Saturday, October 21, 2017

Music Technology & EDM tools - Bookmark dump

The recent flood of formulaic, recycled, and repetitive EDM is making me want to make my own. Why is house and big room coming back? I'm hearing the same crappy hardcore gabber sounds come back. Why? Is there really money in that? I bought the software years ago with lifetime updates, and the tools are increasingly more available for cheap or free. And I'm a quick study. I think I'll make a whole bunch of IDM and see if any of it catches on. I get that there's a new generation that didn't hear electronica evolve over the years, so they don't realize that it's seemingly going backwards.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass
I think with a nice sampler / sequencer and some mix automation, I can outdo the tripe I'm hearing on the radio. Especially so, having the massive amount of free sounds from Cymatics and Splice. It's like drinking from a firehose! I'll have to buy more storage. But I realize it's a process of learning to crawl, then walk, then run.

This post is really just a bookmark dump for my own reference, so I have them in a central location for digging in and setting up and filling up my studio computer. 

This is a lot of bookmarks. I wish they were better organized.  Maybe next time.

Free digital audio workstation software (DAWs):

$$ DAW software (many have 14 or 30 day free trials):

Free software / VST plug-ins links:

Producer info/education:

Samples and synth/generator presets:

Classic synth emulations:


Free sound editing:

$$ Sound editing:

Effects:

Mastering:

$$ Mastering:

More good software:

Android:

Apple only? Port that ish: