What is Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers about?

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.

DeSantis writes with clarity and precision. He draws on music theory, cognitive science, and production practice without letting any one framework dominate. The strategies are not prescriptive — he is explicit that most of them work some of the time for some people — but they are specific enough to be immediately testable. You can read a chapter, open your project, and try the thing he describes.

The book is explicitly aimed at electronic music producers working in DAWs, but many of the strategies apply to songwriting and composition more broadly. Readers with no interest in music production may find fewer useful strategies, but the book's larger contribution — a framework for diagnosing specific creative blocks and treating them as problems with identifiable solutions rather than as general failures of inspiration — transfers to almost any creative practice.