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One of my early problems when making EDM was the learning process that went with it. You can listen to Avicii, David Guetta, Armin van Buuren, Skrillex, etc., but how exactly do you go about creating the music and the sounds that you associate with them.

I started off by reading the appropriate books. Two books that I would highly recommend are “Dance Music Manual” by Rick Snoman and “The Secrets of Dance Music Production” by Dave Felton et al. The latter features tips and tricks by several authors at “Attack Magazine” which specialises in EDM. If the philosophy behind EDM music is of interest then “The Creative Electronic Music Producer” by Thomas Brett is well worth a read.

There are also many tutorials on producing EDM on YouTube; indeed the Thomas Brett book has a whole chapter on them. These days, most involve some sort of financial commitment. I have used YouTube tutorials extensively but generally to solve problems or find out how to do certain tasks such as side-chaining and resampling. Watching an expert create a masterpiece was something that I eschewed until recently. This was a conscious decision as I wanted to create my own style and not follow anyone elses.

I recently felt tempted to try watching a master at work but was discouraged by the multitude of so-called experts who wanted to make me become an overnight sensation. I was looking for someone who could help me become competent in a genre of my choosing. I narrowed it down to two genres that I found appealing: trance, especially uplifting trance, and chill-out EDM. The latter is somewhat ill-defined in the literature, so trance it was.

Finding an approriate teacher, even in a specified genre, is not easy. As I looked around, the name Luke Bond kept cropping up. Luke had worked with and produced a single with Armin van Buuren and had good reviews as a teacher, so I thought I would give him a try. I downloaded a set of Serum 2 presets which Luke had designed and found them to be excellent. Luke offers two courses, a comprehensive trance course and a shorter course on uplifting trance. I had no wish to be sitting watching YouTube for hours on end, so I settled for the shorter course which I have just finished. I have since purchased a second set of Serum 2 presets from Luke.

The main problem I had with the course is that Luke uses Ableton Live to make his track. This was not unexpected as most EDM producers use Live these days. I have tried but never really managed to get my head around Live, much preferring to stay in my comfort zone with Cubase. One of the things that attracted me to Luke’s course was that he stated that his methods could easily be transferred to other DAWS like Logic, FL Studio and Cubase and, so far, I believe that to be the case.

I didn’t intend this blog to be an advert for Luke’s course but rather to be a record of my journey in finding a suitable course and managing to avoid the pitfalls of not-so-reliable offers that you find on social media. It is not always clear which are scams or even well-intentioned but sub-standard and it is always wise to do a bit of background on the teacher and to make sure that he/she is the person actually delivering the course.

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Well, it’s two months since the release of my “Aestas” album and the time has flown. I’ve had a two-page spread in the Alloa Advertiser, had a track, “Rebirth of Venus”, played on Forth Valley Radio and been a guest on one of their shows.

One thing that I have discovered in promoting the album is the need for visuals to accompany the music if you want to promote it properly. Spotify want what they call canvases, which are short looping videos (3-8 seconds), to accompany the tracks; Meta (Facebook/Instagram) likes reels, which can be up to 90 seconds; while YouTube is best served with full videos or AVs (audio-visual sequences).

In order to supply the needs of social media, I have gone back to my AV days with PTE (Pictures-To-Exe) and am currently relearning animation with CTA (Crazy Talk Animator). In addition, Roberta’s camera club, Stirling and District Camera Club, for which we once chaired the AV group, have redeveloped an interest in AV and our sequence, “The Iconoclast”, went down very well when shown there last week. This AV uses “Titanium” by David Guetta featuring Sia as the musical background rather than one of my own compositions. For those who are interested, the copyright for using such music in a non-profit making AV is covered by joining and purchasing the appropriate licences from the IAC (Institute of Amateur Cinematographers). We are both members of Leeds AV group which, since it now operates purely using Zoom, has extended its membership well outside Leeds.

I already have several videos to accompany my music on YouTube and a couple of reels on Facebook. Look out in the near future for more of the same plus a few canvases on Spotify.

On the music front, I am slowly getting back into composing and looking at improving and releasing a couple of older songs. “Through the Darkness” and “Rainbow’s End” are already on YouTube and SoundCloud and the latter, being primarily a children’s song, might be suitable for a release just before Christmas. I’m also working on a song called “Jukebox in My Head” for which Roberta wrote the lyrics. Watch this space!