Tag Archive for: workflow

Electronic Music Is More Than Making Tracks

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People have become increasingly interested in making electronic music in the last decade. I find it more exciting than people getting into DJing. It’s clear to me that one or the other is a hobby that everyone who enjoys electronic music should explore. As you explore the art of DJ, you learn how to dig, get familiar with the roots of artists you love, discover music you didn’t know you loved, and build some obsession over tracks. It’s a fun hobby that fuels the scene, supporting artists and labels and feeding more energy into what you believe in.

Making music is a pretty deep activity. I mean it. Some people get curious about making beats, and before they know it, they’re engaged in an inner journey where they rediscover parts of themselves and create sounds they never thought possible. Making music mirrors its creator’s psyche, reflecting subconscious emotions and triggering memories.

Photo by James Kovin on Unsplash

Maybe you’ll think I’m crazy, but most people who have been exploring the art for a while will confirm that it’s not so silly. This is why I get it when someone wants to make songs first, but I am also excited to tell the newcomer that there is more to explore than making tracks. What’s a bit tricky to explain is that to make tracks, you need to do multiple activities first. Making a song is like writing a story or a novel. You need to live some adventures first to share a story. Or perhaps you have a lot of imagination, but real stories always bring substance.

I like to see songs as stories from the studio. They are a collection of moments built into a more cohesive narrative. Sometimes, a few related stories can also be paired into a conversation.

Regarding categories of songs, in my case, I have two main buckets:

  • Reference-inspired music: This refers to songs that are built with a precise purpose, such as making music for DJs, and is built to fit sets.
  • Personal agenda: collecting moments and miniatures and finding sounds that I would love to put into a live performance where I record the outcome.

 

The issue I see for people who start making electronic music is that they focus on creating a song but lack the experience, tools, and general workflow to get things done. They will then compare themselves, and the gap between what they made and other people’s music will be significant. Many want to make a personal song combining the two categories I mentioned. This is even more difficult because the person will lack one of the primary essential music skills: vocabulary. That skill comes with playing, rehearsing and repeating the techniques.

I found many tutorials on making songs and known artists showing how they made music or how to make one from scratch, but this is a steep activity for a newcomer. We could relate to that kind of video, such as sharing how to build a house. It is helpful, but you’ll practice someone else’s way of working, and it won’t show all the learning they’ve been going through, which includes failing, dealing with various issues and how they resolved them. Electronic music is supposed to be a playground where you play with all those toys and software to see what comes out of it, and then, down the road, you record something you want to share.

 

To record something without exploration is the equivalent of sharing a made-up story that you haven’t lived: it lacks the essence. Memorable stories are partly inspired by personal experience.

 

Making sounds without a purpose might not be romantic or exciting, but it is an activity that develops deep listening. That skill is essential for understanding sound, reverse engineering what you imagine, and mixing. Sitting there and listening to sounds you make or have found is valuable.

 

Besides making music, sound activities that have to be added to your rotation of studio sessions should include:

  • Listening to music.
  • Listening to samples, videos, non-related sounds.
  • Update plugins and gear.
  • Learn a specific effect by testing all the knobs/options.
  • Backup projects.
  • Rename and organize past projects and ongoing ones.
  • Use MIDI controllers paired with plugins and play with them.
  • Design one sound at a time: ex. Bass hit or percussion.
  • Turn loops into structures
  • Create Mood boards and fill them with samples, designs, and sounds.
  • Analyze Reference tracks and create templates for them.
  • Modular patching.
  • Create grooves alone
  • Create Hooks alone
  • Create beats alone
  • Design an arpeggio.
  • Try chord progressions.
  • Deconstruct the song structure of a project of yours and see what are the different alternatives.
  • Practice playing an instrument or a keyboard.
  • etc.

 

 

I will share some activities and exercises I do daily that you can also do. These provide me with some ideas and remind me that electronic music is more than just making songs; it’s just spending time tweaking, listening, and adjusting.

 

Studio Activities to Try

 

Here are eight studio activities that mix challenge, logic, and analysis. Each is designed to be a focused exercise in sound exploration that lets you practice a new skill and gives you material to play with at the end. These exercises allow you to treat individual sound elements as mini-compositions (miniature) while keeping things structured enough to evolve into a conclusive five-minute segment.

 

Focus: Parameter Modulation Mapping

 

Challenge: Explore manual modulation with the 2-hands Technique

 

Activity: This requires a MIDI controller and mapping some parameters to a plugin instrument or effect. One of the most straightforward yet most potent explorations you can do is to map two knobs to 2 parameters. Then, using your hands, you’ll explore the different results when one hand does something while the other does something else. As a starter, if you need an idea, you’d control the frequency cutoff of a filter, and the other parameter would be the resonance.

 

What happens when you move slowly one parameter while the other squiggles quickly?

What does it sound like when the two move in opposite directions, quickly vs slowly?

You could ask yourself many questions, but being curious is the best guide.

 

Outcome: This transformative manipulation can drastically shape sound. You might want to add a limiter immediately to avoid hurting your ears. Recording the movement can test various sound sources through your effect. Resample everything.

 

 

Focus: Layered Texture Sculpting

 

Challenge: Create layers for a sound to make it more complex or richer.

 

Activity: You can layer textures to a simple-sounding sample using an envelope follower and a few filters. If the sound is mostly a mi-oriented synth, you can layer higher-pitched texture by putting a filter in highpass mode. Since many sounds have content in various areas of the frequency spectrum, you can explore parts of it with an EQ that isolates a section. You can also practice FM modulation to make the sound richer and then have fun with multi-band processing (eg. compression or saturation) to blend it.

 

Outcome: Practice adding layers to sounds, which gives you options when exploring new hooks. You can use previous experiments,, or if you build macros while exploring, you can create them on the fly.

 

 

Focus: Micro-Rhythm Manipulation

 

Challenge: Explore a sound when repitched, stretched or sequenced.

 

Activity: There’s this interesting fact that a sound in a library can have multiple lives, just like a cat. You can use the same sample multiple times, and to avoid repeating yourself, you’ll change it so it feels anew. Changing pitch is one way of exploring a sound’s potentially new outcome. Pitch it down for darker moods and high for exciting overtones. Explore the sound in a different scale, as a chord or reversed. Changing its length and sequencing can also turn it into an unpredictable turnout.

 

Outcome: After resampling the new ideas, you can save them as new hooks or post them on mood boards that need fresh air.

 

 

Focus: Algorithmic Sequencing Experiment (Or any sequencing that isn’t usual to you)

 

Challenge: Use an algorithmic sequencer or generative tool to create evolving note sequences or parameter changes.

 

Activity: You can record the MIDI output to new clips using a complex sequencer or MIDI clips with probabilities on some triggers. Recording multiple new clips allows you to save practical and fun sequences to reuse. In Ableton v12, you can make a drum kit and then shuffle the sounds with similar ones. Shuffling sequences and drum selections allow you to preview sounds with a specific sequence. Sometimes, we have a melody we love, but the sound doesn’t fit, and vice versa. Exploring one or the other lets you see a broad palette for a selection. Algorithmic sequencing is a powerful tool to spit out ideas from your habits since you’re not in control of the sequence.g

 

Outcome: If you save them, the result is in 3 spheres with new drum kits, midi clips, and audio clips.

 

Focus: Resampling and Transformation

 

Challenge: Reshape a sound entirely

 

Activity: Using the option to record modulation to clip in session view, add multiple effects of your choice on the channel of the sample and then record yourself moving parameters. Tieing your modulation recording to a loop-based time creates a lot of change to the initial sample. When we play with effects, we rarely automate multiple parameters at once, so this activity is about exploring exaggeration and going to places you might not explore. Once you have some action going, resample the entire playful session.

 

Outcome: Recording a long exploration as this will always offer alternatives to the original idea. Those recordings can be new hooks or extra material to support the initial sound.

 

Focus: One-Plugin Challenge

 

Challenge: Choose a single instrument plugin and use it exclusively to sculpt your sound for 5 minutes.

 

Activity: Similar to making a miniature, this activity is about taking enough time not to achieve anything other than using your curiosity and seeing what comes out of it. Very often, we are task-driven with something in mind, which narrows the outcome of what your tools can do. Set your root key to C to resample the exploration in those moments. Being in C will let you import the recording to a sampler for easy manipulation.

 

Outcome: Limiting your tools forces you to explore every nook and cranny of a plugin, and not having a goal keeps you open to finding sounds you aren’t usually going far.

 

 

Focus: Dynamic Arrangement via Automation

 

Challenge: Turn a simple loop into multiple versions of itself using generative techniques.

 

Activity: Use the follow-action option in the session view to select multiple clips with a hook and create variations. The idea is to start with a simple loop, but the outcome will be different each time you play it. The record button allows you to save the order of the clips played, creating new hooks and unexpected arrangements.

 

Outcome: Either you resample the session or record the clip launching activity, but the outcome will provide a way of exploding the initial loop trap one can fall into. You can also revisit old projects and apply the same activity to recycle solid ideas in alternate versions of themselves.

 

 

Focus: Spatial Field Exploration

 

Challenge: Explore using space through panning, reverb and filters

 

Activity: Using a few samples from a new project or idea, spend time meticulously positioning them in space using panning. Quite often, that production phase is overlooked and left to be done at the end, either in the mixing phase or at some other point. Taking the time to explore what a sound can be like in the panning distribution can reveal potential flaws or strengths of a sound.

 

Outcome: The recorded performance might inspire spatial arrangements in larger tracks and help you consider sound positioning as a compositional element. Sometimes, moving around a sound will help make sense when paired with another. It’s a nice activity to listen to how sounds relate to each other, but from a spatial perspective. Also, exploring reverb use can give a new mood to the most straightforward sound.

 

Focus: Preset Owning

 

Challenge: Explore all the presets of your plugins and tweak them.

 

Activity: It is an enjoyable experience to go through all the presets of a plugin or synth and modify them to taste. You can, after that, either save them over the original preset or as a new one. Electronic musicians often disdain using presets, but you can see them as a starting point. You can also make them yours by changing them to your needs. Going through multiple presets helps you understand how a specific plugin works and how to configure it to achieve a particular result.

Alternative: My friend Jason likes to try to “break” plugins by pushing them to extreme settings to see what happens. By pushing them far, you can then roll back to less intense results.

 

Outcome: An expansion of your presets and a better understanding of your tools.

 

If you have suggestions, please share!

 

 

 

Basquiat Work Ethics

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Coming from a period when few people made electronic music before its art was democratized, meeting people who were making music was difficult as not many people had the opportunity to produce it. You’d meet someone who would produce music, and it felt like you’d have a lot to talk about because they might have similar gear or setup, so you’d hope to be able to share insights.

Nowadays, we have been experiencing an opening of opportunities where software makes it easier to produce music. With AI, people can skip the creation process and have music custom-tailored to their imagination. I see a feeling of jadedness about the new generation among older producers.

As a friend and fellow musician said:

Making music doesn’t make you special anymore. Everyone can do it.

 

In parallel, students asked me how they could elevate their craft above that of the average hobbyist. To answer this, I looked into the case of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

 

Basquiat, An Urban Artist

 

Basquiat was known for his prolific output and unique artistic style, combining street art, graffiti, and fine art elements. Despite his short life, Basquiat created a vast body of work that continues to influence contemporary art.

One aspect of Basquiat’s work ethic was his relentless dedication to his craft. He was known to spend countless hours in his studio, often working late into the night or early morning. A deep passion for expression and creativity drove this commitment to his art.

Basquiat’s work ethic also reflected his intense focus and determination. He urgently approached each piece, channelling his energy into spontaneous and expressive brushstrokes. This intensity allowed him to capture raw emotions and ideas on canvas, resulting in visually striking and intellectually stimulating artworks.

 

While prolific, he made a name for himself that we still relate to nowadays. If you analyze his work, you will see that he used multiple ways to make a name for himself that can be applied to music-making.

Let’s look into the points that made him rise to the status he built.

 

Source Material

 

In the video, the narrator talks about how Basquiat found a book that served as an inspiration base. Basquiat uses a collection of icons, logos, and images on a specific page in many of his artworks. It was his vocabulary, and it became his motor as well. If his pieces were set around a theme, you’d see these same icons being omnipresent. This is a way of always having a collection of repetitive ideas that, in a way, established his brand.

 

The way I teach music is not too far from that approach. I encourage any artist I work with to build a set of references and allocate a lot of time to finding samples that ignite excitement. Services like Splice offer vast items, such as samples, AI sketch generators, plugins and other tools. Compared to jazz, electronic music has too many sounds to pick up, and it’s easy to get lost in which sound one should pick to make a new song.

Your source material could be divided into 2 main categories:

  • Place holders. These are sounds you use by default in all your initial ideas. Back then, people would only have money to buy a 909 or a 303, which was the sound they would use de facto. As we now have access to everything, it is helpful to have a template go to sounds you use as a starting point, and then you can swap later on.
  • Identity. These are more about representing you. Some artists have identity sounds that you can immediately recognize in the first minute of listening to their song. These can be a selection of sounds, presets, or specific effects.

 

Very often, people buy hardware or soft synths randomly. It’s quite handy to use a demo to test it. But if you use some samples, they are often tagged with the synth’s name used to create them. It can also be reverse-engineered.

If you feel like samples aren’t you, remember that everything has been sampled somehow. Having quality samples trains your ears on what quality is. This is crucial for sound design learning.

If you read this blog, these concepts have been covered many times.

 

Steal Like An Artist

 

There’s one point in the video where Basquiat explains where some quotes he wrote come from, which are from some books or movies. Some images, are inspired by artworks he saw. He didn’t copy them, he stole them from a context and brought them into his world.

(Art) comes down to tastes. You basically want to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things to what you’re doing.

Steve Jobs

This is true for many things. To cook great-tasting food, you need to eat exceptional food. The same is true for sounds. I often feel more comfortable with the idea that I’m a curator than a musician. My music is a collection of ideas I love from random sources.

Your inspiration comes from your references. Nothing one has done that wasn’t inspired by someone else’s work. The fact that you do a genre comes from hearing that genre in a context that inspired you. So, you might as well start a collection of inspiring songs. It can be for one sound, one reverb, the way the transitions are done, or chord progression. If there’s one thing in a song you like, put it in your reference folder.

Then, you analyze your references. Take tons of notes, and try to imitate. Ask friends how something is done. Search Splice for similar-sounding sounds.

 

All these experiments build your imagination, which leads to core ideas to keep. It can take 50 ideas to find one exceptionally satisfying. Try to make many of them and blatantly get inspiration from everywhere.

Hip-hop artists are more comfortable taking ideas as they always sample other people. I have to say I’ve been seeing many clients remix pop music in the last year, so the bootleg aspect is becoming an option. However, remember to respect the work of anyone you directly sample.

 

Have A Message

 

One of the messages Basquiat had that motivated him was that there weren’t enough black artists in the art world. He wanted to change that and involve himself, making it the center of his work. The strength of having a message is its appeal for the media to look into what you have to say, and it rallies followers who resonate with it.

 

Punk music has its anarchist message, and hip hop has a gang-related message for some artists, while for others, it’s about the struggle of people in the current world. House music has also had a history of representing a safe space for queer people to dance to. Whatever genre you embrace, there’s a history of its upbringing, and sometimes people forget the political roots of it. While knowing the backstory is not an obligation, you can also piggyback a genre to bring your story and values.

 

Having a message and a vision will help bring a sense to your music, and in times when you might hit a wall with inspiration, your message will drive more inspiration.

 

Speed

 

If you read this blog or work with me, you know that speed is one element I believe in. Ideas come and go, sometimes very quickly and don’t always remain. Having the speed to bring your ideas together will help you catch ideas on the fly, perhaps so that you can finish them later but, most importantly, to see if they make sense. It’s one thing to have an idea; it’s an idea to make it work properly.

 

With Basquiat, he was working fast. Blazing fast. In the video, they share that his meeting with Warhol stimulated a lot of creativity and that at one point, JM did a self-portrait of them in a fast moment and then brought it back to Andy, who was amazed by how fast he was. One of the reasons why artists are slow nowadays comes from poor organization and lack of methodology. The more you are organized in managing your time and art, the faster you become. Music production is a series of phases, and if you sit down to make music and want to do it all at once, you’ll be hit by decision fatigue.

 

The second obstacle is ego. That part of yourself always has the impression it has something to prove, to control and to be something you are not. That leads to procrastination and distraction. My view of music making is fueled by fun in all parts. When fun is present, you are in the flow.

 

Flow is key to success.

Study, Memorize, Internalize

 

The last part of the video is where I saw the strongest parallel with what, as an artist, I do. In my free time, I listen to all kinds of music, radio, and movies and study many tutorials on YouTube. I think I watch about 10 per day. I take a lot of notes from those, and then when in front of my computer, I will test new findings or revisit techniques I was doing to give it a new twist. For each song, I started with a technique exploration, and I developed new ideas by practicing.

 

Saving macros has become something that I just now do always. I will map some parameters to the knobs of the macro and then have fun creating presets by randomizing or just tweaking with a controller.

Doing these sketches touches everything above:

  • Increases speed.
  • I have more control over my vocabulary, coming closer to my message.
  • Ease integration of ideas that I “steal” or get inspired from.

 

Recycle Your Old Projects

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Sometimes I’m baffled by two things when I work with clients:

  1. They start from scratch each time they make a new song.
  2. They let finished projects asleep once over (and never reuse them).

In both cases, there’s a huge loss of time and energy. But when I explain them that each of their projects are a gold mine of opportunities sleeping on their hard drive, I see their faces lighting up. If you think about it, a song has often a lot of leftover material that won’t be used plus, think of all the common elements all your songs have, so why do one person not create a way to have the computer use resources to create that material.

The way I approach making music, ultimately speaking, is to be able to first find a very original idea and then put it in context quickly so you can work to give it a timeline.

 

Why speeding up your workflow?

 

Interestingly enough, as an artist and coach, I often teach that creativity is a super slow process and that trying to rush things might not be a best idea. But there’s also the paradox that it’s important to grasp an idea and make the most of it, then to move on. The idea of speeding your process is to ease your expression in order to not get lost in technicalities. One of the place many people loose time is in the details, clarifying technical details and such.

If a song is an idea, put on a timeline, it is also easy to get a lot of distance from this idea if you are more technical than artistic about it.

 

The strategies below are meant to ease the technical part by focusing on organization.

 

Strategies

 

The first way to speed up your process is to think forward. Just like this movement where people would pay for a coffee for a future client who would be low on cash, the best way to speed the next session is to organize it in the one you’re working on. I’ll explain habits and strategies that will be helpful down the road.

 

One effective method is to utilize the import feature from the Ableton Live browser. For example, if you’ve developed a compelling chain of effects in a previous project, save it as a macro. These macros can then be easily imported into new projects, giving you a head start with tried and tested sounds.

 

Template Creation

 

Beyond importing specific elements, consider creating templates based on your most successful projects. These templates can include your preferred routing, default effects chains, and even placeholder instruments. Starting a new project with these templates can dramatically reduce setup time, allowing you to dive straight into the creative process.

  • If you notice a routine and habit, turn it into a template where you can import what’s needed.
  • Useful arrangements or mixing templates are essentials.
  • Templates are basically like a recipe that you can reimport channels or arrangement section, adjust to taste and then, save again as a new template.
  • See them as “Global Presets.”

 

 

TIP: There are different types of templates to start with. Analyze your last 10 projects to see what’s always there de facto.

 

Creating a Channel of ‘Leftovers’

Another innovative method is to create a special channel in your DAW for ‘leftovers’ – bits and pieces from previous projects that didn’t make the final cut but still have potential. This could be a half-finished melody, an interesting sound effect, a discarded vocal pattern or a unique drum pattern. By saving these leftovers, you create a personal sound library that’s not only original but also infused with your signature style. Whenever you’re stuck or need inspiration, dive into this channel and discover elements that can spark new ideas.

There’s always been a non-written rule that one shouldn’t use presets and should re-invent themselves for each projects. While this answers a need to always have non-repetitive ideas from song to song, it can also be extremely time consuming. A good way is to use your leftovers as a starting point for a future project.

  • Leftovers are basically what you want them to be. I tend to hoard on anything unused. You’d be surprised the uses I’ve found for some sounds.
  • Instant inspiration comes from ideas you thought silly: re-pitch, stretch, slice, filter, EQ wildly… or heavily process them.
  • Decide of your own inner rules on how many times you use a sound. There’s no right or wrong.

 

TIP: Export your leftovers normalized so they sound full and ready for future projects.

 

Remixing Your Own Tracks

 

Sometimes, the best way to recycle is by revisiting your own tracks. Remixing a track you’ve previously produced can be an enlightening experience. Isolate individual elements that stood out and reimagine them in a new context. This not only breathes new life into your existing work but also expands your creative boundaries.

I always smile when a client tell me they can’t decide if one decision is best or another, regarding their track. Perhaps both ideas are good so why not make 2 versions?

You can have as many versions as you wish from your songs. In the 80’s and 90’s, some songs would sometimes have 3-4 variations which was really playful for DJs in how they could use and re-use a song.

Some ideas for new remixes could be:

  • Instrumental or with a vocal
  • Change of scale
  • Beatless or with different percussion set.
  • Collaborate with a musician for adding live take.

TIP: Try combining 3-4 songs into one.

 

Systematic Sound Design Sessions

 

Allocate specific sessions solely for sound design, separate from your songwriting or track-building sessions. During these sessions, focus on creating unique sounds, textures, or rhythms without the pressure of fitting them into a current project. Save these creations in an organized library.

Spending time organizing your sounds is also a useful way to make it easier for later on.

When working on new music, you can tap into this library for inspiration or elements to incorporate, significantly speeding up the creative process.

  • Take the time to understand complex presets on sounds you love.
  • Cross-pollinate the preset parameter of one synth to another.
  • Test demos of a synth you would love to acquire and record your tests to audio.

Collaborative Workflows

 

Encourage collaboration with other artists or sound designers. Sometimes, a fresh perspective can lead to unexpected and inspiring results. Collaborations can result in a shared library of sounds and ideas, offering a wider palette of elements to draw from when starting new projects.

  • I love to share a Dropbox folder with someone. As both of us can share projects there, you can see them being updated on each other’s sides.
  • Ask someone who has musical knowledge to revise and reinterprete a melody of yours with an acoustic instrument.
  • Befriend producers from other genres and see what they can provide for feedback.

 

TIP: Share a Dropbox or Google drive with friends.

 

Regular Review and Curation of Existing Projects

 

Schedule regular sessions to review your past projects that aren’t released. This is not just to reminisce but to actively search for reusable elements – be it a catchy hook, a unique synth sound, or an effective drum pattern. By doing this, you not only remind yourself of your past work but also build a readily accessible repository of ideas and sounds.

People who work with me knows I love to bring all my projects to 90% of completion instead of 100%. The logic behind this is simple: I like to gather a bunch of songs on a specific day or upon a need and then wrap them all up at once. This resolves multiple issues: coherence across a release, avoiding repetitive structures, better originality, etc.

  • Revise the kick of a project for a whole new approach on the direction of a song: harder, smoother.
  • Mute all channels that aren’t part of the hook to avoid clutter. This is easier to do if you are emotionally distant from your project.
  • Try a shorter version of your song to keep it straight to the essential (eg. radio ready mixes are 3 min long).

 

Incorporating Field Recordings and Unconventional Sound Sources

 

Sometimes, the most inspiring sounds come from the world around us. Regularly record sounds from your environment – these can be anything from street noises to natural ambience. These unique sounds can spark new ideas or add an original flavor to your music. There’s a beautiful plugin named Life which comes with a mobile app that sync up with the software on your computer. Not only you can grab sounds from everywhere but the software will chop it, while giving it a structure. The results are impressive.

  • When you are someone public such as a restaurant, pay attention to the music in the background. What do you hear when in a new context? Think of how your music would translate.
  • Try to listen to melodies from your environment. There can be hidden melodies from a street performer, from people talking around you or from a car passing by.
  • Explore noise and shape them to percussion.

 

 

Routine Exploration of New Tools and Habits

 

While it’s important to have a familiar toolkit, regularly experimenting with new plugins, instruments, or software can bring a fresh perspective to your work. This doesn’t mean always buying the latest gear, but rather exploring different tools, perhaps through demos or free versions, to keep your creative approach dynamic.

Exploring new tools means, perhaps, exploring mobile apps that can do sounds. There’s a large myth over those as many things they’re not good enough but you’d be surprised how many of them are extremely solid enough to make ideas. Not only the interface is lovely but the fact that you’re not in front of your computer is a different outlook on what you do. You can explore on your mobile shop to check apps that are tagged as music related and you’ll see synths, drum machines or weird DAWs. You can also check on VR headsets for the same kind of tools to explore.

 

 

Mind Mapping and Conceptual Workflows

 

Sometimes, the block isn’t in the production but in the conceptual phase. Employ techniques like mind mapping to outline the themes, emotions, or stories you want to convey in your music. This pre-production step can provide a clear direction and help in choosing or creating elements that align with your vision.

For this year, Mind Mapping is all rage for me. I’ve been starting to put down to image concepts, how I work in audio. Sometimes to mind map what you do gives you some insights you can’t think of when you only always do music on it’s own.

One method I learned is named “Sticky Steps.” Basically you start with the end and then roll back with little steps on how to get there. I like to think of it as a reverse engineering method. It’s possible that some steps, you will lack the knowledge to explain or know how to do it which is why you can contact me for instance, or ask friends.

 

I hope this kickstarts your new year in good manner. Don’t hesitate to leave comments or questions below.

How can you start a song while stressed out?

/in , /by

Disclaimer: this post is based on reflections resulting from the COVID pandemic.

Every other day, I exchange a few words with artists I know—friends, label partners, people I like, or anyone who wants to connect. I believe during these times, it’s important to keep social contact to divert our attention away from the madness, misery, or other constantly emerging concerns.

“How can you still make music with everything going on?” someone asked me today (and last week). I did a workshop for MUTEK and the main question was similar, something like “where do (music) ideas come from?”

Both answers overlap, in a way. If you think about where ideas come from, (let’s call it “inspiration” if you want), it can strike at random moments. For some people it’s in the shower, others while commuting, or doing yoga…etc. Basically, 90% of the time it’s happening somewhere else, rather than when you’re making music. Hence the importance of taking long breaks when you make music, and by breaks, I mean, leave the studio, go out and do something else. Your mind is still making music, but the space you create for yourself to think, will create space for you to solve problems.

I don’t know about you, but my mind is pretty much always making music, in some way. I’ll be washing dishes or walking my dog, and there goes my brain, creating patterns, imagining song structure, paying attention to ambient noises and figuring out how to translate that with a synth. So, whenever someone asks me where my ideas come from, it’s a bit tricky to give a definitive answer, because the source of some ideas emerge a long time before I sit in front of the computer. The thing is, once I sit in front of the computer, it’s like whatever I have been thinking about vanishes..I’ve forgotten everything and there I am, thinking what now?

The first good habit of sitting down to make music starts with the commitment to a 5-minute session.

The existentialist question(s) of “why make music?” sometimes strike me during this pandemic, and hard. Why am I making this? Who am I reaching out to? Why, why, why?

The answer to everything can be resolved in the 5-minute commitment. If you’re someone who’s interested in meditation, we say that the hardest step to meditate is to just sit and start. It’s the same for music making.

Another part of this challenge we face is the isolation. Most artists feed themselves events to get inspired. Now touring is hard, and that cut-off happening cold-turkey was a mental challenge. Having the resilience to be able to continue making music after months is another obstacle in-itself, as this is something that’s not only demanding, but also unusually frustrating.

If you watch that movie about The Doors, they go in the desert and try taking peyote for a spiritual experience. A lot of artists in the ’60s and ’70s had a breakthrough moment where they wanted to go beyond the rock-and-roll lifestyle to seek out answers about their life, their art, and to open new avenues of creating. There’s something that makes me wonder, when I see artists calling their art meditation or such, if there’s some sense of integrity towards the commitment of what they want to translate. Is the song just another new take on something they did before or is there a real interest to do something meaningful?

I’m sharing this because if you hit a wall with the music making, it might be directly related to a part of yourself that is either hungry for something more, or experiencing revulsion towards the repeating patterns that aren’t providing answers to your current needs. One doesn’t need a change but if your drive to create has hit a wall, then perhaps it’s time to try something else. Because you are an artist and we create just like we breathe.

How to reinvent yourself artistically has been covered on this blog in the past, as well as how to start a new song. I’m not going to cover those again, but I can share how to approach music in these difficult times, when facing stress or a feeling like abandoning it all.

What are you listening to? Connect with the new audience.

A lot of artists find inspiration in clubs and touring. Without that kind of energy in context, it doesn’t mean that music is dead, it’s just transposed. It’s been really difficult to explain to people that have never been in club to relate to the experience of loud music because that same music, out of context, is often very bizarre and sometimes, pointless. But there are other options. You can make the same kind of music for when these events will return, but you could also take the time to make music that is not aimed at those contexts. What makes an artist mature is the depth he/she has. If your music is one-dimensional, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Many of the best artists will have different monikers to explore other avenues and I would say that it’s strongly encouraged to work on different types. Start by listening to a lot of music, perhaps more than you usually do.

Focus on the effortless.

Effortlessness seems to make some people feel uncomfortable. There’s a general attitude out there that great music was made through countless hours of work. Well, yes and no. If you think that you need to work a lot to sharpen your skills, yes, that demands resilience, motivation, curiosity and a lot of discipline. That is where the hard work is. But to record a song…this is where you put to practice your acquired skills and when you compose, that should be effortless. The whole aspect of post-production, editing, arranging endlessly and click-click-clicking your music to perfection isn’t, in my book, the real deal. It’s the rabbit hole of perfection grasping attempt that kills the original, pure and raw idea. I’m more interested in ideas than perfect production. In many cases, over-produced music ages really badly.

To get into “effortless music-making”, prepare for future projects by sketching out a lot of ideas, but mostly musical ones without much of anything supportive. Start a lot of projects, make loops and motifs, build presets, macros, collect some as well. A part of that means to also put away productivity and focus on spending time making music and not finishing anything. Think of guitar players who just play with their guitar without making a song. They’ll just play whatever they just feel coming.

Collaborate, talk, and connect.

How much time do you spend talking about your music? I don’t mean plugins and techniques, but ideas, emotions, and what you are trying to share. Do you reach out to other artists and share how you feel about their music or what it gives you as imagery?

Talking about music in general is pure fuel for imagination. The idea of putting words to the abstraction of sounds is a way of getting closer to understanding techniques and helping you having more precision on whatever you want to do. If you can explain it, you’ll understand it more. Plus the idea of sharing with another artist is a way of also getting technical feedback on parts that remain obscure and confusing.

One of the things I used to do, and still love doing, is to invite a few people to share our favourite music of the moment with one another, listening actively, commenting, getting lost in it. This is for musicians, quite a critical activity as the idea of how others perceive music is a very essential understanding of what people are looking for in the music, just as much as what is the music they’re willing to listen and share. This should fill up your references and study for future projects.

Making a collaborative playlist on streaming sites allows you to be also more connected. That’s the beauty of streaming even though it gets a lot of hate. Plus in time of Covid, this is possible even remotely.

Improving Your Workflow to Prevent Decision Fatigue

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What makes on 30-minute block of music making painful versus some other 30-minute block where everything flows organically? The choices you make can make a huge difference in how you use energy. If you use all your energy in the first 30 minutes of a session, you likely faced too many decisions and ran out of gas.

This overwhelming feeling often comes about when you’ve worked on a loop and mess around with arrangements for a moment before getting discouraged. You’re pretty much burning your brain out and then expect a second wind, but that doesn’t happen right away so easily.

What I’ll advocate throughout this post is a reminder of multiple things explained on my blog that push people to dive into music production and thrive in how they make music instead of being stuck. Strategies to facilitate an easier flow of your music-making are fairly easy, too.

Let’s dive right into the 5 different prerequisites to reach a state of flow.

  1. Risk
  2. Novelty
  3. Complexity
  4. Unpredictability
  5. Pattern recognition

One of the things that I didn’t list here which is important to focus on is the intention to spend a moment making something you know well. By venturing too deeply into something that is difficult (something that is, however, sometimes necessary for self-education), you’re acquiring some new information and achieving a good state of flow is not possible. Once you’ve learned a new concept/theory by practicing it multiple times, you’ll get good at it.

Hence the importance of making yourself:

  • Start a lot of new projects.
  • See most of your songs as lessons where you practice. Forget the aim to create masterpieces or to release all of your songs.
  • Spike time where you actively rehearse something you love doing.

When I teach music production, I explain to people that I can teach them everything their DAW can do, but then they’d sit in front of their computer with the idea of making a song and they’d be lost. The approach I encourage is to start by creating a strong base and then modulating each new skill into lessons. The idea is to focus on what’s useful to get from A to B in order to go to C and not try to go from A to Z in one shot.

A strong base means that you know some essentials, but beyond that, you know what you enjoy doing and what you seem to do naturally.

Once this is set and clear, we can approach the first take in my list above—taking risks. To know what taking a risk means, you need to be at ease with something. By risk-taking, I mean to try something in a different way. This can’t be really done if you can’t do the thing first. For example, you can’t take beat programming risks if you don’t know the basics of how your sequencer works (well, you can actually, but just diving in, chances are, your beat may come out with too much risk).

What’s a Risk in Music-Making?

Is it trying a new technique? Is it finishing a song? Is it learning a new software?

Let’s classify it as a single question: “What if?” This can and often imply a notion of risk. So let’s say you’re making loops, perhaps you can ask “what if I extend it to a whole minute instead of 2-bar loops?”

If you observe how we live, we often will do something we love doing and that usually is because we’re flowing in it; we don’t think—things just roll. You don’t have to make a lot of choices because you already know what you have to do. Taking a risk is a way of elevating what you’re doing a notch.

It’s a personal affair, and it’s something to be asked once in a while. But this gives rise to a second point which is novelty.

Self-Learning, Novelty & Complexity

Another thing I’ve been advocating for in past articles is the importance to see the majority of your music projects as lessons. A cycle I often notice is:

  1. Getting interested in a specific sound, aesthetic, idea, genre direction.
  2. Research and exploration on how to reproduce or imitate it.
  3. Struggle.
  4. Acknowledging a new concept.
  5. Practice and expression.
  6. Perfect it.

Each time I’m interested in something specific for music, I spend a lot of time trying to acquire the knowledge and techniques behind it. I spend a lot of time on YouTube on several How-tos, read some blogs and forums, and then test what I have. For instance, when I was obsessed with Dub Techno, I was searching a lot about it, which led me to acquire a lot of information about filters, reverb, chorus and delay, but also something I didn’t expect—noise. When you dig for information, you’ll find one thing you didn’t know or may not have been searching for, which is the novelty that is precious. In the state of flow, the exploration, in a context where you already feel comfortable but are on a quest of expanding, feeds you with a lot of creative energy that makes you get lost in what you do. But usually just before this happens, you’ll have a moment of struggle and it’s important to go over it to really get to the plateau of full creative force.

Once you practice and work on really handling a new skill, you’ll perfect what you do more and more. You’ll be more able to express yourself properly and eventually, you’ll want to perfect things. To get back to my example of Dub, I started to learn about delay techniques, tried many delay plugins and started understanding their personality and types. Same for reverbs, where I really got into plates and how they sound. The new trick I learned was about noise and started to get very much into the different types of noise: pink, white, blue, brown and red. Which then led me to get really interested in random generators, LFOs and modulation. Always adding a layer of information, precision and personality was a way to feed myself with novelty and complexity hand in hand. They’d play ping pong together.

Imperfection and Unpredictability

Choice fatigue roots in the quest of perfection. When you have more than two choices, you have a moment of not knowing. This clicked one day as I was reading a silly article that a lot of CEO in Silicon Valley will start the day with simplifying how they’d dress to make the least number of decisions possible. They’d have a work wardrobe of only a few things and they’d pick one without thinking. I find that flow starts with the yes-man attitude, as well as the why not. So it’s enemy would be a no, without trying.

Being in the flow, in a certain way, is almost the straight opposite of searching perfection. That is, you’re in the moment and you’re grasping something real and spontaneous. In a way, that is a form of perfection. When you begin searching for problems and feel doubtful about your work, I usually suspect you’re not in the flow, at all. You’re trapped in your analytical mind, the ones that questions and doubts. That part is really important much later, but I don’t give it too much importance in how to improve your flow.

A good routine for improving flow includes the following music-making tasks:

  • Explore, play, improvise.
  • Record everything.
  • Tweak to improve, not to perfect.
  • Consider the future of what was done. Release or not?

I find that I prefer to record 2 or 3 new songs instead of trying to give one a new life by working on it for 10 hours. I could even recycle the best part of a song that’s not working. Making more tracks makes you practice being more spontaneous but also more accurate in what you do, just like a DJ would get better at mixing, transitioning or doing tricks. As you go, your results need less polishing. For years, I left some imperfections in my work as I felt it was part of what made my music unique and human. It received a lot of positive comments and with time, if I listen to my older tracks, there will be things I don’t like, but I don’t know what was left there purposely or should be considered as a problem. That issue is itself, is part of the soul of the song.

As a mixing engineer, I do get in the zone as well. This is why my first mix of the day is crucial for the rest of the day. I usually start with all corrections, and try to do them in one shot, otherwise I start fixing stuff that clients like. I noticed that with time that if it works, don’t change it.

Now, unpredictability is something that feeds all the other ideas I’ve listed above that help to improve flow:

  • Taking risks by not knowing what will happen.
  • Discover new ideas you maybe have filtered out.
  • Making your routine more complex by including new items.

To me, adding a dose of unpredictability starts by making all your elements dynamic with your sounds and effects used. For EQs, I would make sure they’re dynamic (like the Pro-Q3). Compression is dynamic, but I’d link an LFO on the threshold. Adding LFOs, randomizers, and reacting envelopes to the incoming signal would make everything reactive, yet you never are really sure of where it’s going. This is partly explaining how people get addictive to modular synths because it’s all about modulation and unpredictability. A good way to check that is by trying VCV (free) or Softubes’ Modular that is a lot of fun. Reaktor is also an excellent platform to experiment.

Having separate sessions where you prepare an environment for making music is quite encouraged. By opening Ableton Live and launch a starting template that doesn’t take an hour to setup, you’re allowing yourself to be in the zone. Types of “setup” sessions include:

  • Sessions for setting up your future sessions. I’d encourage you to make themes instead of having templates that have all the bells and whistles.
  • Record sessions and sound design moments. These will be precious if you want to make music later.
  • Tweak, arranging and polishing sessions are helpful, but do them later.

The last aspect of improved workflow I’d like to discuss in more detail is pattern recognition—the moment where you realize that you’ve had a good or bad session, and are able to reconcile what happened in order to prepare the next session.

I like to tell my students that if you struggle in a session, it’s mostly because your preparation wasn’t adequate. If you struggle to arrange your session, start small…like, really small. Start from bottom to top: low end, percussion, mids, highs.

If you also fail to finish a jam, maybe you get distracted—a crucial thing to fix. Try to mute all notifications on your phone. Close social media, have snacks and water nearby. Avoid anything that can make your body and mind leave the moment to be elsewhere. If your session lasted at least 20 minutes, you’ve succeeded. Sometimes people feel sessions have to be long, but 20 minutes is sort of the key to get in the zone (unrelated, but this is also why I believe 1 hour DJ sets aren’t fair for the artist).

Personal Rules and Studio Attitude

  1. Be a yes-man to any idea that comes up until tried in context.
  2. Avoid maybes. It’s either a hell yes, or no. A maybe is a no, by default.
  3. Save all rejected ideas for future use.
  4. If it doesn’t feel good, stop everything. After a pause resume, or change tasks.
  5. If something feels like a lot of effort, take a pause and come back later.
  6. If you only have negative points of view, do something else.
  7. If an inner voice insists that you can’t do this or that (music-wise), I suggest you do it anyway to see what happens. Sometimes we stop ourselves from doing things that are creative.
  8. Collaborate as much as possible.
  9. Each session should have a session of listening before or after.
  10. Stay curious and open!

Let me know your experiences with decision fatigue and improving your own workflow!