What revelations or ‘aha moments’ took your music to the next level?

Don’t rely on analog synths or any hardware or software at all.
If you song does not work with the least possible amount of gear or plugins you should change your song.

And: Don’t expect that your friends or family appreciate your music. Your partner too. They might be annoyed.

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Discovering MIDI and all it’s possibilities some years ago!

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Learning not to be too precious about what you’ve made even if it took ages.

If you’re spending lots of time trying to make a part fit in a track then you should probably just delete (or save for later use in something else) and move on.

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This is very good advice! :slight_smile: I’m struggling to apply it, but it’s always good when I actually do. Learning to kill darlings is the way to go!

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I think it’s Arca who said that if a track doesn’t come out in less than 30 minutes, he would trash it and start over. No save.

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I learned to keep it simple but with a good amount of variation. The more drastic the variations the better. The negative space is as important as the positive space in music.

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Less is more, for sure. If it ain’t swinging with like 4 parts no amount of production will help it.

Also Randomize is an extremely useful tool, but not a crutch.

Play the parts don’t program them.

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I’m confronted with this a lot in my current project. There’s tracks that I manage to whip out very easily, but they either have little jamability or completely miss the atmosphere of the whole project. Always a bit hard to move these tracks or loops to the scraps, but it’s necessary for the greater good I guess.
Recycling and processing - eq, reverb, saturation, delay, etc. - these segments and incorporating them back into the correct tracks again always helps. There’s a reason these things grooved so well in the first place, so why not use this creative energy again.

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  1. Printing to audio, instead of using midi data from the daw. Helps move things along and you commit to the audio tracks. If it’s all midi, you tend to change the sounds too often and get stuck.

  2. Less is more (still learning this day by day) letting the track breathe

  3. Using A / B sections with different notation and structure. I used to just mute things and add things for A / B sections, but changing the actual notation at times adds a ton of variation.

  4. Picking a scale and sticking to it

  5. Real-time recording glitch edits (stutters / rolls) on a separate track. Before I would try to automate the vst within the daw and it always gave different results

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I keep a huge folder of these misfits. I also write down bpm, type of part (stab, drums, pad, arp, etc.), and a brief description of mood/feel. Great resource to sift through when another more fully-formed track needs more ingredients. With Ableton it’s so easy to drag and drop these tracks into other song files.

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That’s interesting. I never print to audio until I’m absolutely happy with the structure. I never really change the sound of a midi part though, as I normally play it because of the way it works with a specific sound, but part of my arrangement process is editing and deleting any notes that are surplus to requirements. That’s the “Less is more” part. :wink:

I guess my revelation was to save multiple iterations of a song in progress and to not be afraid of hacking away parts of it, even if it was the original melody. Some of my tunes I like best bear almost no relation to how they started.

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Less is more
Less is mor
Less is mo
Less is m
Less is
Less i
Less
Les
Le
L

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I’ll be happy with the structure before I print. Plus I’m able to multi track record all-in-one take so I still do have the ability to hack away at certain portions. If I go too much in the box with my daw, I find it to saps my creativity. I see your approach would have more control though.

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To me and available on Hardware and Software :
Chance (%) parameter, Lfo modulate Lfo rhythmically, Polyrhythm, When I learn Music Theory especially to go further than one finger chords and combining Real Chord progressions (7th / 9th) with My Sound Synthesis… Granular Synthesis on voice, Vocoder on Drum Loops in the harmony of the track.

think and really think about what I want to do: me as electronic music. Without revolutionizing things but doing only what I like, with the sounds I like. I think it’s already pretty good to know what you want to do… There’s so much people overwhelming by music genre or listening complaints like YouTube comments - I guess the first thing for an artist or a musician is never listen what people said… At the moment you understand everyone can find it’s own public you learn a lot and you evolve a lot.

caliber and create what people are waiting for and that’s the end …
(At least that’s what I think…)

the problem is often : self-confidence and lack of work
Also, it must comes from your heart and your soul.

Edit: Perhaps I have offended few people… I threw this thought like this, it might require to be developed more than that. (maybe) listen what’s objective and “choose” to put aside what’s subjective and matter to taste

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Paint in the sand; Turn (temporary) blind when you’re done. Repeat until RIP.

Edit. Added nuance :checkered_flag:

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Revelations:

Having “stuff” doesn’t matter - hardware is fun but not necessary
Ableton Live can really do it all
Better producers have/are doing more with less
Distortion and saturation are your friends
It’s OK to break any and all rules
Turn the volume down

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This was my a-ha moment. I had been using NI Battery 3 & 4 and Maschine for years until buying a dedicated drum machine. The first time I loaded an Abbey Road Drum loop sample into RYTM and played with the Fine Tune setting - it instantly sounded just like a record. With each incremental fine tuning adjustment of the Abbey Roads drum sample loop, RYTM’s analog kick would breathe and pound in different ways. The sound of the track can morph from funk, break, hip-hop to rave and hardcore techno without changing the BPM or sample loop.

I never use to tune or pitch drums (or given it any thought), as I relied on sound selection, velocity, swing, and eq filters to fit drums together. It worked for me, but only by chance. Now, I love to make the drums sing and talk to one another as part of the storytelling of the song. Once I’m able to get the other analog drum sounds in tune with the pitched sample drum loop to where they’re all talking/singing back and forth, I can make a choice to either keep or discard the sample loop altogether. If you get it just right, it allows you thin-out notes from your bass line or other melodic parts as it’ll all begin to blend. This particular tip has made music-making easy, fast, and fun for me.

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Less is more
Less is mor
Less is mo
Less is m
Less is
Less i
Less
Les
Le
L
I
.

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Repetition works.
Repetition works.
Repetition works.
Repetition works.
Repetition works.
Repetition works.
Repetition works.
Repetition works.

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when i understood nobody cares

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