Free from Aphelion
Learn to make music
Three things, all free, all finished. No account, no trial, no upsell at the end. We make a DAW for a living and these are the resources we wanted to exist while building it.
The theory
Battuto
Music theory derived from the physics of sound rather than handed down as rules, written for people who work in a piano roll instead of on a stave. Every claim is either worked out on screen or labelled as convention.
The practice
Thump
A page for every genre of electronic music: what it is, what it sounds like, the few elements that define it, and how to get them. Each comes with the drum pattern, playable here and downloadable as MIDI.
The argument
Lilt
A melody generator that has never heard of music theory, and eight conventions of melody to hold its output against. A way of seeing what the rules are actually worth, on a machine that follows none of them.
All three are made by Aphelion, who also build Phonon, a DAW that takes this material rather seriously. None of these pages sells it to you. If you already use Phonon, its own free courses are at Phonon University, which is a separate job from the three above.