Where Can I Learn About Music Production

What should I buy for music production?

You'll need a computer, that's at least 299$ off the bat… you'll need good RAM and CPU and at least 500gb of drive space. Music stuffs takes up a lot of space.You're going to need a good set of monitors/headphones. I suggest monitors more though, easier to get the mix down right and ear fatigue is at a minimum. BUT, you're trying to be cost effective so get headphones. Plus there's no good set of monitors out there that cost less than 200…If you're getting the monitors you're going to need an audio interface. A focus rite 2i2 is $200… that's almost half your budget…You're going to buy software, the cheapest good quality one out there is FRUITY LOOPS, cost around $100 But it's only good when you have VST’s (external synthesizers and audio engineering modules of the like). They can really spike the price up, BUT it's necessary to compete against the big dogs.Learn piano. If you're musically intelligent you can just grab a $5 chord book off the Apple Store in the form of a PDF and put ideas together and let your creative juices flow….maaaaan to be honest, $600 for a studio setup is not enough to get the things that matter. It'd be wasted money if you went and bought anything now. Go to Sam ash and listen to speakers and find the ones that really send chills up your spine and make THAT your first hardware purchase along with an interface. If you half ass it now you'll regret it later. My friend did the same thing and he's done nothing but complain because the quality isn't there so he can't mix anything down. It's just a waste of money, save up more money, at least $1200 so you have room to buy what you need. You don't have to spend the whole $1200, but it'll stop you from making unnecessary sacrifices from square one. :)PS: my setup without my computer came up to around 1k, but I haggled the price down to $800. And I went in with $1200 so the rest of the money I kept and I was happy cuz I saved a lot of money and regretted nothing because I had everything I wanted at a discount.WITH my computer it would have cost 2k before the haggling.Also, you don't need to buy it all at once. I had my laptop for 2 years before I copped the full studio. I thought headphones were godly for mixing the whole time (I was naive). BUT, I was able to learn how to create because I had the DAW and a PDF to learn music. So when I got the full setup I wasn't stuck lol.I hope this was helpful ^_^

Can I learn music production by myself?

You can, definitely. But at some point of time, you'll be needing a mentor who can guide you regarding what the “right” approach is and what's a “wrong” one.I'll tell you about myself. I started doing music production 11 months back. I used to learn through YouTube and started off pretty good. But the main problem that I faced with time was that I would get “10+ different methods” to do a specific thing from different people (YouTubers) when I would search for that topic. Now how do I know which one to follow and which one to not? Should I make a judgement based on the reviews? Absolutely not! So I decided to join a crash course thing and learn audio production under him for 3 months. The benefit of that course was that now I could differentiate between what the right approach was and what wasn't. I got to know the logic behind everything there which encouraged me to devise my own methods to produce a song and experiment with the sounds. And the most important thing that I realised after that course was that more than 90% of the people on YouTube don't know anything about audio engineering and are just sharing random concepts in order to gain views or to show that they know how to produce.Hope it helps. All the best!