REQ: Underdog Foundations of Electronic Music
Shortcut your learning journey
This is not a tutorial, this is a music education.
It's a video course designed for absolute beginners, assuming zero pre-existing knowledge. Step by step I introduce all the key building blocks needed to start finishing your own electronic music compositions.
I'm Oscar from Underdog, and I created this course to save you YEARS of trial-and-error. There is a lot of music production knowledge out there in the world, but it is badly organised and not clearly structured for a beginner. This course teaches you the foundation that you need for future development. It starts from clear first principles, and ensures that later on you won't get lost when more advanced topics are introduced.
This course is built up of a core curriculum, and an intermediate curriculum. You can complete the core curriculum in 5 weeks and you'll be finishing your first songs. The intermediate curriculum goes deeper into specific topics and takes the time to explore nuances and details.
THE CORE CURRICULUM
DAW basics & drum programming
We'll talk about the basic audio editing skills needed to navigate your DAW, and learn to programme effective drum tracks using audio and MIDI workflows.
Rhythm & harmony theory
The key to emotionally impactful music is not random, and it's not secret: it's just a few core rhythmic and harmonic concepts that we explore in a series of short videos. Once these are understood, your music will be coherent, focused, and emotionally impactful.
Programming instruments with intent
If we understand the theoretical ideas, we now just need to put them into practice: how do we programme different musical voices and what roles do they play in a composition? We also learn the basis of synthesis to customise sounds to fit into our composition.
Mixdown basics
Even the best musical ideas will fall flat if the audio engineering behind them is all wrong. In this chapter we will learn the foundations of the domain called "mixing", to help us create space for our elements and balance them against each other.
Arrangement & climaxes
We learn most of the concepts in this course while working inside an 8-bar loop. But once that loop is polished enough, it's time to tell a musical story with it, and in this chapter we loop at the concepts behind doing exactly that.
Intermediate curriculum
Once you are comfortable with the core curriculum, it's time to delve deeper into each aspect and get better at it. To help you on your journey, we include a tonne of in-depth topic treatments with this course.
* Advanced drum programming techniques
* An rundown of 3rd party VST plugins
* Studio setup concepts and advice
* Critical listening exercises (house, techno, pop & electronica)
* How to use compression & managing dynamic range
* How to use and record hardware synths and effects
This is not a tutorial, this is a music education.
It's a video course designed for absolute beginners, assuming zero pre-existing knowledge. Step by step I introduce all the key building blocks needed to start finishing your own electronic music compositions.
I'm Oscar from Underdog, and I created this course to save you YEARS of trial-and-error. There is a lot of music production knowledge out there in the world, but it is badly organised and not clearly structured for a beginner. This course teaches you the foundation that you need for future development. It starts from clear first principles, and ensures that later on you won't get lost when more advanced topics are introduced.
This course is built up of a core curriculum, and an intermediate curriculum. You can complete the core curriculum in 5 weeks and you'll be finishing your first songs. The intermediate curriculum goes deeper into specific topics and takes the time to explore nuances and details.
THE CORE CURRICULUM
DAW basics & drum programming
We'll talk about the basic audio editing skills needed to navigate your DAW, and learn to programme effective drum tracks using audio and MIDI workflows.
Rhythm & harmony theory
The key to emotionally impactful music is not random, and it's not secret: it's just a few core rhythmic and harmonic concepts that we explore in a series of short videos. Once these are understood, your music will be coherent, focused, and emotionally impactful.
Programming instruments with intent
If we understand the theoretical ideas, we now just need to put them into practice: how do we programme different musical voices and what roles do they play in a composition? We also learn the basis of synthesis to customise sounds to fit into our composition.
Mixdown basics
Even the best musical ideas will fall flat if the audio engineering behind them is all wrong. In this chapter we will learn the foundations of the domain called "mixing", to help us create space for our elements and balance them against each other.
Arrangement & climaxes
We learn most of the concepts in this course while working inside an 8-bar loop. But once that loop is polished enough, it's time to tell a musical story with it, and in this chapter we loop at the concepts behind doing exactly that.
Intermediate curriculum
Once you are comfortable with the core curriculum, it's time to delve deeper into each aspect and get better at it. To help you on your journey, we include a tonne of in-depth topic treatments with this course.
* Advanced drum programming techniques
* An rundown of 3rd party VST plugins
* Studio setup concepts and advice
* Critical listening exercises (house, techno, pop & electronica)
* How to use compression & managing dynamic range
* How to use and record hardware synths and effects