Definition Of Done In Music Production

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This seems like a common scenario which involves one’s doubt about the status of their song, mainly to know if it’s done. You may be that person. You’ll be feeling your song is finished, bounce it, listen to it in the car or with friends and then you feel that wave of discomfort overwhelmingly creeping on you because you’re noticing all the mistakes and things that aren’t right. Let me reassure you that you’re not alone and this is more common than you think.

 

The concept of DoD (Definition of Done) is something I borrowed from the Agile process, that is typical of coders dealing with a scrum master, mainly in project management. In Agile, there are sprints where there’s a goal set, then tasks/actions are taken to reach a certain point. They’ll agree that the task is done when a certain number of criteria are met. This could apply to basically any projects possible, from weeding out your garden to cooking a dinner.

In a world that is not from the digital realm, with 1’s and zero’s, the concept of done can be a bit tricky as per the one who sets a DoD, the level of mastery might change. In other words, you might be agreeing that my DoD on a song will be very different from someone’s new to music. And that’s ok.

 

There are a few concepts that we can look into that will help you let go of whatever that inner voice of doubt is whispering you about.

 

A song is never really done

This one hurts, yeah? But I tell you, there will never be a field where uncertainty can hit you the most than music, mainly because things are abstract in the world of sounds. Your main enemy is really yourself and your self-judgment towards what you do will change everyday, sometimes it will completely change within a day itself. You’ll never really know honestly but there are a few things that can help you though. I’m not referring to you to just say to let go of things here. I’m more interested in knowing how much imperfection I can live with and how much a random person will notice. This is where it matters.

There are a number of things we don’t know and there are also a gray area of things we don’t even know that we don’t know of. Your song is in between there and your future self of in 10 years ahead, will have a more compassionate understanding that this song has been done within the technical limitation of that moment. And it’s really ok, trust me. 

 

References will reveal truth

This is where many people fail. You can’t know you’re done if you don’t have a model. So, for instance, you might cook a pizza but honestly, if you never ate one (I would pity you!), it’s sort of hard to compare it with anything. I had some of the best pizza of my life in New York and that taste was forged as my favorite. Whenever I have a pizza now, from the airport to a little restaurant, my mind compares it to that one I had in NY. It’s the same with sound. When I do mastering or mixing, I have models of other projects and know exactly how I want it to sound like.

So for arrangements, what’s easy is to simply load up a song in Ableton or your DAW and just use it as a cookie cutter. I encourage people to do critical listening, counting how many sounds they hear in the reference and compare it to theirs. So many times, people have way too much happening or maybe, there’s one less – and that helps much. Same for levels, in the mix.

But I want to sound like myself… I hear you say. Well, sure, you’ll get there but you need to get your skills of finishing songs to be solid first.

Again, most of the time someone feels they can’t tell if they’re done or not, I’ll first ask “compared to what?” Mostly because if we’re not comparing it with anything, we just feel arbitrary in the decision and this is why you’ll feel like a yes or nay, depending on your mood and insecurity level.

 

Lastly, be careful about comparing yourself to a master file. You might be setting yourself up for failure if you are comparing yourself to a song that has been made by a musician that has more experience than you, that has released a lot of music and also, if the song is mastered and yours is not, well, it will not be even. Checking for volumes (eg. snare vs kick), as well as other details is more of a fair fight.

 

Feedback, ask for it

There are multiple ways to ask for feedback and many places to do it as well. You can get some for free in my facebook group (when I’m free) or through my Patreon program. You can ask other producers, even if they’re not that experienced but be sure they listen to it in the right mind set, or context (some listen on their phones, no!).

 

Take pauses and distance

This has been said many times on this blog but studio sessions beyond an hour long are a road to trick yourself about whatever you’re doing. You might think it’s amazing or shit, perhaps it’s neither because your judgment, honestly, quits after 1h of work. It’s called decision-fatigue and you might have experienced it already.

 

I make sessions of 1h max, but preferably about 20 minutes at a time, with pauses. I let my songs sleep for weeks or months. When I reopen them, I want to have forgot about them enough to be able to feel I’m listening to someone else’s song and we all know how good of a critique we are when it’s not our own. I create projects and often rework them 3-4 years later. It’s really fun and eventually when you create these sessions, you’ll have a bunch and will always rediscover sleeping bombs.

 

When I make a really good idea and feel it would be really good, I usually stop right there and WON’T WORK ON IT! I will let it sleep for months. Mostly because what I think is an amazing idea might not be one and if it is, I want my future self to handle it. Between now and then, i will have thought about it, cumulated new ideas, gained new plugins and experience so that when I open that sleeping gem, I have all the goods to turn it into what I want. Sometimes I am working on a great song and might be missing something so I could also grab that idea and bring it into a almost finished bomb, which is for sure going to be beyong what I expected.

 

Decide when you feel good

This one might be confusing or so obvious you might feel caught off guard. Think of the last time you saw one of your friends in their facebook feed saying they quit their DJ career or something they like… well, they’re basically taking a decision when feeling bad. If you decide to quit, you’ve been accumulating frustration. This is the same about your projects. Like the previous suggestion suggested, taking pauses and waiting before making a decision is quite healthy and let’s you wait for when you feel actually good about your song. Especially if you feel like half of the time you listen to it, it’s shit. When in doubt most of the time, pauses are crucial. If you’re 90% of the time feeling something needs a correction, then do it.

How to set your DoD:

Now that we have covered strategies to find out if your song is done, let’s look into setting your own Definition of Done.

 

1- Pick a reference (or a few), as discussed previously. This is to set the tone, aesthetic, direction. Decide and commit to what this song will be (a ballad? Ambient drone? Dance floor bomb?) then find something you know is solid as your cookie cutter. You’ll refer to that.

 

2- Analyze your reference and know what are the minimum requirements. Understand in advance what you can’t do from that one and what you can control. Ask for help, check tutorials and do as much as you can.

 

3- Decide in advance what you will do and what you can’t. If you know yourself and parts where things are a bit more difficult, you can always ask for help. There’s this misconception that one should be able to do everything themselves but this is counter-productive. Do you want to be average at all the different sides of production? You ideally want to be having fun first and get better but you can also ask for help: friends, other producers, myself.

 

4- Give yourself a plan. You can set yourself a deadline but also zones of no actions to be taken as well. 

 

5- Define some points of what would be some targets of done. This can be a scope of how much mix you want to do (ex. I will spend 2h max in the mix). Or “I want my drums to be very punchy” as something to reach. Perhaps your song will never be as punchy as what you dream but when you ask for feedback to someone who has never heard it, you can ask if they think it sounds punchy. Asking general and vague feedback will bring vague answers.

 

6- Test in context. Play your track in a DJ mix or ask a DJ friend to play it. See what happens, how it sounds compared to other tracks. This alone can reveal many flaws and strengths. I also like to bring a reference in my DAW and play my song with another one, mix them so it is not a mess, so I can see with the arrangements if it works.

 

Conclusion

This approach has proven many times with clients that it works. The more prepared you are, the better. Do you need to always do that? No. I mostly do it when I have periods where I struggle with inspiration or when I’m booked for a bigger contract. But it’s good to put it in practice here and there so that when you’re faced with challenges, you don’t start this with no warnings. It could actually backfire.

 

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Are Albums Still Relevant?

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Are albums still relevant? Ok, that’s kind of a loaded question, because yes, I think they still are. There’s been a trend in the last four years, where people are saying that “the concept of the album is dead, no one listens to albums, blah blah blah blah blah.” I hear this all a lot. If you look at the current trends, it makes sense: you look on Spotify and a lot of people release EPs and singles because it’s the surest way to game the algorithm to get plays.

However, the concept of singles and EPs bores me to death. Like, I hate it. When I see a song, I’m like, “Oh, I want to hear the album it’s coming from.” So I go and check and quite often, it’s a single. This turns me off so much that sometimes I get angry. It’s like the artists have lost their balls, for lack of a better term. It’s like they’re being dictated by the capitalist system that says that putting out singles is the most efficient way to market their art. I think that’s a problem because artistry and capitalism rarely go hand in hand. When I see a single, all I can think is, “Where’s your artistry? Where is your vision? Where’s your soul? Is that all you have to say?”

To me, I find that albums are narrative. When I go watch a movie like Doom, or Star Wars, it pisses me off a little bit because there is no climax, instead, they hold you in suspense for years waiting for the next flick. Personally, I would rather see a movie that is five hours long instead of three movies. This is why I love series where they release all the episodes at once, like on Netflix. I know that it’s long enough that I’m going to become invested in the characters, and by the end of it, I will feel like I lost friends, and have experienced something.

To me an album, especially long albums that are an hour long at least, I find that it’s like a window to the artist’s studio. I feel like I’m peeking into the studio and I’m hearing the music he’s been working on in the last six months or year. Sometimes you listen to the songs and you feel like the artists went through different life-changing experiences, or experienced inspiration from a certain artist, and then they came up with an artistic response to their influences like they’re trying to make a statement within a specific culture.

I find that as artists and musicians nowadays we need to step up, and we need to be assertive in the way we expose ourselves in the music. If that means that we’re going to have an album with only two solid songs, where the other ones are experiments, then so be it. There’s a certain romanticism with an album where you’re relieving the artist of the pressure of coming out with the best side of himself for singles every time.

Additionally, with albums, I like the fact that you can sit with an album and you can listen to it on shuffle and have a different story each time. Sometimes I’ll do this for a week straight and marinate in someone’s creative potential. 

Another thing that I love is when an artist has multiple albums, and sometimes you listen to one and you’re like, “Wow, this sounds completely different, but I see a relation to the previous one.” It’s nice to see the evolution between the two. 

I like listening to albums, because I want to hear the music you did in December, for instance, even if it’s not perfect. I love that. That’s why when I make an album I typically make it in a day or two, in order to collect the thoughts that I was having at that moment and time. 

Typically, I never spend more than an hour and a half on a song, which a lot of people think is crazy. When people ask how I write an album so fast, my response is pretty straightforward – I have an efficient workflow. Now, that doesn’t mean that I only work on music for hour and a half increments. The work goes in beforehand, making sure that I have all the elements that I need to create an effective mood board.

Since I spend time getting all my samples and sounds in order when I make a song, I know exactly what I want, and I add the stuff around it from my template. And then I continue what I did in the previous one, and once I’ve finished that one, I open the third one, and so on and so forth. Then by the end of the day, I have a ton of new songs.

Some people will ask me, “How do you jam if you don’t have a bunch of gear – it’s a pain to MIDI map everything every time.” Well, if you’re using Ableton, it’s called Ableton Live for a reason. Use the session view, and start clicking clips you have loaded – you don’t need anything fancy.

I also have another student who just sings into an audio clip and then converts that into MIDI using the option in Ableton. It wouldn’t translate perfectly, but that was part of the fun of it all – it created restrictions.

Also remember, you don’t have to finish a song in one go – you can work on multiple songs at the same time. When you’re feeling stuck on one, just start another one, or open a previous project from that thought.

Another key to making albums quickly is to make it a habit. Prince was recording a few tracks a day, and now there’s a library of music in his vault. Ricardo Villalobos is the same way – he typically doesn’t spend more than a day on his songs. He just jams. A big part of this motivation comes from success, however, in order to be successful in this day and age you have to break through the noise, and releasing a ton of stuff is a good way to do that. Success, just like output is a grind, never forget that, but with it comes a lot of personal satisfaction.