| This is excellent advice. I'm still learning, however the closest thing to "learning music" is "learning programming" in the sense that, at least for me, the way I learned programming was to just immerse myself in it. Let curiosity drive me but try to have some goals. However in the beginning no one knows what their goals really are, and that learning curve is really brutal for programming and music is the only other thing that I've done that has an equivalent feeling of "I suck at this" until it just "clicks" and then you're over the hump and now you can at least understand the map of the territory vs not even know how to navigate the map. Similarly to programming, it can feel like you're in a submarine of thousands of buttons not knowing which to push for what to do whatever. I hit my stride learning programming when I tried to build stuff instead of just follow tutorials or books. I think Music or really anything is quite the same; you just have to align motivation and discipline with experimentation. Easier said than done of course. Besides that, I highly echo the tone of constraints that jsilence made. Leverage constraints so you narrow your field of focus to learn the fundamentals and you'll naturally grow out of the "fog of war" so to speak without overwhelming yourself, plus it'll feel rewarding working within a area of constraint. For example: 1. Pick Ableton Live - it's a great DAW for both live music and recording. They really upped their game with the last update to 11 and their overall UI is very well designed in mind of all archetypes of musicianship. 2. Use stock Ableton plugins for everything as your primary constraint. A lot of people go yak shaving on plugins similarly to text editors and language wars in programming. The stock plugins are extremely high quality and anyone dismisinng them probably doesn't know what they're talking about and just drinking the cool-aid. Side note: you'll hear extremely conflicting ways to accomplish things in Music because it has many ways to reach a conclusion similar to code. 3. Focus on a particular genre of music that you like so you can have fun and enjoy it. It's really important to try to just have fun - it helps get 'in the flow' but also be mindful of 'experimenting without getting anything done' force yourself to 'finish a track' even if it's just a 4/4 beat over 64 bars with 2 unique loops of 4 bars. Those types of 'configurations' can really make you grow quick in my opinion. 4. Most importantly as also jsilence pointed out, and I only recently really digested the significance of this: music is all about the in-between, the space, the pause which gives life to the "pulse" and if you understand three things: 1. Pulse 2. What is different 3. What is similar then you will understand all music. tl;dr in the beginning it's okay to suck, embrace it and have fun with some constraints. Avoid overwhelming yourself with yak-shaving. The pulse is everything. |