When do you decide when your track is done?

Performance & Techniques Music Production
1

When do you decide when your track is done?

This is a major thing for me as it seems like it’s a black hole i fall into every single time.
Usually I can’t even decide on the intro.

I keep making beats and they sound awesome but then another sound comes into my head and I try that out, which also sounds good and then I try other combinations.. well you get the idea :laughing: This leads to a workspace jammed with sounds…

Bits and pieces which I created, 30 percussion loops, 10 different hi-hat combinations, you name it. And when I finally got it right there’s always that extra spark which could be added and I do it all over again… Some of my tracks got at least 7 different versions.

How do you guys deal with this? When is the point where you say “kay sounds cool, let’s export!”

2

This is a dilemma many songwriters struggle with…

I never KNOW when my tracks are done. Honestly. I work at tracks, get fed up, get re-inspired, then change gears completely. Ultimately the best way I found to finish a track is to layout an arrangement, with the parts I’ve got so far. Listen to the whole 3-5 mins of it repeatedly. ASIDE from mix & master, if I can jam to it that’s how it stays.

Again, the act of finalizing a song differs from writer to writer. But here are some tips I’ve picked up along the way to help push me towards completion.

  1. Oblique Cards: great set of cards with abstract ideas, thoughts, quotes that are designed to keep juices flowing and to avoid stagnation.

  2. BOUNCE TO AUDIO: this has been brought up a few times recently, but bouncing to audio, is probably one of the best ways to keep yourself from going back and changing shit. Got a bass line that sounds good? Bounce it and throw it into the arrangement. Move on.

  3. Competition: I found I was the MOST productive when I was writing with my hip-hop group. Between the 3 of us, it became very competitive to have a disk ready for Friday with a stack of hot new beats to show each other. Also, it’s a great way of having a secure feeling sounding board of trusted people.

  4. Workflow: Improving your workflow, and compartmentalizing different parts of the process help to keep you from multi–tasking in vain, and tweaking knobs endlessly without really accomplishing anything. Sound Design, Write, Arrange, Automate, Mix. BOUNCE!

Hopefully this helps!

3

try to finish your song as quickly as posible.
if spend more than 20hs writing and re writing your arregementar your are doing something wrong.

try to have at leas the arrangement of the song in your first 20 hs of work. Limit yourself to finishing this in no more than 20 hours.
It doesn’t matter if your song is not awesome after this part of the work.
only after this, start adding details. glitchs, small variations, complicated automations etc.

4

Yeah it does, I guess the main issue is also getting bored with it because you’re listening to it so much, while it actually sounded fine :S. It’s hard to tell if it’s just ear fatigue or if it actually needs adjusting :open_mouth:

5

I do this all the time!

6

In what order do you guys create the sections? Main part first? Or just start with intro and go from there

7

Honestly meng, a track is never finished. The beauty of music as an artform is that it is everchanging. I have tunes that are 8 years old I go back, hunt down the multitrack or project file, tear apart and remix it as a vip to both modernize and re express the same emotion. When you can play the track over and over again without finding anything you want to ad or take away, then it is ready for the masses. Thats not so say you wont hear it again next year and think… “I could have done that differently”

8

I know instantly when a track is done, and it’s always way before I expected it to be. I often have these grand dreams that every track will have hundreds of edits and fills, really complex layers and what not. Then suddenly while listening to it I think “wait, sounds great like it is, don’t fuck it up by opver-doing it”, and that’s when I stop.

And yes, very rarely sometimes you just sick of listening to something. You like it, you’re proud of it, but you know it’s not your greatest work and you’re so obsessed with it you just need to release it so you can move on.

9

Oooooh man, i hear you my producer brothers! This too is the bane of my producer existence. Especially since i just finished a track that i must have listed to 100’s of times, and for the life of me, i just could not get it sounding the way i wanted to in the mixdown. I sounded “good” but not the “amazing” picture i thought it could be in my head. I added things, i took them away, i changed the sounds, i changed the levels, i would leave it for a couple days and come back and thing the whole thing was off, i listened to it so many times i lost perspective on if i even liked it or not, i swear to god i almost sent it to Terekith to mix for me lol…this song drove me nuts for weeks. Ultimately, i think you just need to get to a point where you have to stop being a perfectionist and be happy with your work…now for the perfectionist this is way easier said than done.

Usually it comes down to, as some said, listening to it a through and thinking “i have nothing i want to change”. At that point for me the song is done, usually this is fairly definitive, but as OP said there is the ever temping desire to go back and keep adding parts. I think this is especially easy to do with percussions, synths usually tell you when things are cluttered.

I wish i had some easy quick fix for this issue, but i really dont. I like to think it’ll just come easier with experience. The more tracks you write the better you’ll become at seeing the proverbial “forrest through the trees”. I think i disagree with the 20 hour rule however. I know thats illGates thing where if his songs are not done in 20 hours he just “scraps them for parts” as he says. I see the merit in that, but i also think theres probably nothing worse than finishing a track under the gun, thinking its good, and then listening to it down the line and thinking “damn i wish i had put some more time into this, cuz i need to change x, y, z”. I wouldnt give up on an idea i thought could be great just because i was at my self-imposed time limit. Thats just me tho.

Although i think what Terekith said is actually fairly profound: sometimes you just need to realize this one got away from you, finish it, know that it may not be the best song you’ve ever written, and move on. I think we’d all like every new song we write to be our best ever, but i just dont think it works that way. Thats a very hard thing to come to grips with sometimes.

10

I need some objective ears on this…
Beat 1:

https://soundcloud.com/bartpoort93/12314251-messin-around-1/s-bF82k

  • little bit more techy, just a snippet without the vox
    Beat 2:

https://soundcloud.com/bartpoort93/12314251-messin-around/s-Jj9fd

  • more funky feel to it

which one do you like the most..

11

Well i think that getting opinions would be a nice idea…i test all my tracks on my brother and believe me guys he is my greatest critic..everything went wrong in the very first and since then it never comes out perfect.

12

Alright so I started up ableton today and found something which does work for me. Save a new version, mute all sounds except the main idea, and put on the percussion one by one while bluntly deleting the ones you don’t love. Gets a clear head through all the rubbish and gets creative juices flowing again :slight_smile:

13

Since I do more engineering work than producing I instinctively have a different scope. I also do a lot of creative work with a (non-engineer) friend of mine, so that helps.

We had the classic problems in the beginning, like so many of you have already outlined. We actually clashed often because I’d focus on making things sound good (engineering) whereas my friend would get annoyed 'cause he just wanted a good song (musician). We’d keep tweaking, going back and forth, scrapping things completely, etc. It was hard for us to agree since our focus was in different places, which made it really hard to ever finish anything.

We actually developed our current method when we tried out a Maschine at a music store. After about 10 minutes of playing around we had actually managed to come up with a pretty fun sounding track. We both sort of looked at each other and we’re like: “Hey this is fun, and it sounds fun”. We pursued this method because it allowed us to disconnect from everything else and just focus on putting a song together, with the minimal on the spot tweaks that actually made a difference (pre-mix).

Main Philosophy

Through working on music, be it recording, mixing or producing, I’ve learned one very valuable lesson: Limitations create possibilities.

The reason a lot of stuff is done is based on limitations: time, money, experience, equipment, etc. But now these limitations aren’t as harsh for most. We can go on endlessly tweaking and stick all of our time into projects. I think that’s part of the problem why people can’t seem to finish things. That’s why I fully agree with Alchemy, if there are no limitations whatsoever then you’ll never see an end to it.

Constraints

Me and my friend have actually imposed rules on our projects because they help us produce better and more efficiently (which the Maschine helped us see). At the start I’ll usually work out some drum patterns, chords, etc. and mix them as instruments on the spot. This happens sporadically, which is actually nice since I’m not always thinking of making sounds in function of a specific song. Obviously some cataloging has to happen, but that’s simple, and rewarding later. Usually me and my friend will then sit down with our material and see what gells together. Once we find stuff that works well together we’ll use that as our basis for a track. From there we just keep grabbing material and building our track, focusing only on the arrangement. It’s great because by this point we don’t have to worry about how it sounds since most of the pre-mixing has already been done. It’s pretty much literally like banging out a track on some Maschine pads.

I mentioned rules, and these are the ones we try to stick to. In my opinion, most songs (even complex ones) can be divided up into 8 major groups (not tracks!):drums, bass, keys, etc (imagine fader mix groups if that’s easier). so we try to stick to that. If we’re having a hard time dividing by 8 then we’re probably using too much stuff. Once we’re actually arranging a song based on some start point we found, we’ll have 2 structure sessions max. The sessions are imposed by time constraints (which is great), so sometimes we can sit down for a few hours, other times it’s shorter. If we haven’t found our structure then we wait, usually a week, before even opening the file again. Once we have our structure then we focus on adding/subtracting material if it’s absolutely required. This keeps us from needlessly altering the main sound, 'cause in the end we almost always go: “Hey I miss that old drum pattern now…” when the old one was something we quickly added in 5 minutes to fill in, after we added a so called “better” drum we worked on for a lot longer. In the end we just add whatever minimum things we are missing, and maybe tweak a couple of things. Once we hit a point where when listening to the track we can’t think of stuff to add, we’re done. This allows us to use our time and material to the fullest effect.

Obviously this doesn’t happen all the time, but that’s why we have our rules, so we don’t get sucked into projects going nowhere.

14

I’m a huge fan of imposing limitations on how I work to try and get new ideas flowing. Working on a whole album using just an iPad, sticking with just the stock plug ins your DAW comes with, writing a song using only drum machine, etc. Great way to think outside the box, AND learn your gear inside. And that helps you to finish songs quicker too.

15

Actually I love ableton’s built in sampler and effects, with my huge sample library it’s basically a limitless ocean. I don’t really like setting “limits” to what I use, but as one who is producing minimal I try to think of changing the current sounds a lot over the course of the track rather then adding bits as it moves along

16

Try always to start with your main part, your “chorus” or the part of your song where most of the energy is concentrated.

For me its easier this way because once you got that part you know where yo want to go with your other sections, every path should lead there.

Otherwise, if you start with the intro, you will never know where you are trying to go, which will be your peak, you will start building without knowing anything about the final product.

17

I find I work best to a deadline. After making pieces for various remix competitions, aiming at a submission date, the hours seemed to melt away. When I realised how long I had been working and then evaluated my work, I was presently surprised! I’ve never won anything or got any sort of mention, sometimes I didn’t even end up submitting my work, but the time constraint helped me create something I considered “done.”

Last November I gave myself the task of starting and finishing 4 tracks before the end of the year. These 4 i finished, filed them into a dark corner of my hard drive and forgotten about. I recently rediscovered these tracks and I was genuinely impressed with myself!

18

My knowledge and understanding of music production is limited. if you read my most recent posts you will see/hear this. However within my peer group i am seen as the one who ‘knows’ what the crack is when it comes to music production. thing is though…i don’t know. all the things that i have learnt, i got from youtube and i’ve spent hours trying to understand what these videos are saying. I’ve been a bedroom DJ for over 15 years. i though that i understood techno and how it was constructed. however i now know that i never really listened to it properly. I still don’t fully understand it. Last night somebody who is totally new to DJ’ing and music production asked me whether they should produce a certain style of music. i told them that the style of music that they will produce when they start is driven by what they know how to do.

I said this because when I started trying to make tracks, i have always started with a general idea however this changes as i progress. the track i am working on at the moment started out as a proper techno track. it now sounds like a dub techno track. this doesn’t bother me. what does bother me is that i never finish a track. i have loads of them that i started but never finished.

This time it’s different. i will finish this track. even if it’s shit. I now think that it’s better to have several shit ‘finished’ tunes than it is to have several ‘started’ tracks.

Massive respect to Tarekith for the guidance he’s put out. I’ve read/watched several tutorials etc but yours made the most sense.

My goal now is to start a track and finish i before i start another. even if it’s bollocks when i’ve finished. i can learn from it and try again the next time.

Sorry for hijacking this thread. in some ways it’s relevant. in others, i just needed to get this off my chest.

19

I know excactly what you mean. I’ m good at creating the fundamentals, a good beat, bass and everything surrounding it but it’s putting those building blocks together to build a track is where I get stuck. I’m really starting to get sick of this, seeing great idea’s crumble at that stage over and over again.

20

Thanks Wev, glad you found them useful!

I’ve said it before,but I’ll say it again, if you want to get good at writing tracks, you NEED to finish tracks. Even If they turn out different than you intended, or you know you can do better, the act of taking a track to completion is the only way to get good at the process from start to finish.

It’s ok to shelve some projects for a bit, but it’s too easy to say “this is hard, let me start over” and then you never ever really get good at those last few steps of writing songs. Wrap them up, then move on. You’ll write dozens or hundreds of tracks before anyone likely takes notice, don’t stop half way expecting that first track you actually complete will be THE ONE. :wink: