› THIS POST IS LONG ‹
› LONGER THAN I PLANNED IT TO BE ‹
So recently I’ve recently been getting the feeling that I’m either hitting, or about to hit a plateau in my music production, and was hoping I could get some advice or direction from people more experienced than myself.
I suppose I’ll start with a quick rundown of my musical background to establish my skills, and knowledge, and then I’ll move onto the main question.
So here goes:
I started out playing electric guitar age 17 when I started college. I attended a small music school for about 2 months, and was learning basic theory and technique, standard beginner stuff. But then a recession hit, and the school had to be closed. With no other schools in the area that I knew of, I was left stuck. Regardless I kept on playing. However I foolishly dropped the theory and just stuck to playing covers of other peoples songs. I got quite good and was moderately alright at picking things up by ear. However I still never tried to write my own stuff, and on the rare occasions that I did I would create melodies and chords from simple moving around the fretboard till something fit. I would always struggle to advance these melodies beyond a few bars, and I couldn’t for the life of my begin to match chord progressions together beyond the basic cheesy sounding stuff that a typical beginner would do.
I have been kicking myself ever since for not sticking with the theory.
I played like this for about 7 years on and off. Never joined any bands. Never recorded any material. Just played to pass the time.
Across those 7 years I enjoyed all kinds of musical genres in that time. I started to dip into jazz a bit. Some Charles Mingus, a bit of Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Snarky Puppy etc. I liked the variety in the sound, the complexity of the some pieces, and the simplicity of others. It seemed like they could do anything and everything with melody and percussion. The jazz led me into some downtempo jazz influence trip-hop, Amon Tobin, Bonobo, lots of Ninja Tune artists.
Still no music creation though.
Move on another year or two and I’m listening to Autechre, Plaid. Complete alien sounds of godliness that stuff was to me. I didn’t even know what a synthesizer was let alone that it existed. Got really into that. Couldn’t get enough. Kept listening and listening.
But still no music creation,.
Until about May 2015.
Summer starts, college year ends. About to head away and get a job somewhere away from home. Then my dad falls from a ladder and breaks both his wrists. So I take over his job full time till they heal. 10 weeks of full on farming. So here I am at home, working on a farm in rural Ireland, with no-one around and nothing to do. So I figure I’ll give music a go, I’d been playing guitar seven years surely I could make something. So I opened up Garageband [don’t laugh], and then for the next 10 weeks just kinda tried my best to see what I could do.
Needless to say the result was nothing, I couldn’t do anything very good a all. I made 1 trip-hop song that looped a 4 bar pattern of bongos, kicks, snares, and a plucked bass. And about 20 other other attempts at songs that only ever made it to about a minute each in length.
Eventually summer ends, my Dad’s back to work. I’m back to college. And all music stops.
A college year passes it’s June 2016. College ends. Summer starts. I download the trial version of Renoise, and spend a month trying to figure it out.
And that’s what I’ve been doing every since. In a few days it’ll be 7 months since I started with Renoise, and with consistent music production.
Across those 7 months I learned a lot in a short space of time. Too much nearly, because I think I forgot half of it but anyway, point is I progressed.
Now I went over all the things I made in the last 7 months today, and I’ve made about 10 or so fully finished songs, and dozens of half finished ones. The first three - four months weren’t very productive and the tracks never got much further than a wonky drum beat, and a bad synth line. Around Sept things started to see a marked improvement. Beats become more complicated, and melodies become slightly more interesting but still quite basic. Oct see’s improvement again. Beats become more refined, construction of percussive rhythm gets better, the basic melodies begin to groove better as a result of better drum programming, sound design is getting more complex and interesting, but the melodies are still basic, quite uninteresting.
Roll on Nov. I have 12 songs; 6 are finished, 2 are semi-finished, 4 were started in the last week. A big leap up in productivity. Drum programming is now my best asset, I can work fast, and create rhythms I imagine in my head better than I could before. Melodies have become a bit more complex but only due to the application of employing chance and randomness to their construction. They are still bland, lack character and don’t create a strong hook. Sound design is up from Oct due to more experimentation. Mixing has gotten better to.
Overall still improving.
––––––––
And so that’s about where I’m at right now. It’s been a slow upwards curve of progression. But I’ve still a long way to go.
The question stills remains though? What should I do next to keep improving.
Clearly my complete lack of music theory is a hindrance to my music. Not knowing what I’m doing means I have no real control over what direction I want my music to progress in, and stifles my creativity. Jazz musician likes Mingus, and Davis have a strong knowledge of music theory, and their music benefits from it in that they can create complex evolving melodies that not only twist and change constantly but are unique, interesting and catchy.
But at the same time I don’t want to devote all my time to melody and in turn neglect developing skills in other areas. There’s so much to learn in regards to audio and sound design that I want to delve into as well. I’ve got a copy of Curtis Rhoads: The Computer Music Tutorial which is about 1200 pages long and crammed full of stuff to learn. So that has enough to keep me busy for a long, long time. But in the end will it really help my compositional skills?
So what do you think I should do?
Focus more on the musical theory, and improve compositionally first, allowing the technical end to follow?
Or focus on the technical end first, and let the musical theory follow?
If anyone wants to share their own personal experiences of what worked for them, or a rundown of their own progression over their musical careers. That’d be great.
Thanks for reading all that as well. I know it was long, I hadn’t intended it to be so.
