Music Magazine The Music Producer's Guide to Electronic Third Edition Back Issue

Welcome to the Music Producer’s Guide to Electronic, your guide to five decades of Electronic Music, where we speak to the pioneers, examine the history and look in detail at many of the production techniques used within this most incredible of musical genres.

Electronic Music is a vast subject to cover whichever way you look at it, so we’ve taken the logical approach to bring you the highlights, detail and the techniques in chronological order: from 70s synth sequences right up to huge, 21st century basslines. However, the history of the genre goes back many hundreds of years, which we attempt to encapsulate in a feature starting on.

As we’ll see, Electronic Music’s journey has been as varied and fascinating as the technology behind it; indeed the music and the technology have influenced one another so much that you can’t really talk about one without the other, so expect us to delve deeply into the rich, technical side of music production as we traverse its history. We are focussing on the synthesizers behind the sound and detail these machines, from analogue modular monsters to sleek cutting-edge software. And don’t worry if you are not equipped with the latest music production gear, as we are giving you many of the software tools you need, free with this guide. See p6 for more details.

Of course Electronic Music isn’t really about one musical genre but many (many) varied sub genres. You could sum it up as music produced by technology, yet even that definition covers a multitude of styles and bpms, so we have several step-by-step workshops to help your music production skills progress within ten genres spanning 50 years: from ambient to bassline, synth pop to synthwave.

We hope you enjoy reading about some of the cutting-edge producers and techniques used by those who have gone before you, and look forward to hearing your productions add to the rich history of Electronic Music production. Keep tweaking.