Well, you know....

And then again....

 

Me: *tries to write as little as possible
ThrashHead: hold my cigar

 

Lots of good advice in the thread. Repeating here just two of my favourites...

from @Plainview
"change the way you think about it , when you are making music dont think about whether its bad or good think about it as a practice a form of self expression"

From @ThrashHead
"when I'm just trying to get a groove/vibe going, I'm not worried at all about any theory. In fact, that's the last shit I want in my head. I don't want to be calculating anything, I don't want to be thinking about any structure, modes "rules." I'm focused 100% on feeling. I don't give a shit about techniques, theory, I don't care how sloppy it is or sounds. All that will be cleaned up later when It's time to learn what the hell I just wrote"

They're both saying...
Base your creativity on spontaneity, improvisation, being expressive, etc. Don't be thinking about theory when writing.
Great music always 'feels' good!

This is MUCH easier to achieve when the writing is "in your head" or "singing" or "playing an instrument".
It's MUCH harder to subconsciously groove using a DAW-computer. So if all your efforts are computer based you're missing something (something wonderful) and you owe it to yourself to adopt some non-computer approaches.

But after you've developed 'something' interesting and you're reflecting on whether it's great or crap it can be a different story.
No-one needs theory to decide whether it's great or crap - it's always just obvious.
But if you want to figure out and explain WHY it's great or WHY it's crap then some very basic theory is really helpful. Just the ultra simple stuff like thinking separately about the basic components TEMPO, RHYTHM, MELODY, HARMONY, TIMBRE, ...other

There are so many possible combinations and maybe there many remedies for repairing or improving a track.
- Should the tempo be faster or slower (or heaven forbid in modern music, variable!)
- Is the chord progression brilliant but the rhythm is crap?
- Is the rhythm brilliant but the melodies are lame?
- Is the melody good but a complete re-harmonisation required?
- Are you really locked into one genre or would your great song sound better in a completely different style?

There is no intricate music theory in any of the above - this is just revisiting the crude basic building blocks of music and considering them separately, and figuring out which of these fundamental features is letting the song down.

So, it might be a great surprise... You thought the song was crap but then it gets a new tempo and new rhythm and then the same chord sequence and same melody suddenly sounds great. Think of how many successful songs had crappy original versions that flopped then great new cover versions that were brilliant.

Personal (only) opinion...
A lot of modern EDM (for great reasons) is obsessed with TIMBRE. Sound sculpting is a wonderful craft and produces previously unheard art but it often neglects more traditional and very valuable components like form, melody, and harmony (and even the rhythms are sometimes a lot less interesting than they could be). There is some wisdom in the saying that a truly great song is indestructible and would sound great even if farted by a monkey (as long as the ape could fart in tune of course). So never neglect melodies and harmonies. All the interesting sound sculpting might sometimes be better left till later.

 

You can learn more from failures than from successes. If you believe you are successful in every tune you wrote, consider that it is feasible you would never know when you did not. The fact that you know when you write something that us not up to a standard you consider acceptable is a great thing. It is a vehicle to create something that is really good.
How do you learn from failures? F**k knows because it is different for everyone, that is, what is considered good or bad. You have to find whatever it is that you consider bad and remove it from your music vocabulary

 

I start with a basic concept work on it for a few hours, stop wait till the following day listen to it and decide if it is what I wanted or if it needs to be shelved for a while till I have more ideas to improve upon it. this system really works for me

 

I've thought about remixing some really deliberately awful things into dance music just to see if anyone would even notice.
Luckily, lack of time has prevailed.

 

He is spreading this anywhere and it's off topic anyways.

 

Except if the music destroys the universe. Then I would say it is bad because the universe is good.
Of course some will say there are a multitude of universes, so the destruction of the one we are aware of is no big deal.

Still, it's not going to be on Spotify long.

 

Yes I was, as a songwriter that is. I started playing the trumpet in 4th grade and two years later when about 11 picked up the guitar and took lessons for a coupla years. I didn't start writing songs until I was about 16 and my first song was pretty good, a song called Thomas about my cat that had just died. I didn't really write any more for about 4 more years when I wrote an excellent song called The Bum That Begs On 34th Between 7th And 8th Avenue Blues which I still love to play and had about 15 years ago added a spoken word poem that puts it over the top for me. I've interestingly never recorded it as a keeper but have decided to do so recently with all my tunes to document them before I kick the bucket. Here is the first song that I wrote, Thomas. Maybe you'll like it too.

 

Thank you for sharing your process. I did manage to get a lot out of it. It's great advice making music from feeling is better than building with science. You just can't explain it. (Why you make better music when you're in a good/ positive emotional state is what I mean, one can't explain).

Btw did you mean improvising rather than improving in the 2nd paragraph?

 

Last edited: Sep 1, 2021

My bad I was unaware that he regularly does it.

That explains it, you had a musical background before you ever even thought of producing.

On your first track, Thomas, is that you playing guitar? And is that you singing? Pretty good track for a 16 year old, it's more difficult to make acoustic than electronic music. I noticed you added indian drums/ tabla also. Were you using any samples for the instrumental of this track?

 

Listen to a lot of bands and broaden your horizons.The more different music you have listened to, the greater your chances of being creative. Listen to a lot of old bands and get inspired. Make a folder with ideas and tips. If you can’t think of anything else, you have a collection of ideas and you can copy all of your tips into it.

Yello - the expert

Transformation by Signal Aout 42 - Submarine Dance

 

Last edited: Sep 1, 2021

Some other things I'll add that will help with workflow and productivity.

- Clean your shit up! lol - The more "stuff" you have laying around the more it can interfere and screw with your focus and mood. This applies to a lot of different areas of your life too.

- Have something available at ALL times to record melody ideas. Whether a phone, digital recorder, looper or whatever, it doesn't matter, just have something and use it often. Don't get lazy and let a melody come into your head only to vanish to never be heard again. Record them all! Then scan through periodically and dump the crap and keep the gems. I get endless song ideas from doing this.

- Learn your DAWs keyboard shortcuts and make your own. Use them to save time. Each one can shave a few seconds off your time and all that compounds and adds up to a huge time savings over time.

- Use templates - You should be able to start your computer, open your DAW, open a template and be recording within a minute or so. When I'm tracking I open a template that has a bunch of tracks, sims and a few plugins set up the way I want so I spend ZERO time screwing around with settings, routing or dialing in sounds. I use EZMIX for tracking EVERYTHING because it has a ton of great tones ready to go. I'll use other sims and even reamp much later in mixing, but for tracking exmix is fantastic.

- Get rid of all distraction. Turn off your phone, axe the internet and get rid of anything else that will interrupt your creative flow.

- Use reference tracks. This comes in handy especially if you have a hard time with song structure or if you just need a framework for certain genres or certain "lengths" of music. You can quickly map out their song structure and use it as a framework when writing similar style and lengths of music.

- Ignore rules, break rules and be careful of Youtube "experts" and their advice. A lot of it is pure steaming piles of hot garbage.

Now go create music.

 

Good to hear.
Yes, improvising... that was just a typo.

 

There has always plenty of mediocre music, all the way back to Haydn's day and beyond, it's just been forgotten e.g. the best-selling song of 1969 was Sugar Sugar by The Archies, but everyone remembers that era as the emergence of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath etc. Same will happen with modern music - the good stuff will be remembered, the rest will vanish into the ether.

 

Talking about clearing things up, I have so many VSTs (thank you crackers and audioz) I installed when I was just started music. After getting experience I now realise that you don't need good plugins to make good music. (Here comes the user saying that good music cannot be made anymore). It's all about experience. One can make hits with stock plugins. It's not what you use, It's how you use it. Easy availability of cracks can make for a bad habit. I may move to Mac soon since they have a cracked audio software famine.

 

Right, and this goes back to what I was saying about "decision fatigue," which can absolutely destroy creativity and productivity. That decision fatigue can happen when you have a ridiculous amount of presets as well. Your mind is like a computer in some ways, once your computers ram fills up, things bog down and problems start happening. You can only handle so many things at a time. Too many things to focus on and make decisions on just fill up your ram so to speak.

Do you really need 300 hundred compressor plugins?
Are you really going to use 100 terabytes of kontakt libraries?
How about those 80,000 sample packs?
You need 350,000 midi files?

 

To go a bit more into details on my methods....

I don't write the same way all the time. Sometimes just sit with an acoustic guitar record ideas on my phone or digital recorder to work out later. Sometimes I sit down at a daw and write a complete song with many layers. Sometimes I improvise over various chord progressions I create on a looper or over backing tracks that I've created. Sometimes I just jam and record myself jamming. Sometimes I'll just hum a melody in my phone or pick up a guitar quick to flesh out something that's I've been writing in my head... I'll quick record it to work on it and expand on it later.

With that said.... here's the later part when it comes to raw jam, melody ideas and riffs.

I'll take some of those audio files and either open them in audacity or reaper on my studio system or a laptop and sit and listen to them a few times. While I'm listing to them, I'll start dropping labels/tags on the riffs, melodies or progressions that have potential. Sometimes this is quick and sometimes it takes a few days to keep listening and getting different perspective. Different listening sessions can also create different ideas, so sometimes if I come up with another idea while listening back to files, I'll quick record that and add it into the bunch.

While I'm listening, if there are obvious diamonds, I'll export just those bits to their own files/tracks. I give them a working title/name and then save them in their own directory and then move it all to a "working projects" directory. These files then become the beginning frameworks for full songs. I usually always jam to a drum track or click that uses drum sample so that If the jam is really good and captures something special (often) in the moment, I can actually use that track in the final mix.

There's plenty of times these rough draft tracks actually ended up being used in final mixes, but usually this only happens if I have the dry signal recorded.

If something I play is a bit too complicated, I'll video myself playing it so that I can figure it out later fairly easily. Those videos get dropped in those project folder too. When you write so much music it's easy to forget what you played and having to try and figure everything out again by ear can be a royal pain in the ass for complicated riffs, which can also kill your motivation and creativity. Obviously if it's keys there's midi so no issue there.

If I have lyric ideas, they also get dropped into those product folders. Sometimes I'll even add lyric ideas on a layer track in audacity or notes in reaper just so I know where I had the original idea.

 

It depends what you mean by terrible?
There's a big difference between terrible (i.e. out of tune, out of time, badly produced, tacky etc) and just something that's "OK but not a diamond".

If you trash everything that is not a diamond, then you may end up finishing nothing at all.

If you already an expert at composing, producing and arranging then yes trash it, because you will learn nothing new by finishing the track.
But if you not an expert, then persisting will tease out the "how can i make this sound not so terrible" skills.

Yes I am talking about turd polishing, but turd polishing is still a skill if you don't know how to do it.

Some of the most famous producers through the years have been experts at turd polishing.

 

That's a good point.

I don't think I would ever trash a track that I just wrote because there's been times where I have been writing something and in the moment think it sucks only to come back the next day and find there was a diamond in it. When I say dump the crap quickly I don't literally mean as I'm writing it. That's why I have to listen to my tracks a few times before deciding what goes into production and what gets tossed away. My mood changes and I have that in my awareness before deciding to dump a track.

Also why it's important to give your tracks multiple critical listens over a few days. Even if it's just to influence new idea for those tracks.

Deciding what is good and crap takes experience, you just have to write and write and write some more and it starts to come naturally. You'll figure out your own methods and how your own creativity works. I think it's important to find the diamonds fast though so that you can keep fleshing them out while they are fresh.