Talk to Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Making Music is Dennis DeSantis's catalog of seventy-four specific problems that electronic music producers encounter, paired with concrete strategies for addressing each one. DeSantis, who works for Ableton and was instrumental in writing the company's Learning Music and Ableton tutorials, brings both compositional knowledge and an acute understanding of the software environments where most contemporary music is made.
The book is organized around three categories of problem: starting, finishing, and developing. The starting section covers the paralysis of the blank project — too many choices, fear of commitment, perfectionism that prevents beginning — and offers strategies ranging from the deliberately arbitrary (start with a specific constraint: no kick drum, only three pitches) to the procedural (start from a reference track and work backward). The developing section is the longest and most technically substantial, covering arrangement, tension and release, contrast, repetition and variation, and the relationship between musical elements. The finishing section addresses the problem that many producers never finish anything — not from lack of ideas, but from an inability to declare a work done.
What it gets right
- 1.
Creative blocks have specific causes. Diagnosing which problem you're facing — starting, developing, or finishing — points toward the right kind of solution.
- 2.
Constraints accelerate creative work. Limiting your options (one instrument, one scale, one tempo) forces decisions and produces results faster than unlimited freedom.
- 3.
Finishing is a separate skill from creating. Many producers have unfinished projects not from a lack of ideas but from an inability to declare a work complete.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Dennis DeSantis is an American composer, musician, and writer who works at Ableton, the company behind the Ableton Live digital audio workstation. He was a contributing author to Ableton's widely used learning materials and has spoken and written widely about the creative and pedagogical dimensions of music production software. Making Music, published in 2014 and released freely in PDF form as well as in print, is his primary book-length work and has become a standard reference for electronic music producers working through creative problems systematically.
