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
What kind of electronic musician are you?

So here we are, ready to finally boot up LMMS and get crackin'. When we first open LMMS, we are presented with a blank template song. This is like a blank canvas ready for us to start making music with. After we have set up all of the preferences and settings from

Chapter 1, Gearing Up: A Pre-flight Checklist we should be ready to just jump in with both feet and get some work done.

Before we get going, we need to understand what our best workflow is. Maybe you are a piano player. You may want to use a keyboard controller to record notes into LMMS. Maybe you are an obsessive-compulsive tweaker and want to have meticulous control over every iota of data being written into LMMS and prefer to use your mouse. Your workflow is a way of creating the path of least resistance between you and your music.

To understand which workflow is going to work best for a given individual, we need to explore our tools. In electronic music, there are some tools...