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Just like the title says. I'm curious how long it took others to make a song. I'm about on my 3rd week of working hard on learning Ableton and gonna try to go all out and dedicate myself into making music. Starting off I plan to spend 400$ on a M-Audio Axiom 61 keyboard and 900$ on a new laptop I'm wondering if people could tell me a little bit of how they started getting into music. How much of a struggle did you have trying to make your first song? What was the first few things you did when working towards your first song? How was your computer/hardware set up? How much experience did you have in music before starting to make music on the computer solo?

3 years and still counting or even more, i'm not really sure.
at least i haven't finished anything so far. but i remember back when i started out i was a lot faster than i am now. the first thing i did was made in an hour or so, and while it was total crap of course (i set the fader of my drum channel to +12 dB because i thought that's how you distort ) it actually sounded neat in a way. then i started chopping up random breaks found on the internet and sampling guitar riffs from hardcore records. again, total shite music me and my buddies loved that kind of shit back then. that was also the last time i actually listened to my music together with my friends more than just once when i'm showing it to them.
i used logic on an old powerbook g4, i always had to freeze channels when i was working with more than one complex synth like sculpture or es². i haven't really had any musical experience before, except that i already was trying to break down everything i listened to into it's parts, trying to visualize different elements et cetera.
from then on things started going slower and slower and slower. a year ago i would have said don't rush things, take your time with tunes but no. do it, and do it quick. just bang out a tune as long as the idea is still in your head even when it sounds absolutely horrible, you can still go back and spend weeks to fix it after that.

over a year now
Have a shitload of half finished projects. I'm still practicing

Gruesse mach Muenster uebrigens

Haha same!! My first track Morphine came out 3 years after I'd had my DAW. I used to spend months working hard on an intro or something... and I'd finish that section then hear it back and think... "wow, I started this 3 months ago, if I made a new intro from scratch with the knowledge I've gained over 3 months, it'd be so much better." And from there I would scrap it and go back to the drawing board! Each time getting a little better. :L

Ahh well, nowadays it takes about a month to churn out a track. I had a period over the autumn before christmas where I could finish a tune within two weeks!! How on earth I managed that I will never know.

I have a friend who claims to finish tunes within 3 hours... like, 1st hour; main idea, 2nd hour; structure; 3rd hour; mix down. o.O
Check out his stuff btw. http://soundcloud.com/taiki-official-uk
He seems to do alright for three hours!!

My first track took 40 hours in one week (including learning to use the DAW - which at that time, I used Deck). I released it 7 years later on my 3rd album, and I still think it holds it own compared to anything else I have done.

Mad EP wrote: and I still think it holds it own compared to anything else I have done.

Hahah you know this!!!

Making music while being awfully naive is such a good thing !


My first track took me around 3-4 months to bang out, it was just samples and like 1 synth patch (preset) I just made something which felt natural, I found some offbeat hit sample, grab some vocal, put in a sub and then worked on some drums .. It was really quite a simple process.. I mixed down as best as I could and yeah, I am still proud of it!

The first track I was proud of took about 6months but I dont consider any of my shit to be good really. Its good to put your shit in perspective. When I finish a track Ill listen to it then stick on someone like Dayn, Ajapai or Diesal. Reminds me my production skills are nothing compared to those guys and motivates me to keep pushing and improve.

buttock wrote:over a year now
Have a shitload of half finished projects. I'm still practicing

Gruesse mach Muenster uebrigens

oh, kennt man sich?

My story is a little different from the rest here in that I hit the ground running when it came to producing music on a computer. I've been writing and performing music as long as I can remember and I've been around studios a bit as a result. Got my own proper computer setup around 2002ish (an iMac G4 with various bits of hardware I had acquired over the years) and started thumping out songs in no time. Good idea for a thread this.

Ooh, ooh, ooh! Ich kann auch ein bisschen deutsch! Ich habe 3 jahre in Gronau gewonnt! Und meine Halbschwestern sind auch deutsch!

And to stay on topic, I think the first tune took a few days. Quickest tune I'd ever made took one night to make.

Um, first electronic track? or first song?
First song about a year after I picked up guitar, first electronic track about a month after I got the gear, FL studio, Reason...etc I had the advantage of about 8 years musical training before I moved into the electronic stuff though, so that made it a bit easier since all i had to learn was the daws rather than the music. My gear was crap, still is, I'm working of an acer laptop, and pc line speakers, no hardware, just fruity loops, reason, renoise, and a few others ive managed to acquire over the years like cubase which i don't use and reaper and mad tracker and goat tracker and ... a lot actually lol.

I don't think either was a struggle, struggle kinda implies that it was bad in some way to me, i wouldn't say struggle, I'd say it was just a slow process, but it was still all enjoyable, and eventually i got there. Now I'm making one every week, sometimes every day. The more you do it the better you get at it and the easier it becomes to write a tune.

Shum wrote:My story is a little different from the rest here in that I hit the ground running when it came to producing music on a computer. I've been writing and performing music as long as I can remember and I've been around studios a bit as a result. Got my own proper computer setup around 2002ish (an iMac G4 with various bits of hardware I had acquired over the years) and started thumping out songs in no time. Good idea for a thread this.

My situation was similar... when I wrote my first track I had already been a musician for 15 years, had graduated with a degree in cello performance, produced radio broadcasts and was in a post-grad recording engineering program. So the musical aspect wasn't the issue as much as getting used to the software and such.

Speaking of iMacs... I was in that program 11 years ago, and the production studio had 1 G4 tower, and a couple of iMacs. So I had to work with as little as 64MB RAM at times! Sure as hell taught me to be efficient though...

^ It is amazing to think how tight it was back then computer power/memory wise. It was just after the beginnings of proper affordable home studio DAW setups.

Shum wrote:^ It is amazing to think how tight it was back then computer power/memory wise. It was just after the beginnings of proper affordable home studio DAW setups.

somehow it makes me wonder if maybe things were easier like that. having only little processing power forces you to actually do everything step by step, preventing spaghetti workflows (like mine )

Took me a year to finally get it done, I as well have a ton of tracks in various stages of completeness. Here's the one I finished:

Soundcloud

I would say I didn't finish an entire song for at least 3 months

Around 30 mins, 45 tops.
I'd just downloaded a demo of FL 8 when it was fresh. No real Idea of arranging music or anything, it was all off beat and had no logical structure to it tbh.
Made it fiddling around with some one shots and pad samples in FL's collection.

Then a friend got Acid music studio, tried to install that. Didn't work, but the samples came off the CD. Using the 8 bar loops from this I learned more about structure. These tracks would've taken maybe an hour or two..

Then a few months later, I was introduced to FL Studio's piano roll. Just made stuff? Nothing in particular, just the same theme, a lot of FL keys and boobass
Same time frame here. Even today, I don't spend much more than 15 hours on tunes, at least the finished ones. The most I've ever spent was 24, on a track called "Right as Rain" it was originally called "When it rains it pours" but logistics actually MADE me change it hahahah

About a week. This was back in 2006.

My first track was a few days of hairpulling, I don't even remember where it's at, I think it's been formatted away.

I turn tracks out in 2-48 hours now though.

basically, you shouldnt worry about the little fine things in a first song cus its gonna sound like shit anyway (imo). My first song took me about 2 months (FL) and then I switched to ableton and got my techniques down for making everything and THEN started a track. my second track took me a month but I hope i will become faster as I gain experience.