Production Resources

If you're wanting to learn to play the drums, it might seem a bit daunting at first - trying to get some good sounds out of the drum kit you've just sat down at. As with anything music related, practice makes perfect, and so you'll need to be realistic about the time it may take to learn to drum.

However, with the right guidance from an experienced drummer, you're going to be able to pick up some great drumming advice, and start to play more confidently sooner than you would have otherwise!

Here are a series of free online drum lesson videos, which explain each drumming learning stage very clearly.

Drum Lesson Video 01 - The Money Beat

See below for the other 11 free drumming video lessons for beginners!

While they're already known for their sound libraries, Prime Loops have now announced their new free music production tutorial sections of their website.

For those of you wanting to learn more about the complexities of harmony and counterpoint, from the basics of melodies and harmonies, through to much more advanced harmonic theory, you might like to check this out.

The MIT is offering a full undergraduate level course on Harmony and Counterpoint theory for free. The course is dated Spring 2005, and naturally many of these sort of musical fundamentals date back to the days of yore! (You'll notice the course home page features a picture of Ludwig van Beethoven - a man ever so slightly skilled in this particular field!)

It's not widely known, but several pretty heavy weight Universities actually give away a lot of full courses online for free once they've been running for a while. Naturally some of these are a few years old, but I've seen some dated up to 2007.

I'm currently going through many of these lists and finding courses which I think might interest some of you, as musicians.

The first of these that I thought I would post about here is the Undergraduate level course, Composing with Computers, offered by MIT. It's dated Spring 2003, so I would imagine will still be of real value to those of you wanting to study the use of Mac-based studio environments running Pro Tools, MAX/MSP, Peak, and Digital Performer - as well as some outboard hardware.

This is a common question, so I thought I'd post a tutorial video on how to setup your MIDI controller to work with FLstudio.

This is a very clear video tutorial put together by Zukan from Samplecraze, on how to use Propellerheads Recycle software to slice up audio samples...

Cakewalk, the software company which has of course brought many tried and true musicians apps such as Sonar to life, has recently established it's own Youtube channel.

There you'll find many videos on topics ranging from getting started with Sonar, to advanced tips and tricks, to sneak previews of upcoming software.

I'll be posting some of the best Sonar videos shortly, as I know a lot of you guys rock Sonar.

You can check out the Cakewalk Youtube channel here.

Here's a video tutorial on Cubase's Pool - continued.

Here's a video tutorial on using the Pool in Cubase.

Here's a video tutorial on further audio recording in Cubase.