Music production is one of the most attractive career paths to choose from. As a result, there are a lot of people that are eager to start making music for a living or just to make music for fun.

In this article, I will introduce the main points, that can help you to start making music fast without struggling a lot along the way.

6 Steps To Start Making Music Today

Music Theory

I emphasize this point because nowadays a lot of people are making music without any music theory background.

And that is nothing wrong about it. I’ve started making music without any theory knowledge as well.

However, at least a basic knowledge of music theory helps a lot.

If you have a natural understanding of what sounds right, you can be good at the beginning.

But even though you can make melodies sound right, music theory can speed up your process a lot. It tells you what is the good practice for a certain chord progression, or it can help you to express a certain feeling you are trying to create.

Without this knowledge, you just might be stabbing in the dark without knowing what you are doing.

Furthermore, when you are doing collaborations with other artists or working with vocalists, you might have a hard time working together if you do not have any background in music theory.

Because:

You are not able to communicate in the same language as educated musicians do.

Basic knowledge such as learning about keys, chords, melodies, arrangement, and structure will make your music production so much better and easier.

Music Software

After you attain basic knowledge about a song structure, arrangement, keys, and melodies, the next step is to get a good digital audio workstation.

This is where the real hustle starts.

You can check my article about the best music production software for beginners here.

It is an important decision to choose your music production software because you will spend all of your time on it.

After you do that, the next step is to go to youtube or buy a course and learn as much as you can about mastering your DAW. The more you know about your program, the better the producer you will be.

If you are thinking about learning everything by yourself, I recommend you stop and think about it again. From personal experience, it will take you 10x more time to learn it than learning from guided lessons. So you will waste a lot of time if you don’t learn it beforehand.

Moreover, by watching tutorials you learn tips and tricks that producers learned over the years in a hard way that you wouldn’t be able to discover it all by yourself.

Furthermore, education sometimes gives the inspiration to try new things. Especially when you learn a new trick, or learn how to make a certain sound, it usually captures your imagination and it makes you go straight to music production and implement new things you’ve learned.

Make sure you don’t skip this step when starting music production!

Sound engineering

I agree, not everyone might love this field of music production.

However, it is needed for making good music, or at least a basic understanding of it.

Also, keep in mind that it is not needed to be a professional sound engineer. Even professional music producers send tracks to sound engineers to make final mixes.

And that’s perfectly fine.

But, you need to understand sound engineering essentials in order to have a sense of how to manage sounds, how to position them, how to bring one instrument in front and other in the back, or how to make your music sound like “in your face”.

It will help you out not only for understanding how the technical side of music production works, but also to translate ideas better for professional sound engineers as well if you are going to delegate work to them in the future.

Sound Design

This is an advanced step to take as a beginner. But also a very important skill to keep in mind when starting out.

This is especially important if you are mainly working with electronic music.

Being able to craft your sounds well is what makes you stand out from the crowd.

Even though there are millions of sound packs, they will need some adjustments to fit your track better. And if you will be able to completely adjust the sound the way you want, you will be unstoppable as an electronic music producer for a lifetime.

Steal other songs

Or in other words, learn from the best.

Every music producer starts with copying music that they already like and listen to.

And it is not a bad thing.

You do it for educational purposes. And by the time you get good at recreating other artist sounds, melodies, you should start to find your own sound and realize what unique you can put on the table in the music market.

Sometimes it comes naturally from within, but for some of us, it does not. If it is the case, that you cannot find your own style, don’t worry. After copying lots of artists, you can combine some styles and come up with completely new and fresh things!

You will find your own uniqueness.

Everyone does. As long as they keep hustling.

Practise makes perfect

This rule applies to everything, and so does apply to music production.

Produce music even though you don’t feel like it.

It is usually not the case to get a super awesome idea in your head and lay it out in the daw. More often, you just keep messing around with sounds, melodies until at some point some sound hits you, and then it drives you forward naturally.

And that’s not only my opinion.

Deadmau5 says the same. In his masterclass, he mentioned that he never gets music ideas randomly in his head. It always comes in the process of building, experimenting and creating things from scratch.

Conclusion

That’s all folks. I think I’ve pointed out the main points that I would consider as the most important ones when starting the journey of becoming a great music producer.

If I’ve asked this question when I’ve started to make music, I believe these would be the biggest impact advice that would save a ton of headache later on.

I hope this article will have a positive impact on your music production as well.