Hello everyone, I am Alexxon. There are no hardcore tutorials in this article; I just want to chat with you about some of my recent thoughts on making electronic music.
It is only three months away from the two-year mark since I officially started creating electronic music. In three months, I will have been on this journey for exactly two full years. You can do a lot of things in two years, and I dedicated my time and passion to music.
I tutored a student, though that was about a month ago.
I tentatively call myself a “teacher,” but I personally feel my credentials aren’t quite there yet. However, when it comes to operating Ableton and my familiar genre of Melodic Progressive House, I believe I am more than capable enough to teach.
I taught this student for five sessions, totaling ten hours. I believe I responsibly taught him everything within my power and carefully prepared the project files and materials. The rest is left for the student to digest on his own.
When I was teaching this student, I emphasized one point countless times: modern music creation is fundamentally different from the past. Especially for those of us working with computer music and digital platforms, we need a new mindset, which is the incredibly tight integration of technology and music.
In this era, the composer is usually the arranger, and the arranger is usually the mixing engineer. The mixing engineer… might also master the track themselves. A producer who has gone through this entire workflow might even start their own company and release their works independently. Computers and the internet have changed everything, condensing massive recording studios and all their backend hardware into a single PC.
So, what do I mean by “the tight integration of technology and music”? Let me give you an analogy. When a compressor is working, if you only rely on your ears and artistic adjectives, it’s very hard to quantify and summarize its behavior. But if you introduce the concepts of dynamic range and waveforms, analyze them from a physical acoustics perspective, and combine them with terms like “punchy” or “loud,” you will much more easily understand how a compressor actually works. When trying to understand reverb, you need to understand the vibration of sound and how it propagates in a room. When learning about EQ, you must know how it works fundamentally: splitting different frequency signals, processing them separately, and summing them back together—which is why you suddenly realize the potential delays and phase issues it can cause. As for the difference between digital and analog, we can actually use “non-linearity” and “randomness” to quantify the abstract term “warmth.”
How exactly do the working principles of Fabfilter Pro-Q3 and Maag EQ differ? Why do OPTO and VCA compressors produce different sounds using different resistors? Why does using a Chaos Oscillator versus a standard Unison + Detune in SERUM create Supersaws that sound similar but not exactly the same? These are things I find incredibly fascinating and worth exploring. Literally speaking, this is quite different from the “composition” we are traditionally familiar with.
I used to think music had nothing to do with my major. But later, as I studied audio technology more deeply, I discovered the pervasive presence of mathematics—including the duration of notes, the mathematical relationships between them, and even using math to syncopate rhythms. Digging deeper, math can drastically alter sound frequencies. Similarly, I increasingly notice the presence of physics in modern computer music: waveform and phase cancellation, how sound is generated (vibration), and time/frequency analysis. These words might sound entirely unrelated to music, but if you think about it, they are actually starting from the very origin. They start from how sound is produced and its basic properties, helping you create “music”—a series of sounds produced after intelligent beings apply special arrangements and structures to audio.
A pianist might only need to focus on the piano itself and the sheet music, allowing their performance to be incredibly focused and meticulous. But for those of us using a DAW as all-around creators, we are not just working on one track of music; we are managing massive projects with dozens or even hundreds of tracks. We have to translate emotions into MIDI note velocities and modulations, the cutoff range of a filter, and map “coldness” or “warmth” into specific frequency bands we want to emphasize, rather than just relying on pure music theory. Treating music from both technical and emotional angles has become second nature to me. It has also changed the way I think. When I see an instrument now, I immediately think about what would pair well with it, and subsequently, how to mix and tune them together.
Honestly, it feels quite magical to realize I’ve reached this point.
I used to be a piano student. To pass grading exams, I mechanically and rigidly accepted and practiced highly repetitive sheet music, never truly feeling the charm of music.
However, when I transitioned from someone who plays others’ works to someone creating my own, everything suddenly became clear. The abstract language of art was no longer abstract. While I don’t think this is 100% a good thing, I definitely have far fewer doubts about the sounds I hear in my head.
I made a friend in Canada who is a student in the Sound Technology program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music. I learned a tremendous amount from talking and spending time with him. He was also the one who helped me solidify my goal for graduate studies: Sound and Music Technology.
I used to feel quite lost about being a math major, wondering why it took me until college to find my future direction. But now, I see the possibility of these two disciplines converging in the future. Just as a song by Boards of Canada implies: Music is Math.
In other words, as a basic science student, seeing my knowledge constantly moving closer to the industry I want to be in gives me the motivation to keep moving forward. I’ve also started to feel that my college years might not be a waste of time after all, but rather a preparation for the future.
Thank you for reading.