Creating Sounds for Electronic Music

Overview

What you’ll achieve: In this project-centered course*, you will create sounds and use them in your own musical compositions. Whether you're an aspiring producer, composer, or hobbyist, this course will help you gain skills in music production and confidence using software synthesizers. Along with your classmates, you will create a massive database of designed sounds, or patches, to use in your compositions. As part of the course, you will work with a free version of FXpansion Strobe 2. What you’ll need to get started: This course is designed for learners who are familiar with music production basics, and who have access to some basic music production equipment. Specifically, you should have experience with a digital audio workstation that supports VST, AAX, or AU plugins (Introduction to Music Production or Pro Tools Basics are recommended if you do not have this experience). You will also need a MIDI keyboard or controller (such as an oxygen 8), a digital audio workstation, such as Pro Tools, and FXpansion Strobe 2 (a free 90-day demo will be provided for Coursera learners in this course). *About Project-Centered Courses: This is a ‘project-centered course’, which means it is designed specifically to help you complete a personally meaningful real-world project, with your instructor and a community of learners with similar goals providing guidance and suggestions along the way. By actively applying new concepts as you learn, you’ll master the course content more efficiently; you’ll also get a head start on using the skills you gain to make positive changes in your life and career. When you complete the course, you’ll have a finished project that you’ll be proud to use and share.

Syllabus

Welcome to Creating Sounds for Electronic Music!

Welcome to your Berklee course! Before you begin the course, we will cover all the details about the course and what you'll need to know to get the most out of your Berklee course.

Creating A Mock Up

This week, we'll start working in Strobe 2 and create a mock up of our song. We will focus on creating drum and bass patches to use in our songs. We'll also go over the form we will be using for our electronic etudes.

Creating Draft 1

This week, we'll look at organ, lead, keys, and arpeggiator patches. We'll start researching and adding these patches to our etudes.

Creating Draft 2

This week, we'll learn about pads, synths, unison, and chord patches. We'll research these patches and add them to our second draft. We'll also take a look at changing something drastic in our etudes.

Creating Draft 3

This week, we'll create our third draft. We'll add special FX and texture to our etudes. We'll also expand on the 40-measure form and begin to develop our musical ideas further.