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

In Chapter 7, Getting It All Stacked up, we created a loop and variations. This time around, we need to spread the content of our main loop out for the duration of a song:

  1. Mute all of the elements in the Song Editor:
    Time for action—spreading out the loop

    All of the tracks need to be muted. So make sure that all of the mute buttons are lit up:

    Time for action—spreading out the loop
  2. Grab the right-hand side of our sample, and trim the element so that it is only eight bars long. We are going to build this song in eight bar segments. Building a song in repeating eight bar chunks will give nice structure to the song's overall arrangement:
    Time for action—spreading out the loop
  3. Make sure to mute the sample once you're done.
  4. Now press Ctrl + click on the sample, and click again immediately to the right-hand side of the sample. Repeat this until you have 96 bars filled:
    Time for action—spreading out the loop
  5. Repeat this with all of the other elements. Your full arrangement length should be covered by all of the elements:
    Time for action—spreading out the loop
  6. Now that we have our arrangement spread out, we're going to create our early...