Learning Music is a new, interactive website that helps you learn the basics of music making – beats, melodies, basslines, chords, and song structure – right in your browser. It’s now available in English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Dutch and Italian.
You can even export the music you make on the web as an Ableton Live Set, so you can take your music further.
Learning Music is free, there’s nothing to install, it works on any internet-connected device, and you’ll be creating your own musical ideas right away.
It’s been a long time since I’d looked at this, and now that I know a bit more about music production, this is still a solid intro to making beats or electronic music.
I wish it let you at least load a handful of kit samples so you could make something sound a little more like the genre of music you like, but things like this show that making music isn’t hard. Making good music is hard, but making music for yourself to enjoy, use as a form a therapy, or as a way to learn new things, is easy.
It’s just a process of learning to arrange little pieces into bigger patterns that catch and hold your attention. It’s the same as when you learned to speak, from saying mama to being fluent. You’re still using the same alphabet, but you can use it to let people know what you are feeling.
If you enjoy this, you can try an app like Caustic or Koala Sampler, or buy a decent used instrument. Also, the sooner you make music with others, the faster you will progress because you can learn from their successes and mistakes and it helps branch out your ideas
Neat apps, thx for the suggestion!
Certainly! Both helped inspire me along my way learning what I liked or didn’t like. There are so many free and cheap ways to make music right now. There isn’t really anything holding anyone back but time.
Another fun thing you can do from here is you can use the drum machine on that site to learn things not in there if you’re cool with the sounds.
Go on YouTube and look up things like “beginner drum beats,” “lofi drum beats,” “90s boom bap drum beats” or whatever your taste is and try to recreate them on the drum machine. I was just doing this the other night on my hardware drum machine. It gives your a quick feeling of success to make the kind of thing you want to make, or at least you can relate to. Here is a simple and well explained video I watched and copied all the patterns he showed.
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