I'm new to electronic music.

[Cube of meat]

Hello everybody,

I hope you can help me a little bit, compared to the unfriendly uber-pros at StackOverflow when I had a question about c#.

I am completely new to electronic music. I mean, I listen to it, usually Ambient, but I don't know how to produce it. It would be nice to have a website or thread that goes through all of the basics, like sampling, synthesizers, VST plugins, MIDI, piano roll stuff, fancy effects, how to record a live instrument correctly (since I'm playing the marimba), and so on and so on. I have tried to work with Fruity Loops for a while, but it's too complex if you don't even know what you're doing.

Yours,

A scatterbrained musician. Lol

[Rozovian]

"I'm new to racing, it's just so difficult with the pedals and the gears and all."

It's difficult even when you know the tools, which in this case seems to be FL. Start small. Can you write a melody? Can you use different instruments? Can you write a drum beat? Can you put effects on your instruments?

Once you know how to handle the FL equivalent of pedals and gears, then the hard part begins: writing, mixing, sound design, loudness, balance, pacing, emotion, humanization, etc..

Start by learning the pedals and gear and all. Then have a look at this guide here, and whatever other learning resources you and google can find.

Welcome to ocr.

[lazygecko]

The community at http://www.kvraudio.com is mainly centered around electronic music and you're bound to find a lot of answers checking the forums there.

[eilios]

You don't need to sign your posts dude!!! How much music theory knowledge do you have? What kind of music do you have in mind? These are really helpful questions to know the answers to, but you should really try to focus on not overwhelming yourself right now. There is a lot you can learn, and it doesn't need to be learned all at once. As Rozovian says, start small.

[Mark]

Someone posted this the other day, which is very useful as an introduction too!

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

[eilios]

Someone posted this the other day, which is very useful as an introduction too!

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

This thing is oldschool(read: kind of outdated) but it's still pretty funny and has some good examples. Don't take it too seriously though. If you quote this guide unironically in a discussion you will probably be laughed at.

[Nabeel Ansari]

I think you have your terms mixed up. The things you describe more attribute to general concepts of music production, especially since you're talking about recording live marimba.

Electronic music is a term used to describe music with a heavy focus on synthetic textures (trance, house, big beat, DnB, dubstep). Now I know some electronic music has marimbas, but I have 80% confidence you're more asking about how to make music on the computer.

It's not referred to as electronic music generally, it's just "music" or even "computer music" would land you answers more accurate with what you're looking for.

Just a tip on how you can improve your question so you can get what you want quicker, since it is a broad question not any single person on OCR (with the exception of maybe Rozovian) has mastered answering. If anything, he's already answered the question that you might be actually asking.