Which DAW do you use? Personally, I mostly learned music by creating different genre variations and composing single instrumental tracks daily, no matter how bad they sounded at first. My main goal was simply to keep composing music and improving the mixing so the tracks could gradually sound better over time.
At the beginning, I think it’s enough to focus mainly on understanding major and minor scales along with BPM. Even for chiptune music, those basics are more than enough to get started. I recommend sticking to these simple music theory fundamentals first instead of jumping into advanced theory too early. Most of my compositions also stay within major or minor scales. In freelance work I sometimes go more advanced when clients request it, like off-scale or chromatic variations, but you don’t really need those unless you are doing client work. Over time, usually after 1 or 2 years of consistent practice, you naturally start understanding more advanced theory through experimentation and experience.
I also recommend listening to simple instrumental music on YouTube. Rap instrumentals are often easier to recreate or learn from. Listen to professional rap instrumentals, take inspiration from them, and identify the scale (major or minor) and BPM used in the track. Then try creating a composition in a very similar style using the same BPM and scale. Start by focusing on four core elements: melody, chords, bass, and drums. Keep practicing and releasing music, and you’ll gradually improve naturally. By doing this repeatedly, you start to memorize tones and patterns, get used to note placement in the piano roll, and internalize rhythm techniques.
You’ll also face different DAW-related problems during the process, and solving them helps you learn the DAW’s functions more effectively through experience.
I personally recommend composing melodies and chords directly in the piano roll first instead of only playing with a keyboard. This method helped me self-learn a lot of music theory by experimenting with note placement and blending inside the DAW. Of course, learning with a keyboard is also completely fine.
By learning this way, you can also create chiptune music. I’ve released some chiptune tracks on my profile as well, although they’re not typical chiptune. They’re more of a modernized version where I experiment with gate effects, time effects, and other processing, so the sound changes slightly in certain sections.
Also, the music on my profile is mostly from around 2022-2023, so the mixing quality in those older tracks isn’t very strong. Only my newer releases have improved mixing and overall sound quality. I’ve already started reshaping and reworking the mixing on some of my older soundtracks, and I’ve updated a few tracks with better quality. The rest will take more time to refine and re-release.