Have you ever wanted to learn how to make music?
Whether you’ve played an instrument your whole life or have solely been an avid music listener, you may have wondered what it would be like to create your own music at one point or another (spoiler alert: it’s a deep—and at times challenging—but incredibly fun and rewarding experience). Fortunately, learning how to make music has never been easier than it is today. With nothing but a computer and some online resources (like this article you’re reading right now), you can get a start on—and go incredibly far in—your music creation journey.
In this in-depth guide, we’ll go over everything you’ll want to know to get started with music production, from the tools you’ll need to the six creative steps you’ll take to make your own music. See the table of contents below to quickly navigate from section to section.
The tools you’ll need to make music
When you imagine a music producer, you might envision a spacious studio, sprawling mixing boards, and top-end mics in polished recording booths. While these are all great to have access to, you’ll be pleased to know that you can make some incredible music today with nothing but a laptop and a few pieces of software. Below, we’ll explore the core essentials you need to get started.
1. A DAW (digital audio workstation)
A digital audio workstation, or DAW for short, is the main software used in modern music production to record, edit, and arrange sounds. Think of it as the house within which you’ll build and arrange all of your ideas.
What a DAW typically looks like—this one is PreSonus’ Studio One.
2. Sounds and plugins
While the DAW provides the virtual environment you’ll be working in, sounds and plugins are the elements you’ll need to use within it to actually produce audio. Sounds can appear in all sorts of forms. Perhaps they’re pre-existing loops that you can use for inspiration. Or, maybe they’re one-shots that are loaded into software instrument plugins that you can use to create your own melodies and chord progressions.
An example of a kick one-shot, or a type of audio sample that’s just a single strike. Arranging instances of these into a musical pattern is one way you can make your own music.
Speaking of which, plugins are smaller pieces of software that you use inside of your DAW to meet a variety of creative needs. Maybe they provide a virtual instrument (like a piano or bass) pre-loaded with sounds, which can allow you to compose parts for an instrument that you don’t physically own or know how to play. Or, maybe they allow you to use an effect like an echo or a reverb to colour your sounds.
Know that most DAWs will come with a suite of built-in sounds and effects, so you don’t have to worry about acquiring them separately just to learn how to make music. However, as you continue your music production journey, you might also come across third-party plugins and sample libraries that you find appealing. Purchasing these will allow you to incorporate new sounds and effects into your DAW to expand your sonic horizons even further.
3. Physical instruments and hardware (optional)
Lastly, if you either sing or play a physical instrument, you can absolutely incorporate those talents into your own music. This is totally optional and not a requisite for digital music production, but can certainly be a valuable asset if you’ve got it.
If you want to sing in your own music, you’ll want to look into getting a microphone, an XLR cable (for most mics), and an audio interface. In the tutorial below, we walk through how you can connect these things to your DAW. That said, if you don’t have the budget or just want to get started right away, you can also get some decent recordings out of your phone or laptop’s built-in mics with the right setup.
How to create a chord progression
Once you have a beat going, the next thing you can try out is outlining some harmony with a chord progression. A chord is a collection of pitches that form a single harmonic idea. Meanwhile, a chord progression is a succession of chords that serves as the harmonic backbone of a piece of music.
What is harmony?
Harmony refers to the simultaneous sounding of multiple musical notes. We hear it in almost all of the music we listen to, often outlined by instruments like the piano, guitars, synth pads, etc. For example, the chord progression performed by the piano in Adele’s “Hello” defines the harmonic structure of the song, while providing a nice bed for her stirring vocals.
A i – ♭III – ♭VII – ♭VI chord progression—simple but powerful.
Similar to rhythm, there are also some music theory basics that help us understand how popular chords are structured. If you’re not familiar with what major and minor triads are, our introduction to harmony is also available below to help you out. And although we’re skipping ahead a bit in the context of this tutorial, our introduction to melody will also give you some definitions around terms like pitch, scales, and keys, if any of those come up along the way and you find yourself confused.
How to create a chord progression in your DAW
Now, it’s time to create a chord progression that moves in time with our established beat. While a progression can contain any number of chords, picking a pattern of four to loop is a good starting point. In the video below, you can see how we added a synth pad software instrument and used it to build a simple but solid chord progression to pair with our beat:
We chose an i – ♭VI – ♭III – ♭VII chord progression—all of the same chords as “Hello,” but in a different order and key.
If you’re not sure where to start, you’ll want to pick a major scale or minor scale to build all of your chords around. C major and A minor are great for beginners since they consist of no sharps or flats (in other words, they solely use all the white keys on the piano). While this is a sweeping generalization with many exceptions, centring around a major scale might give you what’s commonly interpreted as a more “bright” or “happy” sound. Meanwhile, centring around a minor scale might give you what’s commonly interpreted as a “dark” or “sad” sound.
How to create a bassline using your chord progression
Once you have a chord progression going, you can create a simple bassline by copying and pasting the chords onto a track containing a bass instrument. From there, just isolate the root notes and move them to a lower octave. You can find octaves by dragging notes up and down until you hit the same exact letter name. This will help fill out the low end of your track and give it some much-needed body, as heard below:
You’ll need some headphones to get a good listen to this one!
As you progress in your music-making journey, you’ll likely start to experiment further with your basslines, adding more notes, deviating from the root, giving them groovier rhythms, etc. While we don’t go too wild, we’ve added a bit more flavour to our bassline below to demonstrate, creating some rhythms that match our beat’s kick and jumping back up an octave here and there:
How to write a melody
Last but certainly not least, let’s add a melody on top of the musical bed we’ve created.
What is melody?
It’s a little hard to define what exactly a melody is—perhaps a succession of tones that are grouped as a singular idea—but we sure know a good one when we hear it.
An effective melody is one that moves us or replays inside of our minds long after the song is over. Take the tin whistle intro in “My Heart Will Go On.” Although it’s practically a meme, its honest and soaring nature is simply undeniable.
How to create a melody in your DAW
While there are once again no rules when it comes to crafting a melody, we do have more structure compared to when we composed our beat and chord progression.
For one, the chord progression should’ve established a musical key that we’ll most likely want to stick to for our melody as well. If you make your melody land on pitches contained within the chords as they hit, you’ll likely find that it sounds more consonant, or musically stable. On the other hand, you can create a bit of tension by making it hit notes that aren’t within your chords. From there, you can resolve them to more consonant pitches (or don’t) to taste.