Hey guys, here I leave you a random tip that has really helped me with my productions.
LIMIT YOUR OPTIONS
What I mean by this is the following. By having almost infinite options in terms of synths, sounds, effects etc sometimes your creativity diverges from the music to trying to find that ultra heavy bass, perfect pad or whatever.
Take the time to select 10 sounds that you like how they sound, and save them in a custom template, so each time you need youll have them right at your fingertips.
So, start working melodies, beats, etc with this 10 sounds you selected and only when you feel you got something you like, if you want start adding more sounds.
Hope this works for you, it really helped for me.
And for all of you ableton geeks, go to arrengement view.
Here’s my tip going into the same direction:
MAKE YOUR DECISIONS RIGHT AWAY!
Don’t always keep things unfinished and open thinking “well I might fix it later”. This is going nowhere. Take your time to sort out properly and then stay with what you got!
If it helps you even bounce things to audio directly so that you don’t have the option to e.g. choose another lead sound any more.
Think of people like Hendrix: They took their guitar adjusted their equipment and then it was recorded. Almost no option to tweak it later left. And they were succesful. This is how music has been made for decades.
I mean, the fundamental work (=the melody, the components of the song and roughly the arrangement) should be finished within that amount of time for sure. In my case, it normally takes me about 30-60 min. to build the rough idea.
But after that arranging, spicing up and finetuning starts and this takes a lot of time. Maybe this is because I’ve not yet finished tons of projects yet so that I’m still on my finding the most efficient workflow but normally it takes me 4-7 days to finish a song so that it’s super sweet.
Maybe this also depends on the genre. I’m mostly in progressive-house where you don’t want to here every element over and over again and where you often have got a lot going on at the same time.
Plus, I never make use of any pre-canned loops. Every groove and melody has been made by myself. My "signature-"kick and clap are selfmade and I always adjust synth patches (but starting from presets, not from scratch with init) and play every MIDI-note myself on the keyboard. Also EQ-ing, adding compression and adjusting reverb, ping-pong-delay, HP-filter, LP-filter and the sidechain-bus plus some other effects and tweakings takes some time.
drink heavily while you write, get so drunk you forget how you made the song, store it on a cd stow it away and forget about it, when you stumble on it a few monthes its the closest thing to having a genuine opinion on its quality. if youre still feeling it - you might have yourself something worth sharing with others…
Well, that’s the next goal to achieve, but dipping to much into sound design while trying to build a musical idea playing in your head often might destroy the first impulse the musical idea gave you. So in my opinion it’s better to start with a preset sound giving you a rough idea what it is meant to sound like later on and then making your individual adjustments (including also major changes like swapping out some oscs, ASDR-adjustments, changing effects, adjusting the filter…) . I know several succesful producers doing that either. Nevertheless, I am not the one buying more and more synth presets or rebuilding every preset being shown on youtube. I just take the factory selection.
On the other hand, it can be quite inspiring to take a day only for general sound design without having a specific track in your mind. Often you come up with great results.
Never heard such a stupid statement in all my years of producing…
I work for labels … Professional Mastering Engineer. Also I’m on VIP promo lists cus I’m a Pro DJ… and been producing since 1992!
Every week I listen to and review the cream of underground Deep House, Minimal Techno… these all where all not created in two hours … otherwise they would sound shit and whack and would not be released!
Irony? Maybe it wasn’t clear enough what I mean. Well, in lots of genres like e.g. electro/ house-electro or minimal house music the song is strongly pattern based and you often have parts where the same 8bar pattern is repeated over 64 or maybe even 128bars with maximally slightly variation. The type of progressive-house music I am aiming at (more the mainstream type of progressive-house music, let’s take Axwell’s “In my mind” or Dirty South & Thomas Gold’s “Eyes wide open”) is pattern based as well but there is lot more variation giving you the feeling of a continous journey you’re taking part in while listening the track. If you’re listening carefully you probably won’t find two identical 32bars-parts in the song (excluding mix-in and -out, for sure)
I have a hard time understanding why composing EDM music takes more than two hours. It’s not exactly Zappa music. Production/mixing/mastering is another story. Anyway, a drum pattern with some variations, a strong bass, do you need hours to write that? Hmm… I have to remember the last time I spent hours writing an EDM track in my studio… Hmm, no don’t remember such a case.
PS: I would agree if EDM would have the same kind of structure like pop songs with bridges, intros, chorus modulations, transpositions, tempo changes, cluster chords…
Well, to be honest it depends on you how you want to structure your EDM track. There is no rule against anything. To a variable extent EDM tracks can of course include the elements you mentionned.
I wish one could make more intelligent-pop centric EDM and actually Indie Dance is going into that direction which is good. As for Electro and similar things, there’s really little you could operate outside the normal patterns just now. Electro had a good run but it’s cliche stuff today.
Anyway, going back to the hint, if an EDM producer is sweating days for just composing a track, something is wrong and just hit the delete and start over – not worth wasting time on turds.
I’ve heard this “a song has to be produced in 2 hours” too often.