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

When sharing a project with others, we need to keep a few things in mind:

LMMS projects will save preset data in them for a specific project, but our samples that we usually have access to will not necessarily be there. There are a couple of easy fixes for the samples and presets, but the VST plugins may be a bit more difficult.

Remember that external drive we got? The one that is so easily portable?

If this is where our WORKING directory is, we can simply take our drive to the other studio and re-point the settings window of the other studio's LMMS application to our drive while we are there.

Now we have access to all of our presets and samples again. Nice, huh?

Make sure that when leaving, the old settings are restored. It can freak a studio owner out if all of a sudden their computer is trying to find another drive for their resources. Jot a note down or take a screenshot of where their WORKING directory is located before pointing to another drive. Change the settings back before leaving. Unless playing a practical joke, in which case you are on your own.

VSTi and VST plugins are usually third-party plugins that aren't necessarily free. We may not be able to copy the VST plugins to the other studio's drive and use them. If they are freeware, we're ok. If not, the plugins may not open at all and cause havoc at the other studio. Be sure to check and see which plugins are freeware and which ones aren't. We can always write the effect to the audio of the tracks that have VST plugins on them. This way the audio will play back with the effect on someone else's LMMS application. To accomplish this, hit the red button on the track you need to export, as you can see in the following image:

Playing sessions at other studios

Then go to the File menu, and choose Export....

Now that the track alone will be saved as an audio file, we can bring this file back into our project and play it on a sample track. That should solve any compatibility issues between studios (we should also save a version of this called First_Time_Out_v5_StudioVisit to keep our versions straight).