10 YouTubers to help step up your music production skills

It’s so easy these days to find an answer to your problems, or even find inspiration when you’re lacking it, by looking online. If I ever come across a blocker in my music creation process then YouTube is generally the answer. While a univeristy or online course is great, they are often expensive, difficult to join and take a lot of time to complete. Luckily there are many great creators out there offering their services for free. Here are a handful that are doing the lord's work.

LANDR

Landr is a platform for musicians to recieve help with mastering, finding samples, distribution and plugins. Alongside that they have this great YouTube channel which provides a huge variety of advise on many areas of music production. The channel has its own team of experts to share insight and tools that could take your music to the next level and it really helps that they're all really likeable. Shoutout to Isabelle for being real fun and also smart. What's particularly great is the range of ability that they cater to. You'll find videos on anything from 'what are minor chords' to 'how to create huge ambient synth pads'.

Sonic Academy

Providing tutorials on how to use the latest music technology as well as some inightful content on the origins of various genres, Sonic Academy is an essential channel to follow for dance music producers. From the channel's early days of DAW how to videos to today's in-depth looks at the best plugins on the market, Sonic Academy have always been there to get down and nerdy with you.

Mix With The Masters

The name of this channel really explains it all. Mix with the Masters is a channel dedicated to sharing the wealth of knowledge that some of the best producers of all time have amassed. There's a mix of indepth chats about mindset and process with a look at the practical implication of those methods. We're talking Hans Zimmer, Neal H. Pogue, Atticus Ross, Timbaland, Dave Pensado and plenty more. While you might not go into each video with a specific problem to be solved you are bound to learn something from these greats of the field.

Memphy

Unlike the other channels I've presented so far, Memphy does it all himself. What he's best known for is showing his followers how to replicate the sound of celebrated producers and genres on the whole. He also shows how to take a beginner's EDM track and make it sound professional (see above). With a focus on how modern electronic music is made, presented in a fast-paced, compact video, Memphy is vastly different in tone to Mix With The Masters, but by no means is his content of less quality.

Taetro

Sit back and watch a recorded live stream where Tatero builds up a beat from nothing. Just like in the video avove, he really makes an effort to answer questions from his viewers while he creates. I particularly enjoy the fact that it's often a diversion from the plethora of EDM production videos out there - Taetro's stuff is often a bit more ambient or lo-fi. It's hugely informative to have a totally unedited tutorial which showcases the successful and unsuccessful practices involved with creating a piece of music from scratch. Alongside these long, recorded streams Taetro also reviews and showcases new equipment and plugins in shorter uploads.

Produce Like A Pro

Another channel that's slightly more from the oldschool, Produce Like A Pro is headed up by experienced pop/rock producer, Warren Huart and is flooded with fundamental knowledge for producers of any genre. There are plenty of videos featuring Warren himself, sharing his own production theories on specific topics, as well as in-depth demos and discussions with other masters of the art. If you're a Pro Tools user this channel might be of particular interest compared to many of the Ableton focussed channels in this article.

Make Pop Music

Austin Hull is making very detailed and insightful videos centered around tips and tricks for making absolute pop bangers. Having said there there is definitely transferable skills for all genres here though as he shares advice on anything from drum sound to microphone choice. Hull has guidance for all types of creators; beatmakers, engineers, mixers and masterers are all catered for and even songwriters might want to take note of the video above.

ANDREW HUANG

Although Andrew has recently diverted to releasing some obscure, comedy leaning videos, (he seems to be living in a spaceship) there is plenty of great music creation content on his channel. With the largest following out of all of the channels that I've mentioned, it is clear that Huang is an incredibly smart musician, offering interesting music theory alternatives as well as some hot production tips. Andrew is a successful musician in his own right. With over 90,000 monthly listeners on Spotify there's a good chance that he's doing something right with his production. It also helps that he has really nice visual production and well put together videos. He's really a top notch YouTuber.

Nathan James Larsen

To put it simply Nathan is an excellent tutor. He is great at walking the viewer through the production process. Unlike some of the beatmakers mentioned above Larsen zones in on how to get the most out of your DAW and make your music sound as good as possible using its tools. For example, I wasn't getting the most out of using busses in my Logic sessions, Nathan has a great video focussing on both why using a bus for effects is important and how to do it best. While he does create music himself, this channel is one of my favourites for the "post-creation" process.

Beat Academy

Hosted by grammy award winning producer, ill Factor, Beat Academy is a channel for aspiring producers to unlock the mysteries of how some of the biggest artists achieved their signature sounds. Similarly to Memphy, Beat Academy showcases how to replicate production techniques but it's done here in a very detailed and sophisticated manner. The channel does divert from the theme occasionally by providing advice on other issues: beat block, Ableton tutorials and specific effect masterclasses.

I hope you'll find something of interest within these channels. I'm not expecting you to love them all or necessarily gel with all of the personalities but I'm confident that across all ten of them there a huge amount of knowledge on show.

As always let me know on social media if I've missed out anyone; I'd love to discover more great creators on YouTube.