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 you need to get an audio signal out of your computer to some speakers, or get some sound from the outside world into your computer, you need an audio interface.

All computers these days have audio interfaces built into them. They are usually enough to get the job done for most music-making endeavors. To reduce noise, get a clearer sound, and get recorded music to sound nice and open and clear, an external audio interface is usually a good idea. Audio interfaces connect to a computer via USB, Firewire, or have a card in the computer with a cable that hooks into an external box. Here's an example of an external USB/Firewire interface:

A brief introduction to sound cards and audio interfaces

On this particular interface, we have input-level trim knobs on the left, speaker volume, and headphone volume.

On the right, there are indicator lights that show us the audio's volume coming in and out of the device. This interface has a pretty nice meter. It has a green area lit up where the audio is at a comfy volume. The yellow area tells us the volume is getting close to peaking and the red area is the audio peak. We don't want audio to peak on input because it will distort. We also don't want it to peak the output, because it will distort as well.

An external audio interface like this gives us a lot of information. If you are using an internal soundcard that came with your computer, you are going to have to rely on the meters in the software you are using and your ears to tell you whether your volume is too loud or not.