Thoughts on 'Techno' courses?

[Lost to the Void]

Courses can be fine, it really depends on the depth and broadness and the time.

Years back when I decided I wanted to become ableton certified, I had been using ableton in a live context for years but I really wasn't using it to its potential.
So I took an ableton course with point blank. It was their longest course, not sure if they still do it, but it was actually pretty good, the tutor was good too, but obviously I had the experience to extrapolate on everything. It was a broad course just a "how to" ableton rather than specific.

[mindflex]

If anyone is interested in Softube Modular
There are 8 free tutorials on this channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wEKRCOPTFI
These cover the basic Doepfer modules, are very well explained and point to some interesting uses and ways to generate sounds and cv using modular.

The ninth video, has just been released and is not free, but works on a donation, no upper or lower limit.
If you are happy with the first eight pay for the ninth..
http://www.rofilm-media.net

The ninth covers the sequencers and promises loads of examples to generate complex unusual polyrhythms

The course presenter is also very good, clear, concise and strangely hypnotic

[Pelecaras]

Courses can be fine, it really depends on the depth and broadness and the time.

Years back when I decided I wanted to become ableton certified, I had been using ableton in a live context for years but I really wasn't using it to its potential.
So I took an ableton course with point blank. It was their longest course, not sure if they still do it, but it was actually pretty good, the tutor was good too, but obviously I had the experience to extrapolate on everything. It was a broad course just a "how to" ableton rather than specific.

Shit!!!! Now I feel like I have labelled you a fool (clearly not true as you always come across as an intelligent and knowledgeable guy, plus you've probably forgotten more about music production than I'll ever learn)... Phew, now that I've kissed your ass and hopefully been forgiven....I suppose what I meant was that people shouldn't expect to sign up to courses and become superstar producers overnight. I nearly became one of the fools easily parted from his money, I used to think that by watching as many tutorials as possible I'd become half decent in no time at all, but then I had a eureka moment and realised that there ARE NO shortcuts and to attain it I had to put the time in.

[Hades]

You hit the nail on the head with that.

I think a lot of people may sign up to these courses as a short-cut to superstardom, x factor style. The same types who have a branded logo before they've even produced a track.

^^ well, pretty much this.
Electronic music has become really big the last decade or so,
so more and more people get in it for the wrong reasons.

Availability has a lot to do with it as well.
When I started DJ'ing, I was asked to do so because I was the guy with the biggest music collection.
Nowadays everyone can get their free MP3's anywhere.

When I bought my first synth, now 23 years ago, I paid 1500€ for a piece of shit (JW-50) that only had GM sounds onboard, but yeah, in the pre-internet days, that was all I could find locally and for a "decent" price.
And nonetheless I was happy as hell, but I sure as fuck made shit music with it.

But yeah, enough "in my days" talk. There's no nostalgia here from my part.
Fuck those days, we got it way better now.
The only thing I guess I could get nostalgic about is what rktic is in a way saying :
he's saying (I think) you have to show enough dedication,
and back in those days, you really really needed to show dedication to get anywhere,
or you had to be stinking rich, but then you still needed to be putting in a lot of hours,
because the machines sure as fuck weren't doing so much for you "right" from the start.

You can say whatever you want, but yeah, if you wanted to DJ back then, you had to have a somewhat big collection of records, and you had to learn how to beat-match. Now you can get it all for free and the beat matching is done for you by the machine.
Back in those days you needed several pieces of HW to make techno. Now you can just get a copy of Live and you can do it all with just your laptop.
In our current times, it just takes less dedication to get to a reasonable result,
and as a result, you get people into this thing who are in it for the wrong reasons.

I am not in any way ranting about this, I am just saying what I see (and what is obvious for anyone who's been into this long enough).
I honestly believe most tutorials (if not 90% or more) are mostly aimed to that kind of crowd.
The ones that want it all now and with as little effort as possible.
(which doesn't mean I am against all tutorials, but more about that later)

And regarding Ronny and his 16 year old son.
I have to convince my 9 year old daughter almost every day you need patience to get really good at something.
I'm convinced it's one of the biggest problems in our current times and one of the biggest challenges to us parents nowadays.

[Hades]

regarding tutorials.
I will totally agree the DMP ones (Rick Snoman) are extremely good.
I watched several of them, also bought the techno one, and I quit watching them like 1/4 in because I felt too formulaic when doing it all the way he showed it.

Only reason why I got into the Snoman ones was because he wrote that excellent book,
and over the years I tried out several books, and 90% of them are all the same,
and of course I also tried watching tutorials, and never really learned that much from them.

I even tried out some of these group lessons in the area I live in, and ended up correcting the teacher.
That even happened recently on Loop as well, which is always an awkward situation,
even if you try to do it as humbly as possible.

At this moment, I think most of these online tutorials are crap, a waste of time and worth nothing compared to gaining experience by experimenting yourself with your gear.
Having said that, if you are lucky enough to find the right ones, I think you can learn some stuff from it, but it will never top stuff you learned by yourself, even if that takes way longer.

Also, I think there is something to be said against group lessons (as much as there is no doubt something that can be said about the social aspect of group lessons). If you're in a group lesson, the level will always get adapted automatically to the level of the slowest pupil. The info you'll be given will be mostly general, and never adapted to you personally.
Many years ago, I once took private lessons for a week from one of the 1st Live certified instructors. Didn't really learn a lot new at all (after having read the manual twice and having spend enough hours with it), but nonetheless, I stay convinced I learned more that way than if I had taken one of those group courses.

So to summarize I think you can benefit from this way of learning,
but you gotta make sure you pick the right stuff, and chances are big you pick the generic shit.

And also, in the end, it's always about putting in the hours...

[Lost to the Void]

Courses can be fine, it really depends on the depth and broadness and the time.

Years back when I decided I wanted to become ableton certified, I had been using ableton in a live context for years but I really wasn't using it to its potential.
So I took an ableton course with point blank. It was their longest course, not sure if they still do it, but it was actually pretty good, the tutor was good too, but obviously I had the experience to extrapolate on everything. It was a broad course just a "how to" ableton rather than specific.

Shit!!!! Now I feel like I have labelled you a fool (clearly not true as you always come across as an intelligent and knowledgeable guy, plus you've probably forgotten more about music production than I'll ever learn)... Phew, now that I've kissed your ass and hopefully been forgiven....I suppose what I meant was that people shouldn't expect to sign up to courses and become superstar producers overnight. I nearly became one of the fools easily parted from his money, I used to think that by watching as many tutorials as possible I'd become half decent in no time at all, but then I had a eureka moment and realised that there ARE NO shortcuts and to attain it I had to put the time in.

I'm not disagreeing with you.
When I took the course you get a group session each week where you can talk to other people on the course.
At the end of it I think me and one other women, who was a film industry sound designer, benefitted the most as we knew how to produce and make music.
Most of the others were total noobs and I think they expected a lot more from the course. Some of the graduation pieces were shockingly bad.

[Pelecaras]

I'm not disagreeing with you.
When I took the course you get a group session each week where you can talk to other people on the course.
At the end of it I think me and one other women, who was a film industry sound designer, benefitted the most as we knew how to produce and make music.
Most of the others were total noobs and I think they expected a lot more from the course. Some of the graduation pieces were shockingly bad.

i bet they were all bro step weren't they?!

[Lost to the Void]

I don't think they were of a level where they could be called anything other than noises made on a computer.
The course wasn't about showing you how to make music, it was merely about the software. So I think a lot of them had unrealistic expectations.

[Pelecaras]

had unrealistic expectations.

I reckon that's gonna be my epitaph!!!

[Squill]

If i'm honest, I wish these were around when I started to noodle around. It took me far to long to work out a lot of the basics (if you don't know what something is called, you can't google for it!) and by the time I did a number of years later my knowledge had surpassed what 75% of these courses were offering so I didn't see the value in taking any.

But if you're doing that from the start, it's a great headstart into how to use a DAW, and how to bend tools creatively to make an aesthetic.

Though I guess on the flipside everything I have learnt is "self taught" in that I had to dig deep on various forums to find a two sentence post from 13 years ago that explains the concept enough to be able to Google it further. Which, jokes aside, is a great skill to have on it's own.

^ Agreed. These are great tools for people who want to get into production, but learning on your own through trial and error as well can really help develop ones skills

[over9000]

My question is, is it a pride issue for some to admit that they paid for tutorials to get help? Unless you are a genius like Aphex Twin/Trentemoller you are just going to have to work hard and look for valuable information from other people that can help you get to the next level.

That being said there are a lot of crappy tutorials/courses out there and I never actually paid for them + I made my first tracks without any knowledge whatsoever.

My reasons for thinking critically about courses (rant ahead)

I believe that all meaningful things derive from sweat, blood, dedication, hard work, practice, frustration, investing energy, passion, time, more energy and even more time. If you're driven by such forces, the internet will provide you with all the information you need without spending a single dime. Dedication. That's what I'm talking about. There is no short route to glory. That's where Techno came from, a 'pushing-the-envelope-mindset'. Aphex Twin etc took exactly this route of mastering their crafts to develop their own sound.

Courses, sampling-, preset-packs and the latter only exist because a legion of people are looking for the path of least resistance. To me this is nothing but laziness. When I hear "lack of time" what I really read is "don't want it bad enough".

Ask yourself: Why do I want to do this? How much is this worth to me? What am I trying to achieve?

youtu.be/plWexCID-kA

What a total load of bollocks.

Spending time to educate yourself on skills you want to acquire is dedication and getting taught a skill from someone that knows more than you will get you there faster.

Which makes more sense to you:

1. Spend two hours playing with various compressors trying to work out what they are doing

2. Spent 30 minutes a high quality tutorial that explains it in one go, then 1.5 hours actually using that knowledge in your own music.

This isn't about lack of time, it's about wanting to achieve more with the time you have.

Heres an old quote that i think sums it up nicely:

I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

hehe goat farming is nice actually
nah seriously we live in the age of information, why not use all this information?

[disparate]

So - what's my point in the end?

Thou shalt think for yourselves.

Cause it's something you don't get taught and told these days too often.

I understand where you're coming from there - although my point earlier still remains that a creative producer will(/should) take the knowledge and add it to their arsenal, to be used or not used as appropriate.

After reading this thread I've been watching Rick's drums video series. It has a lot of focus on layering in particular and processing techniques for each layer and/or the whole thing, then goes onto teach techniques about programming beats. I've been producing for a while but in the videos I still came across a lot of things that I either didn't really know, or had chanced upon through a long time of messing about or reading bits and pieces on forums like this etc.
I'm not going to now go and use his layering techniques on all the drums (having observed that e.g. the full-spectrum, every-layer-compressed kicks he makes are a bit more suited to EDM, big room house etc. and some of my tracks might really just need a plain 808 type kick to bump them along...) or put shaker grooves with his programming tips in all my tracks if I think a straight offbeat hihat is all it needs. But the knowledge is there now and I can draw upon it if I'm making a track and, say, I do realise I want a more complex kick and previously would've got sidetracked into spending ages searching for samples or just messing around blindly figuring out how to do things.

I'm sure some might watch these type of videos and think it's the only way - but surely these people are always gonna find a way to be unoriginal Less structured learning is great too but I think there's a happy medium between the extremes of taking ideas and suggestions as gospel and, well, reinventing the wheel.

[rktic]

So - what's my point in the end?

Thou shalt think for yourselves.

Cause it's something you don't get taught and told these days too often.

I understand where you're coming from there - although my point earlier still remains that a creative producer will(/should) take the knowledge and add it to their arsenal, to be used or not used as appropriate.

After reading this thread I've been watching Rick's drums video series. It has a lot of focus on layering in particular and processing techniques for each layer and/or the whole thing, then goes onto teach techniques about programming beats. I've been producing for a while but in the videos I still came across a lot of things that I either didn't really know, or had chanced upon through a long time of messing about or reading bits and pieces on forums like this etc.
I'm not going to now go and use his layering techniques on all the drums (having observed that e.g. the full-spectrum, every-layer-compressed kicks he makes are a bit more suited to EDM, big room house etc. and some of my tracks might really just need a plain 808 type kick to bump them along...) or put shaker grooves with his programming tips in all my tracks if I think a straight offbeat hihat is all it needs. But the knowledge is there now and I can draw upon it if I'm making a track and, say, I do realise I want a more complex kick and previously would've got sidetracked into spending ages searching for samples or just messing around blindly figuring out how to do things.

I'm sure some might watch these type of videos and think it's the only way - but surely these people are always gonna find a way to be unoriginal Less structured learning is great too but I think there's a happy medium between the extremes of taking ideas and suggestions as gospel and, well, reinventing the wheel.

If you'd differentiate between "things that make you feel smart" and "taking action right now" - where on the scale is what you wrote?

[msl]

I didn't even know there was such a thing as "techno" courses...


.

[Hades]

I didn't even know there was such a thing as "techno" courses...


.

they teach you how to make more dance floor friendly stuff !