Well you’ve come to the right place. This post will walk you through the basic concepts and software you need to make music. And we’ll make a quick track together. You know what they say - the best way to learn is to do.

Getting Started

You're riding a fresh wave of inspiration. You sit down at your computer and you search ‘how to make music’, only to be greeted with an overload of information and a paralyzing amount of options. Let’s break all this down to its simplest form so you can focus on the fun part.

Choosing a DAW

The first thing you’ll need to do is download a DAW. For those not yet introduced to a musician’s best friend, DAW = Digital Audio Workstation. It is THE software tool you’ll be spending your time in when you’re wanting to record or make music digitally.

Choosing the right DAW for you should ultimately come down to what type of music you want to make, whether you’ll be using it to perform live, and what type of computer you have. All that aside, I’m going to recommend you start with Reaper. Why Reaper?

1. Unlimited trial period. You can try this DAW out and decide to pivot without investing money (and when you inevitably do want to give your money to Reaper, a license is only $60!).

2. Features. While you won’t need many of these to start, you’ll be able to grow with Reaper and understand these features as you progress on your journey.

3. Kenny G. Reaper has an amazing community of content creators that can help you get up and running in no time. Kenny Gioia is one of the most popular (don’t worry, you’ll start to love his speaking cadence) but there are plenty out there.

Not sold? That’s okay, you won’t hurt my feelings. Check out this video to hear some other options and how they stack up against one another.

The rest of this post will use screenshots from Reaper, but concepts will apply to the DAW of your choosing.

DAW Crash Course

Sweet. You have your DAW downloaded, you open it up, and… holy shit. That’s a lot of buttons. Yeah, I was there too. Like I mentioned previously, you won’t need to worry about many of these until you’re further along on your journey.

The layout of DAWs will vary but I like to think of them as having three main components.

1. Tracks. Tracks are the core of creating audio in your DAW. Tracks could be a vocal recording via microphone, a digital synth all running in your DAW, an electric guitar with a simulated amp, and everything in between. Whenever you want to make a new sound, you’ll want to create a new Track.

2. Timeline. This is where you’ll see your actual audio waves. Each track will be represented on the timeline.

3. Mixer. The Mixer is where you can quickly make adjustments to your tracks like turning the volume up or down. The mixer will also have a ‘Master’ track that’s typically not shown on the tracks section. This is where you can change volume or apply effects to your whole project instead of to an individual track.

Configure your audio

Before we go further, you should first set up your audio really quickly in Reaper. Go to Options → Preferences. Then choose Device which is located under Audio. Finally set Audio System to DirectSound. You should be set for the rest of this blog post now.

🚨Please note Direct Sound will be laggy if you’re using a MIDI Keyboard. I do not recommend Direct Sound for typical use (look into using ASIO instead), but it will be sufficient for this example.

Let’s make some music

Enough talking - let’s walk through a simple example of making music.

Be sure you have a new project opened in Reaper. If you’ve already been messing around in your session, just go to File → New Project.

Create a Track

First thing we’re going to do is create a new track. The easiest way is to just double click on the tracks area highlighted in the image above. You can also Right Click → Insert new track.

Double click the black bar on the track to give it a name, we’ll call this: Synth.

Next, we’re going to apply a synth to our track. To do this, click the FX button which will open up a window of all the Effects loaded into Reaper. Reaper will come with a bunch of stock effects and there’s a whole world of outside plugins and effects you can download (another post on that later).

In the FX window, search for ‘synth’ and then double click on ‘VSTi: ReaSynth (Cockos)’. Cockos is the name of the company that created Reaper if you’re curious.

Once you choose ReaSynth, it’ll open up a new dialog box with a bunch of options for the Synth. Just ignore those for now and close out of the window.

Prepare your track

The first thing you’ll want to do is click the Red circle on your track. This is going to ‘arm’ the track for recording, which just means if we click on the bigger red circle in-between the tracks section and mixer, this track will be recorded.

When you click that arm button, you’ll see a new option pop up on your track that will have a label of IN FX and probably the value of Input 1. We’re going to click on that dropdown, choose:

Input: MIDI → Virtual MIDI keyboard → All Channels

Essentially this is telling Reaper that we want the input of this track to be MIDI - which you can think of like digital notes - instead of something like an external microphone or guitar or something like that.

Okay - quick check in. By now you should have:

• created your track

• applied the ReaSynth FX

• set the track’s input to MIDI

It should look like this:

Make some noise

Okay, now to create some sounds! Typically when interacting with virtual instruments like this, you would use a MIDI Keyboard that connects to your computer. This lets you play notes on your physical keyboard (piano keyboard, not typing keyboard) and have them recognized as notes inside of your DAW.

I’m going to go on the assumption that you don’t have a MIDI Keyboard which is perfectly fine. We’ll do it the old fashion way (which I honestly prefer a lot of the time, but don’t tell anyone I said that).

Now we’re going to click the big Record button (to the left of the big play button) and let that go for a bit. While it’s recording, you’ll see a box start to get created on the timeline. Let that go for about 5 seconds and then click the Record button again to stop it. You should see something like this now:

We’re now going to double click on that box that was created on the Timeline and that’s going to bring up the MIDI editor. Once the MIDI editor is open, start clicking around the piano on the left and you should hear some synth sounds popping up.

The first thing we’ll do is lay out some notes. The easiest way to do this is to click and drag on the grid editor. You can always alter the note once it’s been placed by dragging up and down (changing the note) or dragging in from either side (altering the length of the note). Try to recreate this pattern:

Use the C4 on the keyboard as your point of reference for drawing this up. Now exit out of the MIDI editor when it’s looking good. You’ll see these notes now reflected on our box on the timeline. Now what we’ll want to do is to shorten this box so it ends when our note ends, looking like this:

Now if you want to listen to this, just click on the < button by the Record button which will put your cursor on the timeline back to the beginning of the track. Then hit play and you’ll be able to hear what you just made!

Now that you know how to make some sounds, go ahead and add another track and see what else you can come up with. One tip - when the dialog box of options comes up after selecting ReaSynth in your FX window, tweak some of those knobs and see how that changes the sound of the synth.

Where to go next?

That was a lot of info for one post. Hopefully this at least gave you the info so you can play around in your DAW and start tweaking and messing around with things. Again, the best way to learn is to do.

But of course what we made is nowhere near a commercial-ready track, so where do you go from here? Honestly, it really depends. If you already know how to play an instrument (guitar, bass, piano, violin, ANYTHING), start reading about how to record that instrument and go from there.

If you don’t know how to play any instrument, I’d recommend investing in a cheap MIDI keyboard + search for “free piano plugin” or “free synth plugin” and install some of the most popular plugins you find. That should be plenty to start experimenting more and making quality music.

Lastly - subscribe to my blog and newsletter. I’ll be creating content to help you on all stages of your music journey. Best of luck!