Book Image

LMMS: A Complete Guide to Dance Music Production

By : David Earl
Book Image

LMMS: A Complete Guide to Dance Music Production

By: David Earl

Overview of this book

You've scoured the forums, watched the tutorial videos, and done everything you can to learn the secrets of the art of making dance music. Everyone is saying something different about how to get into producing your own projects. This book will help connect the dots and lay a solid foundation of knowledge so you can get beats banging out of LMMS.This book will show you the ins and outs of making Dance music with LMMS. Do you make house, trance, techno or down-tempo? After this book you'll be able to make a song that stands out from the masses, using time honoured tricks of the trade. From inception to conception, this book will help give you a workflow to channel your muse using LMMS.Readers will be given a brief lesson on the best of dance music history, then learn how to recreate it using the Open Source digital workstation - LMMS. The reader will be guided through creating a project from start to finish. By the end of this book, the reader will know how to create a full dance track in LMMS and make it ready for distribution.Along the way, readers will take short stops into music theory, song arranging, recording, and other related information to give them a good foundation for making dance music with depth as well as power. Reading LMMS: A Complete Guide to Dance Music Production will not just teach the reader how to use LMMS, but also how good dance music is crafted. The reader will not just be taught how to make decisions in LMMS, but when and why. After devouring this book, the reader should be able to focus on his or her creativity, with LMMS as a co-conspirator in the process of making great dance music.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
14
Index

Your computer is the control center of your studio. A computer will impact not only how music is made but also how it is performed. This means major decisions like desktop or laptop, to minor decisions such as deciding which audio effects will save your computer's processor from working too hard.

If you are using a desktop or laptop, you need a Windows or Linux compatible PC. An Apple Mac will also work for LMMS. LMMS is efficient and can run on all kinds of computers. The basic specifications are: 1 GHz processor with at least 512 megabyte of RAM

LMMS plays nicely with older CPUs and is very efficient. But it's still ambitious to think that you are going to rock the house with a single core processor and roughly half a gigabyte of RAM. You'll hit the wall pretty quickly when using software instruments and effects.

A better bet would be a multi-core computer with at least 2 gigabytes of RAM. Multiple processors means more plugins and tracks. You also need enough RAM for the operating system as well as the application you are running. In the electronic music world, more CPU power and RAM means more tracks, more instruments, and speedier handling inside LMMS, as well as your other applications.

The operating system you choose will be determined by your own personal preference, and what other applications you wish to run on your computer. LMMS works on the following:

Stability is key when making electronic music. The more stable your system is, the more work you'll get done. If you don't plan to perform with LMMS, get yourself a desktop. If you need portability for performance or creating music on the go, a laptop would be the better fit. Windows and Linux seem to be the most stable operating systems to run LMMS on as far as operating systems are concerned. The OS X version is a port of 4.1.0, at the time of writing this book and is slightly less stable.

Now this could be considered 'optional', but as a general rule, you should always have an external drive for music projects. Hard drives are inexpensive these days and will ensure that your internal hard drive, whose responsibility is to run your operating system, remains less cluttered and fragmented from electronic music production.

Your external hard drive should meet these optimal specifications:

Your external hard drive needs to spin fast so that it can play many samples and audio files concurrently. Having an external drive also means easier transport if you'd like to take your sessions to other studios.

LMMS works with any active audio output that your computer has. It can use a headphone output or a more expensive external audio peripheral that hooks up to speakers.

If you would like to use a piano keyboard controller to enter notes into LMMS, there are many manufacturers that have products on the market. Simply install the appropriate driver that comes with the MIDI controller and LMMS will be able to see the device.