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

We need to be diligent, almost religious, about file management. File management is what allows us to work on projects over time and not have them suddenly stop playing back right. We aren't all going to be able to write the hit dance song of the century in one night, so we need to be sure that files are named properly and are headed in the right direction when we save. The WORKING directory is a nice start, but we need to start thinking about projects that might have several revisions.

It's a good idea, when starting a song, to immediately go to the file menu and choose Save As. Here's what will happen if we don't: we work on the best song we've ever created and suddenly, inexplicably the program crashes and our work will be destroyed never to be recovered. It's happened to the best of us. If you do not save immediately, your song is only an 'I-forgot-to-plug-the-power-supply-into-my-laptop' away from oblivion.

When saving your project, there are three directories that should pop up when we save, as you can see here:

File management—keeping it together

These are three very important folders. When we have instruments or effects that have been custom-tweaked, their settings are saved in the presets directory. These settings will then be available to you in all future projects. This is how to build a palate of sounds that give our songs a specific and unique signature.

The path shown in the previous image shows the default directory on the internal drive. To use a folder on an external drive, simply create the folder on the external drive and drag the folder into the left panel of the File Save dialog box.

When we collect samples, we will toss them in the samples folder. They will also be available in our future projects in an easily accessible side bar.