Black Friday Buyer’s Guide for Music Producers

You might have already come across a lot of ongoing Black Friday deals on music production products like plugins, sample packs, and equipment. Even though there are some massive discounts and offers going on it’s quite essential for you to carefully balance between what you require to improve your music production and what you actually spend your money on. We highly recommend setting a budget and doing proper research before purchasing any of the tools. Since buying plugins, sample packs & educational tools is quite a slippery slope we have prepared this special guide for music producers that will help you make the most out of this Black Friday.

1. Identify what stage are you on as a music producer: Broadly we can identify 3 stages of music producers: beginner(0-1 year), intermediate(2-5 years) and advanced(5+ years). If you are just starting out then the first thing you got to do is to buy a DAW. There are plenty of DAWs out there with Ableton and FL Studio being the most popular. Almost every DAW has a free demo available so we recommend trying the demos out before making the purchase. At the moment DAWs, FL Studio & Reason have an ongoing Black Friday Sale. As a beginner, we would recommend not buying any plugins or sample packs. There are tons of free sample packs and plugins and also an immense number of youtube tutorials to help you out. For producers in the intermediate and advanced category, the guide follows.                                                                         
2. Analyze the bottlenecks in your current work process: The first step that every producer in the intermediate or advanced category should take is to analyze what has been bottlenecking his/her current process. Make a list of all these problems and assign them a priority number. For example, if you are struggling with sound design, mixing, and creating catchy melodies, first give them a priority number. If sound design is the number one on the list followed by making catchy melodies and then mixing then the best way would be to look up courses and preset banks for the genre of music you produce. We aren’t saying that you download presets and directly use them in your production, what we are trying to convey is to download the presets you think are good and then carefully analyze and reverse engineer those sounds. Once you have the material of your choice you can then move onto the next item on your priority list. Down below are some great resources on each of the categories that will help all the music producers out there in solving the above-listed problems. Almost all of them have some Black Friday sale running right now or are likely to be on sale in a few days. 
   • Music Theory: 
     • Courses/educational material: Beginner, Axtone Academy
     • Plugins: Ultimate MIDI Bundle
     • Youtube Channels: Hack Music Theory
   • Sound Design:
     • Courses/educational material: Serum Sound Design Masterclass [Requires Xfer Serum]
     • Presets: Browse preset banks for every genre & popular synth plugins here.
   • Instruments & Libraries: 
     • Plugins: Heavyocity, Native – Instruments
   • Arrangements: 
     • Courses: House/Techno, Dubstep, Hip-hop, Psytrance, Future Bass/Melodic Dubstep 
   • Drums:
     • Sample Packs: House, Techno, Trap/Future Bass/Dubstep, Hip-Hop, Vocals
   • Mixing: 
     • Courses: Axtone Academy, My Mix Lab
     • Plugins: Soundtoys, Sonnox, Waves
   • Mastering:
     • Courses: Mastering Now – The Complete Guide, Axtone Academy
     • Plugins: Ozone 9 Advanced                                                                                                                                         

1. Once you have successfully identified the bottlenecks and have all the essentials with you, it’s time for you to take your productions to the next level. The ultimate aim at this stage is to make your productions unique. Trying out new sound design techniques, exploring very less used and less popular sample packs, creative plugins like Output Portal, Thermal, Neoverb and basically just utilizing all your gained knowledge of music production over the years and applying it to places where it hasn’t been done before. It could be trying out a dubstep bass in a techno track or even ambient pads in a dubstep track. Wondering how you can leverage the current Black Friday deals for this purpose? Go to sites such as Plugin Boutique go through some of the deals on plugins you have never heard of from anyone. Make a list of these and then go to youtube and check how they function and analyse if it will be a suitable addition to your music production tools. We highly recommend making a list of such plugins before purchasing. Once you have the list ready you can shortlist the ones you feel would the best for you. Since most of the black friday sales stay at least till the 1st of December you should probably start researching right away so you have the music production tool of your choice by the end of this time period. 

We hope that this Black Friday buyer’s guide will be helpful for all the music producers out there and also don’t forget to check out our special page where we highlight the best deals on presets, bundles, sample packs, courses, etc for Black Friday 2020.

Image Credits: Native Instruments