David Shimel on EDM production

An interview with FractalU's EDM instructor

Tell me about yourself. Who are you? What's your background in making dance music?

I took a somewhat nonlinear path to electronic dance music (EDM), but looking back it seems inevitable. Growing up as an indoor kid in Pensacola, FL, its famous white sand beaches were kind of wasted on me compared to my friends who would wake up super early to go surfing before high school. As an adult I’ve learned to appreciate nature more, but back then two of my most load-bearing interests were music and computers.

My family is very musical (for example, my parents, sister, grandfather, and I all sang in our church’s choir together), so at age 7 I started taking classical piano lessons. Around the same time, I became interested in the ‘80s-era IBM PC my father bought. Besides playing games on it, I was first exposed to coding by teaching myself a little BASIC, enough to write a simple calculator program for helping with my math homework which my 5th grade teacher did not appreciate (I’m still a bit salty about that one).

After winning a scholarship in middle school, my dad bought me my first computer, a custom-built beige behemoth running Windows 98 which we had to take back to the store the same day we brought it home because we couldn’t find the power button that blended seamlessly into the case. I used my allowance savings to purchase an entry-level Yamaha keyboard with basic MIDI capabilities, and between the two devices I had enough hardware to start fusing my two interests.

I ran experiments like recording scales and arpeggios in MIDI at a slow tempo, speeding them up, playing the audio back into some free audio editing software, then cranking the volume to create digital distortion, making the synth sound like an unruly guitar solo. Not particularly sophisticated, but I didn’t have any local mentors, and YouTube wasn’t a thing back in the dial-up Internet days, so all I could do was FAFO.

Going into high school, I had no idea that my musical world was about to be completely upended. I wasn’t that interested in what was on the radio or my dad’s classic rock collection, so I pretty much only listened to Weird Al . . . yeah.

Furthermore, my gusto for piano was starting to wane as I couldn’t see why I was investing so much time in a skill that I didn’t know when, where, or how to apply. But one day I was reading a forum post about slowing down songs with a Winamp plugin to make them easier to transcribe, and the poster mentioned Overture 1928 by Dream Theater as an example. So, I booted up Napster, downloaded the song . . . and proceeded to listen to it on repeat for hours.

I was transfixed! I’d never before heard melodies, rhythms, or tones like those, and it was deeply validating to finally make contact with a sound that I’d been subconsciously searching for my entire 13-year-old life. In particular, Overture 1928 has two dazzling synth solos courtesy of the band’s keyboardist, Jordan Rudess, that cut through to my soul and set my mind on fire with possibility. Now I understood what all those hours with Bach and a metronome were for.

Refueled by the energies and intricacies of progressive metal, I picked up my first “real” piece of home studio software, a digital audio workstation (DAW) by Cakewalk. By 12th grade, I had gotten good enough to win a statewide composition contest for high schoolers as well as record a 5-song EP with my band New World.

After graduating, I moved to NYC to study engineering at Columbia, where I played keys for a dozen musical theater productions. I also picked up the programming thread again, having dropped it when I tried to teach myself C++ but got overwhelmed by a concept called pointers. Turns out I have a knack for telling computers what to do as my comp sci grades were better than my mechanical and electrical engineering ones. Now knowing myself better, I sometimes fantasize about going back in time and just double majoring in Music and Computer Science, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to play with the big toys in the machine shop, so . . .

Anyway, with a BS degree in hand and desperate to stay in New York, I self-studied my way into an entry-level software developer role after failing to get even a single interview for a mechanical engineering position. A year later, I became terminally infected with dance music fever thanks to my soon-to-be girlfriend who introduced me to a now-defunct website called Turntable.fm. Essentially, it was a series of chat rooms where people took turns choosing songs to play for each other, and our favorite was the “Dubstep” room.

From day one I was hooked. Every track sounded better than the last, and the brutalizing bass wobbles picked up perfectly from where the crunchy guitar riffs of my youth left off. Once again I had the sensation of discovering a tonal flavor that I was certain existed but didn’t know how to describe in words. I tried making my own dubstep tracks, but they left a lot to be desired. Something was missing.

Eventually, in 2018 I came across Splice, a site that lets you buy credits that you can use to download professional-quality sounds from thousands of sample packs. They also have a rent-to-own program through which I acquired Serum, one of the most popular software synths out there. Along with the knowledge from countless tutorial videos on YouTube, I had finally assembled the three pieces of the Triforce needed to create truly professional-quality tunes, and a few months later I dropped my first track, a Ru Paul’s Drag Race remix called “Keep It Pushin’”, under the name FVN STVFF. Since then I’ve released more than a dozen tracks and performed at various DJ gigs while staying more-or-less gainfully employed as a software engineer.

How did you end up teaching at Fractal University?

Last year I started getting more into Twitter and eventually lurked my way into the TPOT community. I saw some of Andrew’s tweets about the Fall 2023 courses which included Chris’s Intro to LLMs. I’ve been interested in ML/AI for a few years now and thought I could make more progress with hands-on learning experiences in group settings, so I signed up right away, even though I don’t technically live in NYC (shout-out Metro-North Railroad).

At one of the sessions, Andrew asked if there were any classes I thought I could run, and I mentioned EDM production as an option. Both he and Liam said they’d be interested in taking it which made me confident that hey, maybe the NYC market for this kind of activity isn’t totally saturated, even though similar programs do exist, not to mention the thousands of YouTube videos on how to make beats from people far more musically accomplished than me.

With that, I applied to be a teacher during the Spring 2024 semester which turned out to coincide nicely with a sabbatical from my tech job that allowed me to invest more time in developing the curriculum, interacting with students, and recording tutorial videos, the last of which helped me get my YouTube channel off the ground. It’s not much, but I recently crossed the 200 subscriber mark, and my Intro to DJing video has accumulated over 31,000 views, so now I have some momentum which I can carry with me once I go back to the corporate world. Thanks Fractal!

What’s the structure and curriculum of your class? Why did you design your class that way?

The nominal goal of the class is to teach people how to use a piece of software called Ableton to make EDM, though in theory they could use any DAW they want since the main concepts are universal. However, even if they never make another song ever again after the course is over, I want to leave them with a heightened musical consciousness and enhanced auditory awareness as they go about their lives, so to that end I treat it like a music appreciation class. A secret third thing that I smuggle in is the simple act of gathering together in community around a shared activity. Much ink has been spilled about the decline of third spaces in the modern West, and reversing that trend is one part of Fractal’s mission that really resonates with me, so I’m happy to do my part in the War Against Societal Atomization.

EDM being a product of human cultural and technological achievement, I like to begin the course with a brief history of the major developments over the last two centuries that made it possible. After that, we get down to business with drums which form the rhythmic backbone of the entire track, the groovy percussive pulse that gets people moving and locked in. Drums are also easier to teach than, say, melody and harmony, which require more contextual understanding and are less intuitively accessible, whereas everyone has tapped their fingers on a table or stomp-stomp-clapped in a stadium before.

Next we cover bass, the simplest pitched instrument to manage since it typically only plays one note at a time. As the lowest-frequency instrument, it establishes the harmonic foundation for the song and creates a felt sense of fullness in the music. We then create the foundation for our first “drop” (the most intense part of a song, analogous to the chorus in pop music) by combining drums with bass, adding and removing them at key moments over time to convey a sense of energetic progression.

Third, we get into different kinds of “leads”, which are the final fundamental elements needed to make a “proper” song. A lead is usually the “hook” of a track, the main theme that gets stuck in your head after listening. In part one, I ask the students to find a vocal sample, such as a speech or catchphrase, from a movie, TV show, or social media video that they can chop up and arrange in their song. Since these samples are non-melodic spoken words, we can again delay learning music theory a little longer, at least until part two where I introduce students to diatonic harmony through the Circle of Fifths. Because it can be really difficult to come up with interesting melodies and chord progressions when you’re just starting out, for this lesson I ask them to make an EDM cover of a popular song to get around the “blank page” problem.

At this point we have enough knowledge to make a Minimum Viable Song that could be, say, published on social media along with a short video clip. However, to make a standalone track for release as a single or on an album, we need to go deeper into song structure to further contextualize our drop and take the listener on a journey. To that end our next topic is the “buildup”, which is like the uphill climb at the beginning of a rollercoaster, creating a sense of anticipation that is emphatically gratified when the drop hits.

We then take a slight detour to cover the basics of DJing which is the typical way that EDM is performed for an audience. While it’s not strictly necessary to be able to DJ to produce music, it helps clarify how different sections of a song fit together into the overall structure and the purpose that each one serves. Plus, as with writing, to be a good producer you also need to listen to a lot of music, and DJing encourages you to listen closely to songs so you can select ones that work well together and nail those transitions.

In the penultimate session I build on this “close listening” idea and tie everything together by discussing the remaining components of song structure using examples drawn from my own work, which besides being fun for me also lets me to avoid getting copyright strikes on my YouTube channel since I stream all of the sessions :) Finally, in the last class I put everyone’s skills to the test and give them a taste of what working in the music industry is like by pairing people up and having them collaborate on a track together.

What did you learn about teaching EDM from the first round of your class? What surprised you?

Oh man, so much! In the very first lesson, I made the mistake of trying to teach folks how to program a kick drum sound from scratch. In one sense this is a very fundamental exercise since the kick is the beating heart of any dance track, and being able to program your own sounds unlocks a lot of possibilities. I thought that by precisely specifying every step in the recipe and methodically demonstrating them it would be easy to follow along, but it was a lot to ask of the students who were seeing this complex software UI for the first time. They lacked context (“why exactly am I programming this sound again?”) and immediacy (it took us at least half an hour to complete), and the payoff for success was minimal (hard to retain anything when you’re barely keeping up with all this minutia). We could’ve made progress much faster by doing what producers usually do, which is to pick an existing kick sample and start building a beat right away.

In the second semester, I cut this topic from the syllabus in favor of spending more time orienting the students in Ableton and showing them multiple workflows for constructing drum loops so they could start to develop familiarity and muscle memory more quickly.

Speaking of cutting topics, another improvement going from my first to second semester of teaching is that I tightened up the curriculum, shortening the course from 12 to 8 weeks. Getting adults with busy schedules to commit to 3 months of Saturdays for a side interest is a lot to ask, and while the extra time did allow me to experiment with ideas like guest lectures (shout-out Bastion) which turned out to be super inspiring for students, near the end it started to feel like the course was dragging a bit and may have contributed to attrition. By offering more content I thought it would increase the course’s value to students, but there’s also a lot of value in conveying the most essential information in a concise fashion.

While trying to explain various musical concepts, I became acutely aware of the differences between explicit, technical knowledge (how to do X, how to achieve effect Y) and tacit, “artistic” knowledge (why to do X, “Y belongs here”). The former is fairly straightforward to transmit, but the latter requires the student to spend time in the process, making their own music and comparing it to their favorite tracks, paying attention to the sensations that arise and feeling their way through. You have to make a thousand decisions to produce a song, most of which are artistic in nature, expressive of the individual’s aesthetic sensibilities, hence I can’t do them for the student without effectively “taking over.” You can’t ski for someone else! So, I’ve started incorporating more live exercises into the sessions where I set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes and have them produce a fragment of music (usually based on the homework from last week) to help them “get the reps in” in a setting where I can offer them immediate feedback.

Finally, I was surprised at how much I improved as a producer myself. Making the same sorts of beats each week helped speed up my own process, and I’ve become less precious about trying to make my work sound “perfect.” There’s an opportunity cost in terms of other songs-not-made or projects-not-shipped to spending endless hours optimizing tiny details that only I will notice, and perfectionism can often be a mask for cowardice. My new motto is “it’s fine, it’s good enough, it doesn’t matter as much as you think, just keep going.”

What sort of outcomes have your students seen? How has taking your class affected them?

At the extreme end, my student Tasshin absolutely sponged up the material, spending extra time outside the classes learning from other sources and studying intensely. As a result, he finished several original tracks and created music videos for them. We just released our first track together (probably the most euphoric song I’ve ever worked on) called “Rockstar” which you can listen to here.

Other students have reported a deeper appreciation for music and awareness of the details of sounds, as if they were able to see new colors. Even if AI tools make producing certain kinds of music easy (though I don’t think they’ll fully replace humans anytime soon), they can’t take away this newfound sensitivity to the sonic dimension of reality.

Also, not all of the outcomes have been musical! Just as I was inspired to teach a class at Fractal by taking one myself, my student Maryann launched a course on digital collaging the next semester. 🎵 It’s the cirrrrrrrcle of liiiiiiiiife…🎵

Who are some artists and music producers that have influenced you?

I mentioned Dream Theater above as a major influence on me. Other favorites in the progressive rock/metal family include Symphony X, Nightwish, Sonata Arctica, DragonForce, Circus Maximus, Kamelot, Pagan’s Mind, Liquid Tension Experiment, Equilibrium, Arion, Amaranthe, Animals As Leaders, Opeth, and Rhapsody of Fire.

As a kid I didn’t have any access to niche electronic music, so the only album I owned was Europop by Eiffel 65, the Italian masterminds behind the song “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”. Since then, so many DJs and producers have rubbed off on me that it would be impossible to list them all, so I’ll name a few that I saw this year at EDC Las Vegas: Aly & Fila, Angerfist, Argy, Armin van Buuren, Atmozfears, ATLiens, Blastoyz, deadmau5, Devin Wild, Dillon Francis, Disco Fries, Excision, Ferry Corsten, Ghastly, Infected Mushroom, JOYRYDE, Kai Wachi, LAYZ, LSDREAM, NGHTMRE, Seven Lions, Shiba San, SLANDER, Sub Focus, Subtronics, Svdden Death, TRYM, Virtual Riot, Wuki, and Zomboy.

What classes are you facilitating at Fractal this semester?

Just one, but it’s a banger: EDM Production 101 . . . 2.0! And if you missed it this time, stay tuned for next semester’s edition :)

Where can people find you online?

My music is on all the popular streaming services: Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple Music, … do a search for FVN STVFF. I mentioned my YouTube channel earlier which has all my tutorial videos, and I’m on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok as well. For everything else, there’s davidshimel.com.

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