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LMMS Tutorial For Beginners: 2024 Getting Started Guide

In this tutorial we’ll learn how to get started in LMMS (an open source and free DAW). Learn how to use LMMS in only 10 minutes.

Neo Moon Studios is a VST development agency that helps audio companies build software. We also run a no-code VST development course.

Getting Started in LMMS – In Only 10 Minutes

In this tutorial we’re going to learn how to get started in LMMS (a free and open source DAW) in only 10 minutes.

So let’s jump in.

In this tutorial I’m going to quickly get you started in LMMS. So let’s jump in.

Once you have LMMS open, you’ll see an interface that looks something like this. Let’s just make sure we can generate a sound first. By default you’ll see the “song editor” here. If you can’t see that you can toggle it on or off by clicking on this button here. In fact, this entire row of icons toggle these different windows on your interface on and off. So let’s just close down everything so we only have the song editor to start with.

Within the song editor, you’ll notice that by default we have a triple oscillator to start with. If you don’t see a triple oscillator you can add one by clicking on this “instrument plugins” tab and then dragging the triple oscillator onto the song editor here.

The song editor will contain the different layers of our song. In our case, we only need the triple oscillator, so when dealing with your “song editor” you could just remove everything else other than what you need by clicking on this gear icon and then clicking “remove this track”. Or, in our case, what we’re going to do is we’re going to disable these other tracks, by simply clicking on this little LED light here. We’ll just keep our triple oscillator enabled. Another way to do this is to just “solo” what you want to play at any given time. If you click on this button, it will only play the solo layer.

Now, let’s make sure we can generate a sound by double clicking on the canvas here, which will bring up the piano roll. Keep in mind you don’t need a midi controller to use LMMS. You can just sketch out your songs by double clicking beside the key where you want to draw a note. Once a note is added, it can be moved, extended or removed by right clicking on it. You can also control note velocity here which will impact that individual notes volume.

And now let’s imagine here that you’ve designed a nice little motif and you want it to repeat but you don’t want to have to keep sketching it out. So let’s close down our piano roll. And what we’ll do now is we’ll grab our patterns, we’ll right click and click on “copy”, then we’ll select the next available cell and we’ll click on “paste”. And then we can do that for as long as we want and if we needed, we could dive into any individual motif and change the notes in order to develop the song or add variation.

With most instruments you’ll add to your song rack here, if you click on the instrument itself it will bring up a popup which will allow you to manage the sound that instrument is generated. Here we’re just managing three oscillators, but as you can see I can change the volume, the pan and for example I could change the oscillator from saw wave to a square wave to sine wave and so on. Essentially, I could change these settings to create an entirely different sound.

Okay, now let’s jump in and learn about our “beat and baseline editor”. Again, what we’ll do is we’ll solo this track and then we’ll click on it to bring up the baseline editor. Here, we can sketch out a baseline and or plan out the drums for our track. By default you’ll notice we have one kicker. So let’s begin by adding beats on 1 and 3, 1 and 3, 1 and 3 and we’ll leave this bar empty. You can click on this play button to play what you have so far.

We can add more tracks to our instrument baseline here by opening up “instrument plugins”and then adding another kicker into our baseline editor. Let’s add notes on 3, 3, 3 and then 2 and 4.

Now we can click on each kicker and we’ll turn up the frequency slope on one and we’ll turn down the frequency slope on the other. This will make each drum layer sound unique. Now let’s play again to hear what we have.

Now, let’s go back to our plugins section here and we’ll add a mallets layer. Here well add mallets on 2, 2 / 4, 2, and then 1 and 3 and we’ll play again.

Okay, so now let’s add this bass layer to our track by simply clicking on the first cell on the canvas here. Now, rather than copy and pasting we can actually stretch this out by just hovering over the first cell here and then pulling this over to the right. Now we can play both layers of our song by clicking on this play button here.

We can also control the volume or pan each layer using these sliders here.

Now, let’s add a VST. VSTs are “virtual studio technology”, and they generally come in the form of playable instruments or effects.

Within LMMS you’ll need to place all of your VST plugins in the same folder. In order to tell LMMS where that folder is, you need to click on “edit” and then “settings’ and then you need to click on this “folder icon” here. From here, you can select the folder where you’re going to be storing your VST plugins. Keep in mind that out of the box, LMMS can only play VST2 files that end in the extension .dll. LMMS can’t play VST3 files that end in the extension vst3. However there is a free work around to this and I’ll link to that work around below, in case you want to use VST3 plugins within LMMS.

Okay, so let’s add our VST into LMMS. In order to add a VST, we need to first go here to instrument plugins and then add this plugin called “vestige”. With vestige selected, we’ll need to click on this little green folder here and then select the VST we want to play.

Now at NEO Moon we’ve developed a testing VST just for the sole purpose of ensuring VSTS work within your system, so that’s what we’re going to use here you can download this testing plugin for free over on our website, but you can use whatever VST you want. Actually, as a bit of a side note here, if you want to learn how to create your own Virtual instruments from scratch, that you could sell, without having to know how to code head over to NeoMoon, because we have two courses that will teach you how to do that. One of our courses is a no-code VST development course and the other is a VST UI design course. Again, links to both can be found below. 

So as you can see, I have NEO Moon’s testing VST plugin opened up here and I’m able to sketch out a new track here. Again, the process is actually the same, the sound generated will just be different based on the virtual instrument you’re using. You an use synths, violins, pianos… really any virtual instrument you can get your hands on.

Okay, so let’s imagine I want to start coloring this track a bit more. For example, you might want to add reverb, chorus, saturation or compression to your track. You can easily do that by using your “FX mixer” which you can toggle on and off using this icon here. With this turned on you’ll see our master channel here. This is where all sounds are currently being routed. We could add new FX channels and then route different layers of our mix to those channels and then treat each channel differently, but because this is a “getting started” tutorial, we’re not going to get that advanced right now and instead we’re just going to focus on our master channel here.

So let’s imagine we wanted to add reverb to our mix. To do this, all we would need to do is select our master channel. And then click on “add effect”. You can look through all of the effects here, or you can search for what you want here. I’m going to search for “reverb” and then I’ll select “Reverb SC”. Then you’ll see that my FX channel got turned on and I can toggle on and off the effects of this channel by clicking on this LED here. Or, if I have many different effects in my channel, for example, If I added “delay”, I could turn each effect on or off individually here.

Do drill deeper into each effect settings, you can click on “controls” here to manage the effect’s settings.

Lastly, I want to talk about connecting your external midi controllers to LMMS. To do this, click on “edit” then ‘settings” and then click on this “midi settings” icon here. It’s really important to ensure your midi controller is plugged into your computer. You should see your midi controller in the list here. With your external hardware selected, click on “okay”. At this point, you’ll have to restart LMMS.

If you need to restart and you need to save a project, you simply click on “file” and then “save as” and you can save your file as an LMMS project.

Now, once LMMS has been closed and opened again you can click on the gear icon for the instrument layer you want to control with your Midi controller and you can select “midi” and then “input” and then select your midi controller. Now you’ll be able to play that instrument live.

So that’s the bare bones of LMMS. Obviously there is a lot more to cover and I’ll do so in the upcoming tutorials. But this tutorial was just designed to get you started.

Now, before signing off, I just want to remind you that at NEO Moon we run a VST development and design agency. So if you’re looking to build a VST and you need help getting your audio plugin build complete, I’ll leave a link to our agency below for you to check out.

Or, if you’re more of a “do it yourself’er”, as I mentioned we have two no-code VST development courses you can take to learn how to develop as well as design VSTs not only for LMMS, but for a wide range of DAWs.

So that’s all I have for you today. I hope you found this helpful and don’t forget to check our other in-depth tutorials over on our music production and VST development blog.

Thanks for stopping by.

Neo Moon Studios is a VST development agency that helps audio companies build software. We also run a no-code VST development course.

Want to Make Your Onw VSTs?

Do you love sound design? So do we! For this reason, we created a no-code VST development course that walks you through the process of bringing your virtual instrument visions to life without needing to know how to program and without having to be an artist. We will teach you how to bring your VST to life in our 8 hour 50 + module no-code VST development course.