Tag Archive for: coaching

Artistic Integrity and Music Theory

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Last week, in one of our online coaching sessions, we discussed the importance of music theory. In describing my own opinions on the importance of music theory, I’d like to outline different stages of music discovery I’ve gone through during my life. In this post, I will also elaborate on some of my reflections on the current state of music itself.

It’s hard to pinpoint the first time I heard electronic music, but it was probably in the ’70s, and obviously, I fell in love with it. There was a whole science fiction trend at the time, and anything related to sci-fi was characterized by electronic music in the score. During that time, in a sea of pop and rock, electronic music was the oddball, not sounding like anything else. It had its own rules, and while some people were making electronic covers of known songs (which I’ve always hated deeply), I had an appetite for original music.

In the early ’80s, I was really into break-dancing and early electronic hip-hop or electro, which was all the rage. The use of 808s was common, and for me it was also instant love. What I discovered later on was the strong bond between early hip-hop and jazz. Recently, I watched a Blue Note documentary which retraces the roots of hip-hop and jazz, which was very refreshing.

What’s inspiring in this documentary is how this label, in its beginning, was trying to really give artists a chance to share a very personal take on music, and they didn’t follow trends or worry about sales. What was shocking about the film was that, for most part, the artists and label owners talk about what they do largely coming from the same perspectives as electronic musicians do about their own craft.

This type of vision has always resonated with me; what makes an artist wholesome is striving to be personal before anything else. If that’s obvious to you too, I’m sure you also know it’s not the case for many others who might be reading this post. This is why I became close friends with Bryan, who I make jazz with. He’s been playing sax for more than 45 years in all kind of contexts. When it comes to learning music, knowing chord progression rules and things like the circle of fifths, he’s probably the best person to talk with.

We had a talk about those so-called “rules” once. His point of view was very clear: knowing fewer rules might actually keep you more open to making things that are ground-breaking rather than thinking that certain things shouldn’t be done. I can related to this, because when I hear about “engineering rules”, I often feel like I’m preventing myself from doing certain things by adhering to them. Bryan is not interested in guiding me with respect to melodies. “Ya gotta break patterns, man!”, he’ll say, sometimes talking about how it works in free jazz.

“Music rules got blown out of proportion in the ’80s when musicians understood they could make a lot of money if they knew the tricks. Then everyone were more interested in repeating known recipes than making something personal,” he says. We have discussed how historically music elitists came up with serious rules to keep music-making limited to wealthy people who could afford music classes and thus it became less available to the poor. The dialog around music theory has traditionally been downwards, from the higher classes to the lower class—one way communication.

Jazz made music more open and accessible. The early beginnings of the rave days (circa 1987-1992) where music and the scene was really about inclusion and a big F-you to the music industry had a similar ethos. There was a lot of tension back then between electronic music and other genres. Electronic music was often misunderstood, mocked and put down, probably because it was the exact opposite in terms of values and ways of life.

From the early ’90s until around 2010, one of the most important values in most branches of electronic music was a sense of novelty. In my early rave days, we’d attend to be musically challenged. We wanted to hear music that we never heard before, and we even wanted to be disoriented. You’d have DJs dropping a huge mish-mash of different styles, and beat-matching was not as important as it seems to be now. It got more and more organized and popular DJs became the ones that were more structured, and eventually DJs started playing sets of one genre alone. One genre would emerge, stay for a while, and then become “bad” until another one usurped it as it faded into the past. This progression had many victims: Trance, Techno, House, Drum and Bass, etc. It was pretty different from today where there’s room for everything and artists are the ones to come and go instead of genres. Maybe they never really “go”, but the media focus often shifts to others in the same genre who are slightly “different”.

But let’s get back to music theory and academic chord progressions.

Often people make melodies based on some concept or rule they have in mind, or something they’ve heard before. One thing I hear a lot from people is that when they read about music theory and then try to apply it in their own work, they sound cheesy or too pop-y. So the question is, is there a way to know rules regarding melodies and still make something that sounds right?

That’s a bit of a hard one to answer.

It’s either you understand the tones and keys associated with a genre first and then try to reinterpret them in your own creative way, or you don’t. But to me, this raises some issues regarding artistic integrity—perhaps you want to work within a genre but still create a strong sense of originality. Is that possible?

Well, if you chose a genre that really speaks to you that you want to work in heavily, that’s a certain decision you make about who you are as an artist. But in my opinion, the quality of the vocabulary you can develop in electronic music comes—first and foremost—from understanding sound design.

That said, understanding music theory is a huge help in understanding how to strike a particular note. There are numerous tools out there to help you improve your tonal and theoretical knowledge. Here are a few:

  • Instascale: Not familiar yet with this one, but I’ve heard good things.
  • Scaler: For helping you understand chord progressions by proposing what could follow your melody, based on a genre.
  • Melodyne: one of the most used plugins for pitch correction.
  • Captain Plugins: The complete suite gives you access to tools that facilitate melody-making, pitch detection, bass-making and can make a huge difference in creating musical structure.

One thing I do a lot is work with my reference tracks using a pitch detection plugin (Mixed in Key, studio edition) and then will have that as a starting point. Then if you want to generate a different starting point, I’ll use Rozzer (Free Max patch) that generates a random pattern. That usually helps me find a motif for a song. Andrew here also has a few good suggestions:

I find that one thing that helps me a lot about making melodies is to work with what’s proposed instead of trying to control the output too much. If you start working with an expected melody in your head, you might spend hours trying to recreate it and it will end up sounding like crap. You sort of need to find the right melody for the right sound. That’s where it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole.

This is why if you work with what you have and try to get the most out of it, you might end up with something more original. I’ll record a lot of MIDI ideas and usually will go back to them and try a large series of presets until I find what feels like a perfect match, then tweak the sounds (this is where the sound design knowledge comes handy).

In this blog I frequently talk about remaining open-minded as much as possible and letting go of control. The notion of having control over what you do comes with practice. Same an understanding of musical theory. You need to make a lot of projects and a lot of songs to become more fluent and understanding in what you do. But to get there, first you need to really let go!

It’s Time for Musicians to be Inclusive

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Anyone making music regularly goes through numerous phases of wisdom. Sometimes, it can seem like the music industry is a video game, where—with some luck and networking—you can “level up” until you attain glory. Making music with this frame of mind, which many artists seem to do, produces certain unattractive behaviours:

  • An unwillingness to share knowledge and contacts
  • Taking a competitive approach to music
  • Snobbery and arrogance towards other people and artists

New producers are often thrown-off by the attitude of established artists. Established artists do filter people for other reasons, as being completely open to everyone and everything can become draining, especially if many are trying to “use” them (i.e. for attention, feedback on music, etc). Some artists are also really bad at communicating or just shy, which makes them adopt a closed persona as a way to hide. That said, there exists a very thin line that can be crossed from filtering to snobbery.

Where Does Arrogance Among Artists Come From?

If people work hard on learning something, giving what they spent time and money to understand to someone else for “free” might seem unfair, right? People might also feel that if they’ve reached a certain status, maybe others coming up behind them might bump them out of their position.

Sharing knowledge doesn’t make you lose it.

Sometimes people also feel that opening up to someone to share valuable information and getting anything in return can be very frustrating, as it feels like a waste of energy. Or worse, sometimes there are concerns that there will be some sort of betrayal if the recipient gets “further” with the shared piece of information than the original artist did themselves. It’s not really a surprise that many artists are extremely protective, as they constantly feel like they’re at risk of being “surpassed”.

Seeing someone succeed doesn’t mean you failed.

Reality check—a music career is just a series of ups and downs, with some peaks and plateaus. You can’t escape it, it’s part of the game. It’s never related to other people’s success, it’s just organic. A music career is absolutely bipolar and extremely volatile. These conditions are conducive to feelings of hyper-vigilance, anxiety, and depression. Some people manage to reach a flow where things work longer than others—this is related to a good combo of solid networking, natural talent and a good dose of charisma. Sometimes helping other artists can actually help an artist’s career for the better.

What are the Benefits of Being Inclusive and Helping Other Artists?

While for many this might seem obvious, you’d be surprised how for many others, the idea to work with other people sounds like a bad or compromising idea. I’m not one to judge anyone’s opinion because there is indeed a big risk we need to first address: theft and knowledge abuse. Many artists are taken advantage of by labels, club promoters, Spotify or other giant takeovers in the music business, and even other artists copying or “stealing” content/ideas. Does being inclusive pose risk for these types of situations to increase?

Being inclusive is not being naive. It is—first and foremost—trying to help others, as you wished you were helped when in need.

While writing this post, most of us are in quarantine and have no idea what things will be like in the near future. Interestingly enough for me, for the last 20 years, I’ve become used to being in my studio, secluded and working remotely. I’ve done countless collaborations online and ran labels as well. But now this lifestyle is imposed on many people who aren’t used to it. Not everyone can feel comfortable in this position, even musicians. In the last two weeks, I managed some online groups through Zoom to support my community. Sessions of three hours with more than 30 participants made it clear to me that we all want to reach out to one another, and that our life is far from a dystopian movie depicting revolts and violence. I see way more creative collaboration, online performances, tons of entertainment, classes and people spending their time helping strangers. I want this to happen with music-makers as well.

During a prolonged time of inactivity such as the situation we’re in right now, many institutions, clubs, festivals, and artists will suffer losses. I see people organizing crowd-sourcing campaigns, but they don’t seem to be gaining much traction. Money is only one aspect of the problem—it’s not the real solution to this situation. Where we’ll really need help will in reaching out to one another, supporting local musicians and businesses, and cutting out this business of acting like a “music diva”—we should rethink how we work.

I would like to outline some ways of acting towards others that have been my way of life. I don’t see myself as perfect, but I try to live by these maxims. Being inclusive is something essential to my daily life.

  1. One thing I often do, since of course I don’t always have the time to help is that I teach people to troubleshoot their problems, find answers through efficient researching. For instance, YouTube has solution to many issues and many people ignore that.
  2. I give everyone a chance until they prove me otherwise. Just like in life, if someone comes to me, seems friendly and wants to chat, I’ll usually take the time to chat back. I’m always interested in getting to know others with the time I have. For the most part, people are really friendly. The great thing about an online presence is, you can take distance yourself easily if things don’t go well. But I like to give people a chance and would never snob someone unless I feel there’s a strong clashing of life values (ex. aggressive behaviour, inability to listen, excessive drug use, or anything that can put my health at risk).
  3. I like to be a “yes-man”. For the most part, whatever people ask me, I will do my best to say yes and answer. I’ve been told I’m too nice and that people take advantage of me, but there are a lot of people who are like that and it’s often more energy-boosting than draining. I find that having strong boundaries are essential, though.
  4. I invest in those who invest in me. I’ve often chased after people who I thought were cool, but from whom I wasn’t getting any attention back. I kept trying and usually ended up feeling resentful. That behaviour is in the past now for me, and I only invest myself in people who give attention back. If I send an email and there’s no follow-up, I might poke a second time, but I usually set no expectations. This has cleared up a lot of frustration towards labels who don’t reply or other artists I’ve been wanting to work with that would never reply. I now focus on people who come to me in the first place. There’s a lot more energy there.
  5. Listening to what people have to say teaches me one thing a day. When I do online coaching, I spend time listening to what people have to say. There’s space for learning just as much as for teaching. I believe that everyone gets to teach me something because the world of music making is too vast to claim to know it all.
  6. Develop trust that even when confronted with what seems like a failure, there’s something ahead that will benefit me. Sometimes I felt like some misfortunes were really bad for me personally or for my music career. It’s really impossible to foresee what’s ahead but strangely enough, when it comes to the future no one is in control; magic that can happen down the road, in ways that were impossible to imagine. Stories of missed flights, cancelled events, pirated albums and so on, have been things I went through and I could go on about, but there was always something positive that came out of those experiences. I’m not someone that believes “positive thinking” can in negative situations fixes everything, so I prefer to stay grounded and have a sense of trust that there’s something to come that will be better for me or others.
  7. Always put people in touch—sharing connections creates power. I’ve never ever kept contacts for myself but this is something I often see people do. I don’t see the point to keep people apart. If you can put people in contact and something happens from that, you’ve just created a channel that many people will benefit from.
  8. Never take anything personally—’Nuff said.
  9. You never know who will help you in the future. So many times, I’ve talked with some random people and years later, these people came back to me with something. Recently someone booked my services for a mix and said I gave him a CD in 2004!
  10. Being nice often pays more in the long run. I don’t believe that being difficult pays off in any way, and in the long term, people will avoid you if you’re unpleasant.
  11. Explaining is learning. This is my motto. If you can teach someone a trick, you need to know it well enough to explain it. Therefore, you’re teaching yourself how to do it again. Often, if someone doesn’t get it, you need to find other ways to explain it, which tends to help discover new opportunities in your workflow.

Music Goals: Using Signposts instead of Goals

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You often hear about setting music goals to keep your drive going and to get you pointed in the right direction. I’ve previously discussed the best ways to set goals and reach them, but as time has gone on, I’m not totally sure if setting goals is still the most efficient way to get yourself going.

However, some goals on your bucket list still might be relevant; but this depends on how you set them. For instance, whenever I have people in coaching, we discuss that setting goals should be done in a way where you can actually quantify the success of your work. For instance, people often try to set a goal of “becoming a known artist”, which, in a way, doesn’t make sense at all compared to “finishing an album.”  The problem with the first goal involves two important things:

  • You can’t control your circle of influence. What does “becoming an known artist” mean exactly? That you’re appearing in charts or that 1,000 people have your tracks on their Spotify playlists? You can’t control that at all and being vague in your objectives will lead you to failure.
  • Becoming a known artist may or may not, happen. If it does, you might not even be aware of your reputation and some people think they’re known, when that’s actually not the case (for example, buying “likes” on Facebook doesn’t mean anything).

In the second goal, “finishing an album”, you’re in total control of that goal – you can clearly make a “definition of done.”  If this definition is reached, then you’re done, and the goal has been achieved. Working in this way can be useful, but I would also highly recommend that you also put an end date on your goal.

Now there’s another alternative to setting goals, which, for lack of better terminology, I’ll define as setting a signpost.  Why? Signposts are signs you see when you’re driving that help you be aware of the direction to go, to get you where you want, and also to reliably re-guide you when you’re lost. I like the term in French for “repères” – it’s sort of like “landmark” but not necessarily for physical places.

What is a signpost in your musical journey?

They are something you can rely on from a community you want to be part of, or a specific sound that you want to immerse your life with. I’ll give you the best examples as of how I applied the community approach to my life and why I use them in parallel to the type of goal-setting we described above.

In Montréal in the late 90s, we were really lucky to have a solid core of people and producers that gathered around the MUTEK festival which was our community but also a sort of signpost; a direction. It was a place where we could perform the music we all appreciated (arranged based on our personal tastes) and where we could also discuss music production. So back then, a goal for me was to play at MUTEK, but at the same time, it was that community that dictated how we had to sound to achieve it.

Another signpost I’ve used was a sort of music “target” I set through Ricardo Villalobos. I’d study his music, his sets, and a recurring question I had was “will he play this track of mine?” There wouldn’t be any goals attached to this besides, perhaps, having him play my music, but it was more as a reference point of how my music could be made or adapted,

I often do mixing and mastering for artists and labels, or do coaching, and one thing I often see is how people are a bit lost on determining who their music is for. Who do you want to reach exactly? Who inspires you? Which community would support and encourage you? This is the type of question to seriously consider, as I often work with people who are far from the physical community they’d like to be part of and rely heavily on the internet to be in touch. For instance, I have in mind some guys from South America who love Romanian artists – that’s quite a distance!

In past articles, I’ve about the importance of networking. Here are a few ways to help you find your own set of signposts:

  • Locally. Is there a club, a venue, or promoter that is booking and playing the music you love? Where is the closest place to you that could be your local reference? This is very important as you can get to meet people who have the same tastes as you. Perhaps it’s a festival that you can attend in another city, like MUTEK (this reminds me of a huge community from Colorado used to visit MUTEK in a group of 20! They would forge bonds and networks on their trips).
  • Online. I find it’s important to find a crew that make good podcasts, DJ sets, or music that gives you goosebumps. A trap however, would be if you aim too high, at very big artists and organizations (ex. Time Warp in Germany) where it is so big that becoming part of organization might become a huge puzzle and is very difficult. There are many smaller festivals that exist that have the same kind of music but on a smaller scale, you can grow with them. That said, try to downscale your target, or follow the bigger names but try to connect with the other, smaller guys who like that same music but are also emerging.
  • Aesthetic, genre, mood, direction. Try to find artists you like that are emerging and look stable and serious about their craft. You don’t need to contact them; it’s more about following their production and supporting them. Be a fan, someone who encourages and gives, while not expecting anything in return. Feeding people that inspire you is a good way to invest in yourself as well. I’ve supported and encouraged artists that started to go well but then have disappeared; it’s a disappointment, and sometimes I wonder what else I could have done to help. Seeing someone you love perform and do well is a great motivation for your own art!

I’d love to hear what you consider to be your own signposts!