Creation & Legacy
I was told by a successful business man that three F's are, "Family, Friends & Fools!" Make sure you dodge family, friends & fools when you're wanting an honest opinion. I know my mum thinks everything I do is great but if you really want an honest opinion, chuck it onto Soundcloud, throw it onto Facebook and let the people decide if they like it or not!
Breaks are really really important, no matter what kind of art form you're doing! It's important to take a break. What happens if you keep working and working and working, especially in music production is that you don't start to hear things how they really are. So make sure every 2-3 hours, walk out of the studio, go get a drink, come back and you're going to hear it with fresh ears!
If you need to ask this question, then it probably isn't! It's something that you really need to be doing everything because there's just so many people doing it! It's a lot of a fun and if you love it, then you don't need to question yourself! A lot of people ask me, "I don't know if it's my passion!?" then I promise you, it's not! You do it everyday because you love it, you definitely don't do it for the money!
There are no limits! Although this may seem incredibly obvious, you'd be surprised! People are always asking, "What is the right thing to do?" Yes, there are generic things you should do but there are also various things you should just try. You might make up your own sound or you might make up your own FX. Don't limit yourself to what you think is right, when I first started I tried everything! Give it a shot, open the plugins, press buttons, turn knobs!
It's really really important and detrimental to your success and your progress. You need to support yourself with like minded people who like what you're doing and who encourage you to do it and also you'll find that they'll really inspire you to move forward and push yourself even further. That is probably one of my number one tips! If you don't have the right click with the people who are doing what you're doing then get out there and find them!
You got to be patient guys, its takes a lot of time and many many hours, we always no matter what kind of art form that we're doing, want to be ahead of time, we need to make sure we really enjoy the process and enjoy the journey. You're going to look back on where you came from, the most important thing is to be patient, not get frustrated. Music production is just something that takes time and you're going to look back and realise how far you've come! Stick at it guys!
Now this is something that takes a lot of time. First if you have a full time job, you probably need to quit it. I'm not saying it's quit everything! It's still good to have a bit of income coming from different sources, basically you just need to put yourself out there. You're going to find that you're going to work with people at your level, there's no need to stress that you're not good enough. Just tell people where you're at and be 100% honest, the best thing is to just start collaborating. Even if you charge, $20, $50 or $100 to start with, at least you're making a little bit of money and learning along the process. So chuck an ad up on Gumtree, or on Fiver, Airtasker or Facebook, put the word out there and I guarantee good things will happen! That's my quick tip of the day! (Also... check out Soundbetter, a platform that is now just for Music producers, mix engineers, artists, singers, songwriters and so on!)
This is something that takes quite a while to do and the only way to really establish your own sound is to discover as many sounds as you possibly can. You need to make sure that you're consistently experimenting and playing with different synthesizers (or samples), whether it's hardware or software synths and experiment with different sounds. That is the only way you're going to find what you like and in time you develop a sound that is just your sound because no one is going to like exactly what you like!
My quick tip of the day is a 5 minute beat challenge, I want you guys to time yourself and try and make a beat in 5 minutes, this is really going to encourage you to just use your intuition and not overthink things. I've done this with all my students as well. 5 minutes, make a beat, 7 days a week! Pick your best one and send it to me!
So we really want to start understanding EQ by understanding the numbers below, 200hz, 500hz, 1khz, up to 20,000khz. If you can understand this lingo, any plugin that you open and that has EQ and that's probably most of them, it's going to make it much easier for you to know what's going on and to get a better understanding of how to sculpture and use additive EQ, as well as reductive EQ!
Now this is a pretty complicated topic but I'll try and sum it up! There's musical compression and there's technical compression. Musical compression basically adds saturation and adds colour to the sound that you're using. LA2A, 1176.Technical compression is basically squashing the dynamic range, it doesn't add any saturation or colour, it's just merely compression. If you want to understand a bit more about compression, I'd love you to get in touch and I'd be more than happy to explain it to you.
So what do I mean by creating your own lane? I basically mean that even though we all feel like we are competing, you're not really competing with anyone else! Only YOU can do it the way that YOU do it! If you practise and put in the hours, you're naturally going to be the best at what you do! I guarantee, just put in the work and be patience and you will get there!Music production is repetition mixed with the hours that you put in and if you really love it, then who's counting anyway right? I can tell you this, it's worth it!