What kind of electronic musician are you?

So here we are, ready to finally boot up LMMS and get crackin'. When we first open LMMS, we are presented with a blank template song. This is like a blank canvas ready for us to start making music with. After we have set up all of the preferences and settings from Chapter 1, Gearing Up: A Pre-flight Checklist we should be ready to just jump in with both feet and get some work done.

Before we get going, we need to understand what our best workflow is. Maybe you are a piano player. You may want to use a keyboard controller to record notes into LMMS. Maybe you are an obsessive-compulsive tweaker and want to have meticulous control over every iota of data being written into LMMS and prefer to use your mouse. Your workflow is a way of creating the path of least resistance between you and your music.

To understand which workflow is going to work best for a given individual, we need to explore our tools. In electronic music, there are some tools and techniques that have been developed over the past thirty years that make getting your music out of your head and into the world easier.

Computer programs that are used to create and manipulate digital audio are called Digital Audio Workstations, or DAWs. A DAW is your music making environment. In this case, we are using LMMS.

When you first open a new document in any DAW, it usually has two main windows; an EditorWindow, and a Mixer. The Editor is where you create and arrange your sounds and the Mixer is where you balance the volume of the sounds and adjust their sonic characters. DAWs also employ other additional editors that allow you to manipulate sounds in compelling ways. This is something that distinguishes one DAW from another. Different DAWs will use different, specific sets of editors, depending on what kind of content they are creating.

LMMS is all about making electronic music, so its tools are focused on creating, editing, and mixing electronic music. It still employs a lot of the standard tools that one may find in any other DAW, but its specialized tools are a lot of fun.