HOLE WEDNESDAY.

you need NONE of that shit!!!!! there’s a website called beepbox.co. literally all you have to do is press things until it sounds a modicum of nice. it’s easy it’s free and it works on anything which has a browser because it’s a website.

if even ONE person starts making music bc of this post it will be worth it.

I'm gonna try and make music

Ableton has excellent free websites to learn the basics:

Learning Music

Learning Synths

You can learn basically everything you need on YouTube. I recommend:

Mercurial Tones Academy

Dan Worrall

Bthelick

A lot of your favorite artists, mainly in electronic music, likely have done track breakdowns, you can watch those to learn how they do things.

DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) ultimately all do the same things, and Cakewalk is a great FREE fully fledged one. Sure it has some issues, and doesn’t have many plugins included, but it works just fine. All the music I released so far was made there, before I made the jump to Ableton.

As for VST plugins:

Vital is an excellent free synth

Native Instruments Komplete Start is a good free collection of plugins

TDR Nova is a great free EQ

There’s a lot of others and I don’t wanna name everything I’m aware of here, but feel free to DM me for more (Or if you have any other questions and stuff too).

And as for samples, you can get a bunch of free ones at:

Cymatics

Ghosthack

Having good headphones is nice and what I’d recommend you invest in first once it comes to it, but even your current ones will probably be fine, mainly if you slap AutoEQ onto them to flatten the frequency response. And ultimately, music isn’t all about the mixing, the most important part is conveying an emotion.

Yeah, there is still quite the learning curve, I get that, though it’s also why it’s managed to hold me as a hobby for so long.

I do however have something of the exact opposite variety too, the most simple way to make music I know of, and a wonderful little semi-social experience, along the lines of the game Journey:

LOOKING AT BLACK CHARACTERS

I made a zine! Rather than being just being a guide on Writing Black Characters, it's a reflection on those guides, popular media (particular Hazbin Hotel and Steven Universe), the eternal discourse wheel, and has some tips here and there.

Created for the Media Essay Zine Jam! Thanks for hosting

FIXES, EDITS, ETC

The zine has been edited primarily to encourage readability and a bit better formatting. This has been an on and off thing I did over the course of June. The zine now is formatted optimally for future editing which means when I edit in the future, I can focus on one page at a time. Before, I struggled a bit due to transitioning from Scribus to Affinity.

There are things I would do differently if I had started with Affinity before Scribus

List of edits are as follows:

Reworded some things I felt were unclear or I felt I could articulate a bit better. 

Exported everything at an optimal size for digital consumption and download

Tried to fix more of the capitalization for Black; this can be one of the more difficult things to catch as although I have some grammar checkers now, they do not capitalize Black by default much of the time

Made the addendum slightly less rambley though it is still extremely rambling

Tried to make the typesetting a bit better (though I believe I may redo the typesetting entirely someday in the future)

I included some additional thoughts on masculinity, my identity as a lesbian, etc.

As always, due to having a migraine disorder, I at times introduce more errors when editing my old work. I hope to give the zine a lookover again soon though I may have one of my friends do some more in depth editing and fixing for me.

I made a grimoire to hold my tiny e-reader and MP3 player (an XTEINK X4 with Crosspoint flashed to it and a Sony NW-A55 Walkman respectively)

Note: the ereader attaches magnetically, it's not just gently balanced atop