[m-hilgendorf]

I strongly disagree, and I say that as a classically trained musician. You can do pretty much everything with a mouse and (QWERTY) keyboard today. We've worked really hard to democratize content creation and lower the barrier to entry, we don't need to raise it by reinforcing the notion that you need a physical aptitude for playing instruments to create art with sound.

The computer can be an entry point for one's journey just the same as an acoustic guitar or piano. You can use that as your platform to learn theory as well as (if not better than) a piano or guitar.

But to get elitist for a moment, there's no better way to learn music aside from private lessons. That's true of any instrument, including the DAW.

[ben7799]

I don't know if you can really have the perspective on this if you were a classically trained musician. You already knew all that stuff inside and out.

I think a lot of music produced on a qwerty keyboard eschews huge amount of music theory just because it's produced that way.

My perspective was from the other way.. trying to learn it all playing with DAWs and other tools (admittedly a long time ago) and failing. Nothing about these tools will teach you why certain notes sound good together or why certain chords sound good together, etc..

For sure lots of electronic music just tries to skip all that completely though, or follows super strict genre rules where if you follow them it all comes out OK.

But we mostly agree though, the lessons are what make the difference. When I tried to learn this though there was zero accessibility of local teachers who would have taught through a DAW or something like that though. Finding a piano or guitar teacher was something available everywhere.

[grugagag]

If you want to learn the fundamentals it is better to remove all distractions. If you want to produce a song it is much easier on a computer. But the meat of creativity comes from limitations though