Since I don’t make use of the blog all that much, decided to start using it to document my journey as an aspiring rapper — to keep me motivated. I’m not exactly the rapper archetype, even less so than MCs like Childish or lil Dicky, but I’m inspired and moved by music and aspire to make great music of my own. I’m starting off using a free software called LMMS that frequently force closes on Mac, so save often if you do use it. It’s somewhat of a struggle to learn the software coming from a weak musical background, but with youtube tutorial videos on how to use the LMMS, it’s starting to get a little easier.
What I’m actually starting out with is using suggestions from a reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/makinghiphop/comments/3zdlgd/producers_how_did_you_learn_how_to_make_solid/?st=j0itecda&sh=7e96b671) to learn. The gist I got from it was to learn fundamental music theory concepts like chords and scales, to follow videos of people making beats, and to make beats everyday. To start off, I’ve been learning the software, how chords, and scales work, and how to recreate a Travis Scott beat. The video I found was for FL studio ( a more popular ‘DAW’ — something I learned on the reddit subreddit that stands for ‘Digital Audio Workstation’ ). At first I thought this would be a huge problem, but I seem to be accommodating the changes in software fairly easily. One particular example was when the tutorial guide used a shortcut on the piano roll ‘ctrl-u’. I quickly Googled ‘ctrl-u piano roll FL studio’ and was able to find that it represents the command ‘quick chop’. From there I just searched for how to chop in the LMMS piano roll. I unfortunately couldn’t find a mirror command in LMMS, but no worries, the command was more of a convenience than a requirement. I can do exactly what the ‘quick chop’ can do by hand! Although it is a HUGE inconvenience, especially for an aspiring professional. Maybe I’ll try to make a ‘quick chop’ option myself since the software IS open source (although I know it’ll probably be hell to work with code that complex, especially for an unguided newbie to the code base). Anyway, here are some foreign terms that I’ll try and learn before the next post on Thursday. It came up in various tutorials found online. Hopefully I’ll have good definitions for them by then.
-low pass filter
-amplitude
-time
-cutoff
-res
-attack