Tag Archive for: creative collaboration

Getting Lost in the Sea of Tracks

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Searching for music these days has become a real skill. I was in a few music stores recently browsing for new tracks for an upcoming DJ gig, and I realized just how counter-intuitive the experience had become — not only because music stores are, in general, a huge mess, but also because the noise factor was so high that I just couldn’t find what I was looking for. By “noise factor,” I’m referring to the ratio of songs I found that were irrelevant to my search.

sea of tracks, music production, crowd, vacationsWe can attribute part of this to the accessibility of music softwares today, which helped democratize electronic music by bringing production within reach for so many people. Part of it can also be blamed on the fact that launching a label has become so simple that basically anyone with the resources can start one. It might seem ironic for a music production blog to point this out, but this is the reality. I’m pretty sure that if you’re reading this, you’re someone who is dedicated to your art and is looking to really make something happen.

But how do you find your way through this wall of noise?

Consumers have more difficulty than ever finding the music they like. Scroll back in time and you’ll understand that the invention of records was to answer a simple need: to be able to play something again. Once that need was met, a lot of the innovations were centred on making the music sound better. robot, missing hubRadio appeared later as a way of broadcasting over distances. Then, at the same time as music was becoming easier to make, the internet came along to dramatically expand its accessibility and reach, leading to an overall decrease in the quality of what’s available. The sea of music out there today is the result of this over-proliferation caused by these technological advances all converging at the same time. For the consumer faced with thousands of new songs daily, it can be very disorienting. One’s community of peers therefore become an important reference.

Artists have difficulty finding appropriate labels to release their music. If you’ve overcome the technical challenges and are now hunting for a label, you might feel overwhelmed. Like I explained in a previous post, you’ll have to spend a considerable amount of time in music shops and online just trying to pinpoint which labels are a good fit for your sound. But with so little time and so many choices, finding what you’re looking for can be a huge challenge.

What seems to be missing is a hub between both parties.

So what’s the solution?

headphones, music, selectiveStop searching elsewhere, rely on your network. I have a few people who I follow attentively on Spotify or Soundcloud. These guys seem to either have a great radar or amazing connections, because they’re always finding gems. I’ve been told that a great way to keep up to date is to follow as many artists as you can, and then cut out those who are idle too long or change styles abruptly. I also ask my friends who are DJs or label owners to share their recent discoveries with me every now and then, and I do the same. Very efficient.

Find influencers. Influencers are individuals who seem to be at the intersection of multiple networks, who are followed by many people and will make waves with their track picks in charts or podcasts. Each genre has its own influencers, of course. Perhaps check a site like Resident Advisor to get an idea of who they think is trending currently.

SEE ALSO : The New Face Of Albums 

Resistances and Procrastination

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I like to believe that creating music goes beyond simple clicking and assembling. The whole process of making music has always had, to me, a very deep feeling of inner exploration. It’s the same when it Screen Shot 2016-01-03 at 13.27.58comes to listening. Apparently, music has this effect on about 60% of the population, so not everyone gets the same chills from listening to music. But if you do get a sensation like this, then you’ll try hard to get more of it.

Now, when it comes to making music, that honeymoon phase after you first discover how to make your own sounds can be an exciting moment. But for so many, soon after, a sense of frustration begins to set in. It can come from:

  • Not being able to get things to sound quite the way you imagined them.
  • Things seeming to take an awful lot of time to get done.
  • You feeling embarrassed by the sound of something you made.

The next thing you know, you’ll start procrastinating. You’ll feel like there’s some sort of inner balance to achieve each time you’re about to make music. As David Lynch points out in the clip below, a lot of artists think that suffering is a necessary part of creativity, when in fact any kind of suffering just cramps up the creative flow. In my view, this is not a healthy approach to getting new ideas.

So how do you avoid suffering?

That’s obviously a very difficult philosophical question to answer, though it’s clear that relying on substances is not the way to go. They might do some good in the short term, but you don’t want to develop that as a habit. To me, the essential question to ask is existential: why are you making music in the first place?

If the first answer that comes to your head is anything more than simply enjoying yourself, then you’re setting yourself up to feel resistances. When I say “resistances,” I mean those frustrations or blockages you might experience once you sit down and try to make music. You might feel like you’re wasting your time, or be tempted to just stop and play video games instead. You might conjure any range of excuses to plunge into procrastination.

The solution to this is to build up your appetite for music-making.

Here are some tips for doing this:

  • If you’re feeling uneasy or anxious, listen to your body and move away. Do whatever you need to do to regain your calm and motivation.
  • Discover your creative triggers. These can be as simple as listening to music you love, enjoying a rich cup of coffee, or going for a walk. The most important thing is to keep track of when you feel creative, and what triggered it. The more you know about your creative triggers, the more you can fuel your creativity when you’re lacking in energy or ideas.
  • guy-walkGo to your creative place. As Lynch said, if you can go to a place that inspires you, such as to nature or on a trip, then go there if you can.
  • Apply a creative fast. That’s right. If you want to be hungry, you need to empty out first. This means withdrawing from making music, or if possible, from listening to any music in the genre you produce. Observe your musical fast strictly, until you feel that tingling sensation return that tells you you need to make music again.
  • Discover your creative downers. This is the opposite of the above point about your creative triggers. Have you noticed when you feel creatively down or uninspired to make music? In my case, as weird as this may seem, I have a physical downer around 4PM every day, when I know I need to stop and drink tea. What’s yours?

I hope this helps!

SEE ALSO :  The Rule Of 10: Production in Rotation for Big Results 

Should I Remix for Free?

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If you’ve been hanging out on SoundCloud, uploading some of your music productions, commenting on other artists’ tracks, and exchanging a few words here and there, you may have been invited to collaborate at some point. If you haven’t invested much time in networking on SoundCloud, you’re really missing out on one of the most important hubs for music producers.

There’s been a huge emphasis in recent years placed on the number of followers producers can rack up. I even get people hitting me up every now and again to offer me 10,000 new followers, if I pay them 100$ or so.

Yet this craze over followers is nothing but a mirage.

Record labels won’t bite if they see an empty profile with two songs, but 1000 followers. And it’s not only labels who’ll see right through this. Anyone who’s even slightly curious or discerning will be struck by the awkwardness of such a hollow presentation.

Genuine connections, however, can go a long way. The more you interact with people directly (through SoundCloud’s horrible messaging system…), the more you run the chance of being invited to do a podcast or a remix. It’s even a pretty frequent occurence for active users.

Remixing for free can gain you valuable exposure and connections.Yet with this being said, if you’re at the beginning of your musical journey as a producer, you honestly shouldn’t expect to get money for this, not even if they propose royalties on sales. The truth is that the current state of sales in the industry is pretty discouraging for all but the larger record labels. Exposure and connections are thus the name of the game, and networking is the way to get you there.

It comes down to these key points:

  • Gain exposure, get heard. Considering that there’s not much money to be made, and that you want to expand your visibility on SoundCloud, one thing you can hope for is that the remix or podcast you make will help you reach a new audience. The music scene is composed of countless separate micro-worlds, and you’ll never manage to reach them all. Be strategic: try to reach the ones that are looking for music like yours. It’s a common mistake to assume that casting a wide net will succeed in garnering you enough people who will love what you do. But that’s actually counter-productive. You’re better off reaching one true fan than 100 people who care more or less. That one impassioned fan will spread the word and carry your music around. But you need to be exposed.

 

  • Target the right people, make your network work. Following the previous point, if you connect with people who love the same music as you, your music will find its way to the appropriate people. Again, you have to think strategically. Too often I see someone agree to do a remix without first having done research into who they are about to work with. On the other end, you could end up saying no to someone who is close friends with one of your favourite artists, or who attends a club regularly and passes music he discovers off to local DJs who love the kind of music you craft. The point is that good networking involves enlisting others to spread the wheel of music for you. And the same goes for you if you ask other DJs to remix your music productions: if someone believes in the music, they’ll pass it to people who will play it.

 

  • The rocky road. The state of DJing is pretty interesting these days. If you think about it, a lot of DJs play digital music they get for free, and will only pay for vinyls. Digital sales, at least for underground music, are somewhat stable, but haven’t evolved much at all in the last 5 years. For some reason, people have a hard time paying for underground music. They prefer to get it for free through their DJ friends. So with this in mind, accepting to remix for a label or a fellow producer is more about hoping that you’ll connect with someone who will get you closer to your goals: to release with a specific label; to be associated with a producer that inspires you; to get more gigs; or whatever they may be. This comes with a price though, and remixing for free might be one of those little discomforts that are necessary to get you closer to your destination.

Group of Friends with Digital Tablet

So as a producer, if you’re facing the option of being invited to work for free, consider these 3 things:

  • Are you inspired by the original song?
  • Is the invitation coming from someone with an interesting reach (fans, artists, community, promo)?
  • Who else is involved? Is there anyone in their circle that inspires you?

 

Ask yourself these questions, and feel free to ask the people who are inviting you to collaborate. If you’re going to do it for free or for a few bucks, it’d better be a fun gig!

Now just one final tip: you too may at one point invite someone to remix your music, and they might be considering these same points. So if you really want to work with an artist you love, it could be worthwhile to invest some money into having that special artist remix your track. Paid artists are often a good source of promotion to get your music where you want it to be.

Choosing Track Finalization over Ghost Producing

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A lot of you might already know what ghost producing is, and you might even have some pretty strong feelings about it. For those who aren’t familiar with the term:

Ghost producing is having your track made from scratch, with your instructions, by another producer.

What you might be more surprised to find out, though, is that many producers — even the most pro or successful ones — sometimes get others to finalize their tracks for them. I can tell you, for example, that even some big-name artists on the Minus label get Richie Hawtin to finalize their songs. But despite how common it is, there’s unfortunately still a sort of stigma around outsourcing your track finalization, and it’s easy to understand.

So first, let’s get this out of the way: song finalization is not the same as ghost production. Track finalization is nothing to be ashamed about, as the song is still the creative work of the producer. Let’s begin with a definition:

Track finalization is having another producer suggest ideas on how to get to a finished product based on your initial ideas.

 

Track finalization: The sources of a stigma

Back at the beginnings of electronic music in the early 1990s, DJs and producers had to be technicians too. You simply couldn’t get very far as an artist without being a jack-of-all-trades and an expert in the hardware of sound engineering and music production. It came with the territory, and DJs and producers prided themselves on their resourcefulness.


The stigma around track finalization (getting others to finalize your songs) can be partly traced to the DIY culture of electronic music production

This DIY nature of electronic music culture became so deeply rooted that when laptops and software began taking off in the early 2000s, many seasoned producers and DJs bristled at the intrusion of laptops into live performances. I remember the very first MUTEK festival in 2000, when the novel machines began appearing on stage with one performer after the next — it was such an alien sight that no one knew how to react! Many of us viewed their use as a form of cheating at first, but it soon became clear that the game had changed.

Music technology continued to develop at an exponential pace, making electronic music-making accessible for more and more people. One impact of this, however, has been to make it seem like electronic music production is so easy… that anyone can do it! Well obviously, it’s much more complicated than that.

If anything, the proliferation of producers has actually made it harder to stand out from the pack. Meanwhile, the infinite musical possibilities opened up by the digital revolution have made it that much easier to get overwhelmed. Where once your kick drum would be a 909, for example, now there are thousands of options to choose from. Sometimes the best creative surges come when you’re faced with constraints, but pure freedom, while it seems tempting, can make it easier to get lost and lose your focus.

Reaching out to others to help you finalize your songs is a form of creative collaborationTrack finalization as creative collaboration

The truth is that even the most experienced artists get writer’s block, and every producer is likely to have a hard drive full of tracks that they never got around to finishing for a variety of reasons. Chances are that there is at least one great album or a few EPs in there waiting to be unearthed and brought to fruition. So what’s holding you back?

Chilean producer Dandy Jack once told me that the day he understood that a shared victory was way more meaningful than doing it alone, his entire perspective on collaboration changed.

dandy jack told me that his perspective on creative collaboration changed when he realized the value of a shared victoryHaving a trusted hand finalize your tracks can be an antidote to writer’s block and a gateway to beautiful and fulfilling creative collaborations. Unlike ghost producing, track finalization isn’t about substituting for your own creativity, but about gaining a fresh and friendly perspective to help you out of a rut. In writing, even the most masterful authors need a good editor. Why should music be any different?

Even if the finalized track isn’t always exactly what you had in mind at first, it then becomes much easier for the producer to take it from there and carry it across the finish line. Track finalization is about finding what’s blocking you and unblocking it. It’s about unleashing your creative potential.

And I’m here to help.

 

 

Need Help To Finalize Your Unfinished Songs?

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In this post, I will discuss the advantages of having someone else take a look at your unfinished tracks.

Time to finish those sleeping projects

Have you ever watched those renovation shows where an expert takes over a messy apartment and gives it a complete makeover? I know that for myself and most people I know, these shows make us dream. We love the transformation, the before and after, the journey to an incredible final product.

Now what if I told you there might be a future for all those unfinished songs of yours?

Are you one of those producers that have dozens of projects that were never finished?

Perhaps you are here because this rings a bell:

 

  • You get bored of the song you’re making.
  • You get a new idea that seems better than the one that you’re working on.
  • What you work on doesn’t sound like what you have in mind.

I hear these comments all the time from fellow producers or aspiring ones. Not being able to finish a song is a very common problem for all of us. The world goes by so quickly today, and being exposed to so much music on Soundcloud triggers our A.D.D. and stimulates the excitement to always want to do more. As an artist, you set expectations for your own work too high, which then leads to you getting overwhelmed and succumbing to procrastination.

Many people have ideas, but once they get on the computer they get lost in the details of sound design and start to feel very sluggish. Eventually, the hype disappears and the person gets bored.

The problem is, your song might actually be great, and you’re not realizing it!

Just like with mixing, sometimes asking someone else to take a look can be critical to pinpointing what was wrong.

I once said to a friend, “That chord here is just too loud and makes the rest of the sounds pale!” That was all he needed to hear to finish what became one of his favourite songs. I’m not taking any credit here: the important part was his curiosity and openness to asking for help.

That’s often the main obstacle here: asking for help.

Mainly because you think:

  • It won’t be my track if someone does it for me.
  • I won’t feel proud of it.
  • It’s not going to work, period.

I can tell you one thing, and that’s that when it comes to remixes, people usually work fast. Well guess what? Asking someone to take over a song that’s blocking you is just like asking for a remix. The only difference is that you’re the maestro who provides the creative direction.

You’ll also need to have enough trust to be able let go of things. This is for your own good.

In the meantime, here are a few tips of mine:

  • Set a deadline on when a song should be done.
  • Set reminders and alarms.
  • Don’t spend more than 30 minutes at a time on the song.
  • Impose limits on yourself.

 

I can help you produce your song and finish it. Fast.

One of my specialties is listening to an artist’s vision, and then using their creative direction to help bring their projects to fruition. With almost 20 completed albums in my portfolio, I’m ready and eager to put my experience to work for you. Book me today!

 

SEE ALSO: Getting Lost in the Sea of Tracks