Music Production

This approach draws inspiration from practising classical piano:

• When practising, it is not beneficial to repeat an entire piece;
• Rather, you pick a small section and practise it until it is second nature;
• Only when each chunk is second nature do you start gluing the chunks together.

The thinking here is that:

1. what you repeat, you remember and
2. the more you repeat it, the more you remember it.

Thus we want to take an aspect of producing a track, such as pads, or chord progressions, or arrangement, and aim to maximise how much of our practice time is spent on that aspect. Thus we arrive at the idea that:

1. Pick an aspect, which I'll call the chosen aspect;
2. Cheat for everything else. Use stems, use construction kits, use presets, whatever saves time.
3. Do not cheat at the chosen aspect.

A thought here, again inspired by a classical instrument, is that the results of your practice, in the sense of the sound you produce, is discarded: nobody hears your practice, it is not recorded, so it is lost to time. Every time you want to make music with your classical instrument, you have to play it. We want to replicate that with music production.

So the idea is that

1. you spend as much time as possible on your chosen aspect, with the aim of doing many repetitions of the thing you want to learn and
2. you spend as little time as possible on everything else.

On the other hand, often it is a good idea to actually produce a track. Hence:

1. Cheat at all aspects before your chosen aspect
2. Perform your chosen aspect diligently
3. Cheat or do a rough job with what's left The idea is that it is second nature to go through the whole process of creating a track, and ending up with a product at the end. Now it doesn't have to be any good: it is the process that matters, not the end result. Once you are used to the discipline of going through the whole process, you can start refining the many aspects that go into it.

Examples:

1. If you don't want to practise arrangement, you could start with stems of an existing track, so that the arrangement is already given. Thus no time is taken.
   1. So instead of spending the time on an arrangement, that time can instead be spent practising your chosen aspect.
   2. You could knock together an arrangement with construction kits, once, and reuse that arrangement many times.
2. If you're working on sound design:
   1. Deconstruct existing presets
   2. Come up with general recipes:
      1. A few recipes for common bass patches;
      2. A few recipes for pads and leads
   3. Once you have general recipes, and can perform them from memory, work on refining them by adding more subtle aspects.
   4. So at first you want to have the rough sketch process practised: produce a pluck in under a minute, or a pad, and then go with it and make a track. You can then learn from how it doesn't work.

If you're not working on sound design, use presets. When you are focussing on sound design, the idea then is to

Remember: the results of your practice are a bi-product, and the learning is the main product. If you produce something good enough to share, great, share. If not, not a problem. If you learn, even better, as that is the main objective; if you don't learn, that is a problem to be rectified.

The idea, so far as the ultimate goal is concerned, is that eventually all the many aspects of producing a track will be second nature. Once this is achieved, and you have an efficient workflow, and you are familiar with all the bits of your software and hardware that you use, nothing interrupts your creative flow.