up noodling about hahah.

* https://vi-control.net/community/threads/stuck-in-four-chord-town-please-help.124751/


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## GtrString (Jan 1, 2023)

To tackle your sense of being overwhelmed seems to be the first thing you need to solve to free yourself up to become creative.

I would suggest prioritizing to create two templates, one for creating jungle music, with drum sampler, pad synths, bass instruments, melodic instruments ect all loaded up on tracks. And a guide marker track set up with a form for jungle (like verse, chorus, drop, ect whats needed, youtube is full of examples you can take away from on form and types of instruments/ arrangements in jungle). Save that as a template in your daw, so you can load that up when you want to make music, so you can concentrate on that in stead of setting everything up each time, spending too much time confusing and derailing yourself.

Same with orchestral, cinematic. Set up a specific template for that, so you don’t have to worrying about making all of those technical decisions when you just want to create. You don’t want your technical mind to mess with your creative mind, they are not very good friends.

Scaler is great, use that as the first track in all of your templates.

Start with the courses on Thinkspace, take the basic, most foundational ones on music theory first. They are also the cheapest. Make sure you work with it, in terms of using it in your actual music, and not just read them through cluttering up your mind. Take your time. They also have courses on templates, orchestral music ect. It will help tackle your overwhelm to just stick with one place to learn, untill that feeling goes away. Just make the desicion, thinkspace are unquestionably good.

In addition, try get something as “orchestration recipes” to get started on composing orchestral music. Imitation is the fastest road to originality, you shoot for Mars and hit the Moon, boom there is your unique, original work.

Don’t fall into the abyss of gear accusation, it has very little to do with actual music making. Try do the work first, and only search for gear, when you experience a need in your process of creation. A need should be defined as a situation you can’t get pass or a problem you can’t solve without the thing. If it doesn’t solve a problem you actually experience, don’t give a shi* - the gear “want’s” are irrelevant, it’s just automatic culture penetrating your head without consent. Don’t give it to them.

Happy new 2023.


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## mybadmemory (Jan 1, 2023)

OriginalJunglist said:


> I am overwhelmed and excited with how much I need to learn to even start attempting to create something.
> I don't want to repeat previous mistakes of trying to jump in and create what's in my head when I don't even know the basics of the software and such.


I really think the classic saying that an artist doesn’t need anything other than a pen and a piece of paper to create art holds true in music as well. You can make music with nothing but a tape recorder and a guitar. Or with just an iPhone. Many people don’t have any midi keyboard but just program notes or score with a keyboard and mouse. I myself started with a computer and a small midi keyboard before I even had any speakers or even headphones, just listening through the speakers in the laptop I was using. All of the hardware and software you can get is really nothing more than convenience or perhaps inspiration, but really not necessary in any way at all. 

And I think the same is true with education and theory as well. The idea that you need to acquire gear, or learn theory before you can start is just not true. You can acquire both gear and theory as you go along, and that road is endless as you will probably want to both buy and learn more and more the further you get. It will all evolve naturally when you hit certain roadblocks that prevent you from going forward. But to start, you really just need to actually start. By putting the pen to the paper so to speak.

An interesting thing I read is that the theory that we learn quicker as children and that it gets harder and harder as we grow older is actually completely debunked by now. We learn much faster as adults. The difference is that we as adults have such high expectations on the results that we get demotivated quicker and just quit. We want to get from 0 to 100 in no time which is of course impossible. While children are happy enough with proceeding from 0 to 1, to 2, to 3 and so on. Which keeps them going.

Minding that I think the biggest mistake you can do while trying to learn something new is to start out with trying to make a masterpiece. You need to start super small and be fine with a very slow progression in the beginning. Recreating is probably easier than creating before you get somewhere but just recreating a full song can also be daunting. Perhaps try to start out by recreating a small snippet from something you like, that is quite simple and only contain a few sounds?


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## OriginalJunglist (Jan 1, 2023)

tc9000 said:


> I should say - I'm very much on the same journey as you - still figuring all of this out!
> 
> For being able to listen to a melody (and / or chords) and then reproduce that on the keyboard or in the DAW, I would recommend ear training - learning to recognise intervals, chords, etc. The Ear training section of the Tenuto mobile app is great for this, but tonegym also seems to be v good (i've only looked at the free part). One more app that has been useful to me is FlowKey - but it has also allowed me to avoid learning the theory (e.g. by learning to play piano peices by rote), so yeah - not so good.
> 
> ...


Thanks, I have Perfect Ear on my phone. Maybe I'll start doing 10 minutes a day of that!


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## OriginalJunglist (Jan 1, 2023)

GtrString said:


> To tackle your sense of being overwhelmed seems to be the first thing you need to solve to free yourself up to become creative.
> 
> I would suggest prioritizing to create two templates, one for creating jungle music, with drum sampler, pad synths, bass instruments, melodic instruments ect all loaded up on tracks. And a guide marker track set up with a form for jungle (like verse, chorus, drop, ect whats needed, youtube is full of examples you can take away from on form and types of instruments/ arrangements in jungle). Save that as a template in your daw, so you can load that up when you want to make music, so you can concentrate on that in stead of setting everything up each time, spending too much time confusing and derailing yourself.
> 
> ...


This is awesome!
I never even considered the idea of style templates. Sounds like an interesting exercise just to figure this out.

Would you say the most basic theory courses on Thinkspace offer more, even if just homework exercises, over the theory videos on Producer Tech or MacProVideo? 
I went through the basic course on Producer Tech already, and it's really basic and aimed at beat makers with tricks on how to work around lack of theory, for example.


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## OriginalJunglist (Jan 1, 2023)

mybadmemory said:


> I really think the classic saying that an artist doesn’t need anything other than a pen and a piece of paper to create art holds true in music as well. You can make music with nothing but a tape recorder and a guitar. Or with just an iPhone. Many people don’t have any midi keyboard but just program notes or score with a keyboard and mouse. I myself started with a computer and a small midi keyboard before I even had any speakers or even headphones, just listening through the speakers in the laptop I was using. All of the hardware and software you can get is really nothing more than convenience or perhaps inspiration, but really not necessary in any way at all.
> 
> And I think the same is true with education and theory as well. The idea that you need to acquire gear, or learn theory before you can start is just not true. You can acquire both gear and theory as you go along, and that road is endless as you will probably want to both buy and learn more and more the further you get. It will all evolve naturally when you hit certain roadblocks that prevent you from going forward. But to start, you really just need to actually start. By putting the pen to the paper so to speak.
> 
> ...


Good suggestions.

Yeah, my mindset is not continually acquiring more gear. Specifically, I was wondering about the keyboard and making sure I have the right kind for creating orchestral pieces.


Then, I just thought I'd ask for recommendations on anything given sales, and that seems to have given the wrong impression.

I also bought a decent amount of stuff just now, but a lot of that was just because it was very cheap and not sure if i will really even want to use it, like ReMidi, for example.


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## GtrString (Jan 1, 2023)

OriginalJunglist said:


> This is awesome!
> I never even considered the idea of style templates. Sounds like an interesting exercise just to figure this out.
> 
> Would you say the most basic theory courses on Thinkspace offer more, even if just homework exercises, over the theory videos on Producer Tech or MacProVideo?
> I went through the basic course on Producer Tech already, and it's really basic and aimed at beat makers with tricks on how to work around lack of theory, for example.


I’d say the basic ones are their short courses in musical composition, but I don’t want to advice you against the others you’ve found. Go with your gut feeling, learning is a bit like food, you have to go with what you like and what you can make sense of. And they are not mutually exclusive. You are in a learning stage that will go on for some time, so just take it easy and don’t take on more than you can practice with.


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## OriginalJunglist (Jan 1, 2023)

GtrString said:


> I’d say the basic ones are their short courses in musical composition, but I don’t want to advice you against the others you’ve found. Go with your gut feeling, learning is a bit like food, you have to go with what you like and what you can make sense of. And they are not mutually exclusive. You are in a learning stage that will go on for some time, so just take it easy and don’t take on more than you can practice with.


Well, like I said in my original post, I bought an annual pass to MacProVideo when I upgraded Live to 11 for the courses on Live. They just happen to also have a few theory courses.

And, I have access to Producer Tech for 2 months just because that was a gift received when buying some of the plugins.

So, I didn't choose these for their theory courses.
I would like a theory course that is aimed at or at least sets you up for orchestral composition.


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## HitEmTrue (Jan 1, 2023)

Others have mentioned recreating music that you like. When doing this, it is helpful to drag the original song into your DAW (Live in your case) as the 1st track. You’d want to do this in arrangement view at first. Then you loop different parts of the song, figure out how to play them, and listen to what elements you here in the music so you can attempt to copy each part. You don’t have to get it exactly the same….try to find a synth patch that sounds similar, or create a patch, and go with it and get the midi into the timeline. You’ll find that during all this process you will run into “how do I do this” situations. You’ll find the answer on YouTube, and as you proceed, you’ll be filling in the blanks in your skills in using the software.


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## Emanuel Fróes (Jan 1, 2023)

OriginalJunglist said:


> Hello!
> I have dabbled here and there with music throughout my life, such as taking piano lessons for a few months 3 times in my life and violin lessons once.
> I bought the original, first version of Reason back in 2000 and played around with it but never created an actual track.
> I spent a year or so in 2008 really trying to learn Reason and create some ideas and eventually created one actual track.
> ...



learn to sing what you read, figured bass, some easy piano pieces, and jazz improv. Then you have the brain muscle for all

You can also book a first free lesson with me

* my profession is to give such advices ; )


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## Greeno (Jan 2, 2023)

Hello Original Junglist!
DnB/Jungle long time listener and producer, I also am a budding composer but not new to it.

for your jungle production I would highly recommend the following tutorial channel!

Stranjah https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeLFtU-sqofx-UsM2ixZa-w
some really relevant tutorials on his channel!

Sample Genie - specialist knowledge by the specialists - it may not be the particluar sound you aim to make but it is mostly all relevant and really well done, they have loads of videos in the vault to buy etc. https://sample-genie.com/

Also if you can use Reason, get hold of the Rex refill pack called DnB REX - I have used this for years, it has tonnes of breaks ( includes all the famous breaks) all in folders that you can easily export into your DAW and easily manipulate, cut chop etc - such a massive time saver because I see other people trying to get the original break WAV and then fiddle around with chopping it up and time stretching etc in their DAW, no need as it's all done for you!. Also try the sample pack called Jungle Warfare 1&2 which I think was from Zero G?. Failing both of them you should be able to find breaks packs on Loopmasters etc.

For composing, I have found Guy Michelmore and Marc Jovani really helpful. I have been doing Marc's SVO and Orchestration courses but he also gives away lots of valuable tips for free on his channel.
Best of luck and feel free to hit me up re dnb/jungle production


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