Nabeel Ansari

https://www.coursera.org/specialization/modernmusician/5 Here, Meteo. This may be of some use. On the contrary, producers of pop music are not usually connected to the music itself. These artists have hired recording/mixing engineers, those who have been working with all sorts of mixing equipment over the last century. These people have much more mixing knowhow than many on OCR, who are mostly gamer-hobbyists (with the exception of our VGM composers and engineers) and have only really worked with their own DAW's in the context of remixing (and mixing to the point of "good for the judge's panel"), and may not even factor knowledge of acoustics and proper signal flow into their mixing. Mixing/engineering is a vast art form in itself, which is why it's a disconnected profession from composition. The move to the "project studio" (all-in-one, composing and producing tools alike) from the traditional studio (artists come at a set time to a dedicated recording building, the parts are recorded and the mixer mixes on a large console) has only become a legitimate option in the past couple decades, and then we saw the rise of home studio composers, who wrote music and also produced/mastered it. This is a fresh approach to music, and saying people who do it this way are better than dedicated mixing/mastering engineers is not paying any respect to how old mixing music actually is. In fact, if you look at "bad" pop music, just listen to the production; it's very clean and well-done.

If you think the FL Studio Bible will help you write music, by all means, go ahead and buy it.

Your analogy makes absolutely no sense. Asking "how do I write good music" is not the same thing as asking "how do I make chicken parmigiana" and believing so exposes the flaw in your approach. There are recipes for chicken parmigiana because it is defined. Something is or isn't chicken parmigiana. You can look up a recipe for it because it is a thing that exists. The only logical analogy would be picking a song and asking "how do I write it?" In which case, all you have to do is look up the sheet music, plug it into your DAW, and match the track levels of any recording of the song that you're listening to. If you want a chef analogy, what you're looking for is "how do I start from scratch and just make an original delicious food dish, not referring to any pre-existing recipes and not trying to make any existing dish in particular?" which is an absolutely preposterous question.

You asked for ideally less than 400 pages... That's an insignificant and trivial amount of material for the depth of these subjects.

I wish I could but I have a job and school now. :c

An FL Studio Bible won't teach you music production either, it'll achieve the same thing his video does. Realize that you're asking for "quick final answers" on really complex art forms (composition, production), which just don't exist. If becoming a master was as simple as reading a book, everyone would be master producers. If self-practice isn't getting you anywhere, you need to find a mentor. You're not going to learn anything valuable from survey-style "do x to get y" texts, and people who are worth learning from are too busy to write 2000 page books detailing how their brains work in the studio.

I would skip the middle 3 (so do Hal Leonard and Game Audio) If you wanna learn FL Studio, zircon released an official 90+ minute tutorial on FL. Those books are literally restatements of what you find in the help file (go into FL and hit F1, there's your "textbook") The Cubase one is an intro to sequencing... You don't need an intro to sequencing. I'd be surprised if they even cover humanization with any modern libraries.

Impostor Nostalgia! It's not really pure chip, it has breaktbeat/rock drums in most songs but the rest of instrumentation is chip.

I do not mean anything dealing with production quality. Writing music is a completely separate task from creating a production, and I would never expect to learn production from a composer; it's not, metaphorically (and I guess in most cases literally), "what I'm paying for". If you read my post again with great care, I already explained why this is a flawed perception of what music theory is. I guess putting it as succinctly as possible, music theory is not how to write music, it's how to analyze it. People think that its intent is to teach you how to write music (they perceive the statement "the V chord leads to the I chord" as "they're telling me to follow the V chord with the I chord and I don't want to because I am a rebel", then they quit learning it, grab their electric guitar and twang their hands on it, saying "there are no rules in music!!1!!1" If they understood how profoundly correct that statement is, but in the wrong context, it would open their skillset very much so. Anyways, my rambling has met its end of usefulness. I'll leave the thread now.

Are you asking if a theory textbook will teach you how to write a good song, or are you asking if the things you will see describedin a theory textbook will help you write a good song? What people fail to realize is that "Music Theory" does not in specificity facilitate writing music. Rather, it presents a way to reform the way you think about music (theoretically, instead of "MAGIC!"). It is important to realize that when composers do special things, it is not from their intent to do something theoretically complex; it is from their intent to make something sound the way they want it. It may come from deliberate exploitation of theory they already know, or it may be an accident. From a Music Theory standpoint, that "accident" is analyzed and then the new knowledge gained is adopted into and becomes part of music theory. This textbook is a straight-up music theory textbook. However, after learning about phrasing, voicing, etc. I started listening to music differently. Especially in video game music, it actually gave me pretty crystal clear reasons for why "this melody sounds great!" vs. "this melody sounds... okay...". I even went on to give some tips to someone in the WiP forum who was writing a main melody, and they were much more pleased with their end result after taking my advice. Could be an isolated case, but it works for me, could work for you too. Theory is more of an accumulation of observation and reflection on music that has already been written than it is a set of processes or routines used to write music. After becoming familiar with texture and reduction, it's up to the composer to expose himself to analyzing pieces of music that he deems useful, or in other words, does things and evokes emotions that he also wants to do and evoke in his own music. I personally like looking at specifically homophonic piano music, which consists of a main melody and harmonic/rhythmic support. This is what people like Mozart and Chopin did very well, it is also what Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu did well. This is the most common type of musical texture; pretty much all modern music follows this definition but there are instances when composers call on others. TL;DR You can sit in FL Studio and write out the examples they give you into the piano roll, and you can also sit in FL Studio and try implementing the multitudes of tricks they're going to label for you, but the only way to learn how to write good music is to analyze other music that you deem good. Learning music theory gives you a very comprehensive and reliable way to do that, but the quick answer is: only implicitly will you learn how to write music. Honestly, I would not ever recommend learning strict composition from a book. You will undoubtedly get pigeon-holed into writing a specific way. This is why even in academics, with teachers, aspiring student composers need to research their professors before committing to a school or a teacher, because if you don't think much special of the person who is teaching you how to write music, they aren't going to enjoy what they're learning, and they're not going to end up writing things theyanted to learn how to write. If you want to look more at "composition books" instead of music theory (theory is not for everyone, I understand), I have no recommendations and I hope someone other than me will chime in at this point. Just make sure if you get a recommendation, you research the author's music, make sure you like it and become comfortable with the fact that your music will sound like his. Also, I apologize for the length of my posts, I literally get off to ranting about theory and how useful it is.

I was about to recommend you my textbook, but the page count is a problem (416). It's a big book, and I'm not going to lie, I haven't seen a lot of different books. Texture starts at Chapter 7, but there is content beforehand that's also helpful, such as cadences and phrasing. Fair warning, if you don't read staff a lot, this is going to hit you pretty hard. Your past piano lessons should help you. Even if you don't want to write in sheet, if you can identify notes on the staff quickly (so you can tell what arrangements of notes make what chords), you'll be fine. Also, the content leading up to texture in this book is also all taught online on a website called musictheory.net . It is a bunch of click through lessons in theory that sure, uses the staff, but it also has a bunch of sound clip examples to clearly show you how what it is showing you connects to what you're hearing. Use this website as a companion for WHATEVER theory textbook you end up wanting (if you end up trying it). It's more interactive and has practice apps (for instance, it plays a chord, you have to tell it what kind of chord, things like that). Also, I apologize because I realize this is NOT what you were looking for when you made the OP, but please realize, music composition and music production are two VERY different things. There are loads and loads of resources and materials studying these two things separately, because in reality, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Asking for a book to do the job of both of these disciplines is a large project, and even if one exists, you should expect a large page count.

I don't really have much else to offer other than explaining further why the piano roll is poor for learning theory. I can go into that if you'd like, but seeing as how staff theory is too disconnected for you to learn, it's not going to help you out much anyway, so you might as well put up with whatever resources show you things in the piano roll. Good luck.

That specific book is a way to introduce music theory to people who want to make music on the computer. It's not really any sort of special thing, with any special knowledge to be gained. In other words, you most likely won't learn anything from it if you already know basic chords and scales. It seeks to try and reinvent an introduction to theory, using a piano roll instead of the staff. (again, this is a very bad idea and I'll explain why if you're curious) It probably will not address modulations and texture, which is the next step in theory after learning basic chords and keys. It does look like there are more books from that same writer or publisher, perhaps they do end up getting more intermediate theory in a future book, but honestly, judging by your music, I really would avoid that first one. This is very common. Since you don't have a teacher, you need to have a very good book. It's fine to stay away from traditional theory if this is too much of an issue. EDIT: I read the overview of this book's topics and it indeed is just a basic survey-style introduction. It teaches you a bunch of chord types, a bunch of scales, and some basic rhythm it seems. What's missing here is the horizontal movement of music. It doesn't talk about phrasing, harmonic movement, or voice leading (a key concept in writing the most harmonious music possible). Texture is the most important tool of a composer, and texture is as much horizontal behavior of music (notes changing over time) as it is vertical behavior (chord structures, voicings, density, inversions) I think higher level music theory demonstrated through piano roll examples would be a good idea as an extra, but I don't think the staff examples should be abandoned. It is a drag, I know, I hated sheet music and still kinda do. But concepts are easier to explain on sheet music than in the piano roll. For instance: If I have a pitch playing on the frequency of C, and a pitch playing the frequency of D#/Eb, is this an augmented second or a minor third? Is C and F#/Gb a diminished fifth or an augmented fourth? Does your key have Cb or B? These distinctions are essentially lost in a piano roll because there is only one way to represent the pitch of D#/Eb, it is the black key between the D and E white keys. Argument has it that these distinctions are useless since they don't affect the sound, but in order to really appreciate and understand exotic chords, scales, modes, altered modes, and the like, you should be able to understand altered scale degrees, the difference between a flat and a sharp of adjacent notes, and not just think of everything like patterns of half steps and whole steps (this is a really painful way to write music, and until I learned staff key signatures this is how I used to do things). It is literally impossible to show you the better way of these things with piano roll examples, because just like with hearing, C + D# and C + Eb are perceived exactly the same way.

Of course this is just theory, only a small portion of what you wanted in your OP. For synth techniques, sample usage, etc. I would suggest consulting a person/professional. There aren't a lot of published resources on the matter. Realistic and high quality productions coming from a home studio with virtual instruments only became a thing in the last few decades.

I have a personal bias against learning things tailored to a specific setting (calculus "for physics", music theory "for computer music"), and would recommend learning theory from a regular music theory book and then applying the general concepts to a specific setting on your own. It is far more rewarding in the learning process, but that is just a personal opinion. Learning music theory the traditional way has its benefits. The standard pedagogy teaches things through sheet music, and while that usually deters people discovering music composition through fiddling in DAW's, it really is a better way. Music Theory is the most intuitive when the concepts are demonstrated on the staff. The piano roll displays things in raw pitches (I can make another post detailing all the things you will miss out on by learning it this way, if you'd like); intervals are not as obvious for example, and harmonic analysis, which is really important for understanding key modulations and accidentals, the real meat of writing interesting music, becomes way harder. In my personal opinion, learning music theory as its own discipline instead of as something directly connected to what you're doing in the DAW makes learning it much easier. If you don't already play an instrument, I would suggest attempting to learn piano. Being exposed to classical piano pieces teaches you a lot about things I said above, modulations, accidentals, strange chords. After learning about texture (my professor says is the single most important word), take the theory learned through piano, expand on the texture, with rhythm and multiple instruments. The idea is that even with huge ensembles, all of the voices in the entire song (bass, guitar, choir, piano, strings, whatever) playing through each pronounced chord (ignoring non-harmonic tones, which are notes outside the chord, mostly present in melodies) can be reduced (textural reduction) to a block chord. If you gain a mastery of texture and reduction, you should be able to arrange a song in any style, for any ensemble, be it solo piano or symphony orchestra, or rock band, by being able to mentally reduce songs to their basic important components and then recreating them with your own texture. If you're skeptical, then try this. All the theory I was able to learn on my own in the 4 years before I started studying it in school, I realized that everything I learned was covered in about less than half a year of traditional music theory learning (try 15-20 weeks). It's just really painfully slow without subscribing to the tried and true way to learn it which has been around for decades, centuries even.

Though it may seem off-topic, Recording textbooks/curriculum will by effect teach good mixing. You may want to look into Recording books that focus on signal flow and types of devices, and when different things are used in what situation. You may also want to find books that are along the effect of "survey of modern production techniques". The rest is just actually taking what you read and putting it into effect. You may want to find a book that will contain exercises for you to develop your ear to hear minute dB and frequency differences, so that you can actually tell when you need to change things. http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Recording-Techniques-David-Miles/dp/0240821572 http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Production-Critical-Listening-Technical-ebook/dp/B00AYIKKO4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389829911&sr=1-1&keywords=audio+listening These are my recommendations. Ignore the fact that you will be seeing things you probably already know the first few chapters, no good book (or series) doesn't start with the basics. Believe it or not, music production and computer music books won't teach you these things very well. Study music theory (traditional theory), specifically focus on textural types and textural reduction. Try to get into the real nitty gritty (static support, harmonic rhythmic support, parallel support, etc.).

The way computer sound works is that it audio is calculated in samples at a sampling frequency. Let's say 44.1Khz. That means there will be 44100 values of amplitude calculated to be 1 second of sound, and the computer knows to go through it that fast because it knows the sampling frequency ("I have to go through all of these in 1 second!"). It's the sampling frequency that turns those long strings of values into sound at the intended frequencies. If the sampling frequency was higher, those values would be run through faster through the computer and sound card, and you'd hear it pitch up (speed of a signal correlates to its frequency breakdown). These values get converted to an analog electric signal through the sound card, and the wired to your speakers. The values at each small point in time are basically the position of the speaker cone, because the speaker is a transducer, converting electrical energy into oscillations that behave exactly the way the electric signal did. Imagine a sine wave on a waveform graph, basically is the same as the speaker cone moving forward and backward in that same smooth fashion. It's the same with complex waveforms, where you have large and small up and down motions on the graph that correlate directly to large and small forward and back motions of the speaker cone. Now, the computer can calculate samples in small portions and play them back very quickly and reactively ("low latency") or it can process a lot of the sound ahead of time at the expensive of seeing real-time things right away ("high latency"). Because computers naturally process things single-mindedly (just ignore multi core and bear with me for intuitive understanding's sake), processing lots of sound will in turn slow down things in general. The amount of sound, in samples, your computer will process before playback is called the buffer size. This is why your DAW visualizations get choppy and slow down. The bigger your buffer, the more the computer is sitting there calculating all of the audio values for the next x amount of samples. When you change your drivers, your computer changes its behavior when calculating these audio values. A buffer size on Primary Sound Driver is not as fast as the equivalent buffer size on an ASIO4ALL driver, which may be inferior to a legitimate sound card's ASIO Driver. The tradeoff between latency and buffer demonstrates that at lower latencies, your visualizations become smoother, but this is at the expense of amount of sound that has processing power devoted to it. If your buffer size is too low, your audio gets crackles, pops, distortion, etc. If it is too high, the computer takes a while to process things, not responding snappy in visualizations and your clicks in the DAW. The better your processor, the lower buffers you can get without affecting your audio. To answer the first question, right click on your speaker icon in the lower left of windows. Hit Playback devices and right click on the audio output device you're using. Hit properties and see if there's any tabs like "enhancements". I know that on my laptop, my internal soundcard had some theatre EQ stuff that compressed the shit out of all audio. Turned beautiful mixes into rubbish.

I have never noticed any sound difference between Primary Sound Driver and ASIO4ALL. There also theoretically should not be a difference. Can you post mp3's or something?

You missed the point completely. You don't learn to mix on the job because there are no jobs that would require you to mix that you can get without already knowing how to mix what about this do you not understand

Are there any plans for a "headliner" or "pimp" section on the front page, where the newest album is displayed somewhat larger, or something like that? I'm asking because I'm wondering how the website itself will promote the newer albums, because right now it seems to just display all of them equally.

Reminds me of a time when I played Veigar and I was at the enemy base alone, smacking two inhibitors. Full built Blitzcrank comes up to me, grabs me and knocks me up. I proceed to one-shot the shit out of him because I have 1200 AP. Is good times.

I'm using these two in school. The second one is especially important because if you don't train students' ears they won't be able to mix well. It's a really good run through of training to hear dB differences, identify frequency bands (isolated and in a mix), etc. http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Recording-Techniques-David-Miles/dp/0240821572 http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Production-Critical-Listening-Technical-ebook/dp/B00AYIKKO4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389629475&sr=1-1&keywords=audio+listening

It's fine because he's using it as a leading tone. (He's resolving the D by following it with C#) I don't quite hear much dissonance here, I think the problem is the production. The bass notes become too low and incomprehensible by the human ear because of the sound, and also because the mixing isn't crystal clear.

I will throw the money as well.

I wouldn't advise use any chords with a D note unless he is looking for a tension-resolution situation that arises when you have tritones and accidentals. D is not in any mode (or key, scale) of C# (except Phrygian but if you want to use that you have to change a lot of the composition).