BlogThere is no single method or secret ingredient in the process for making good music. Things like years of experience and lots of familiarity with any given songwriting process can be just as beneficial—or detrimental—as sitting down with an instrument without much musical training. Because every songwriter’s process is a complex mosaic of things like natural musical intuition, experience, and musical philosophy, pinpointing and imitating what songwriting approaches prop up great music isn’t always helpful or even possible to do.
Why Taste Is Vital For Creating Meaningful Music
How To Mix Music: Getting Started With Mixing
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There’s no right or wrong way to approach mixing, but there are some workflow basics that can help you be more productive at the process.
This guide to mixing is for the producer who struggles with what to do when tasked with a mix, or for anyone who wants to be a professional mixer one day.
In this first post of the series, we take a look at four steps you can take to prepare for a mix.
What Gives A Song Its Value?
Asking what makes a song valuable in 2018 seems sort of silly. With music streaming and video platforms displaying listener stats in real time, one doesn’t have to look much further than that to see whether a piece of music is valuable or not, right? If your metric for a song’s success is purely based off of how many times it’s bought, listened to, or downloaded, then no. But what makes a song valuable, in my opinion, is much deeper and more complex than what can be quantified with numbers. To figure out what makes music valuable, listeners and musicians alike need to look past the numbers.
How Musicians Can Come Together To Create Momentum For Their Music
There’s no doubt that today’s music industry is fiercely competitive. Because an insane amount of new music comes out each and every day, it makes sense that musicians often adopt a winner-takes-all mentality when it comes to promoting and advocating for their work. But rather than fighting each other and entertaining jealousy when another artist’s music succeeds, musicians should be working together to create momentum for their work.
5 Steps To Writing Better Lyrics
Writing good lyrics is a difficult craft to master, and with every generation of brilliant lyricists, it seems to become harder to follow in the footsteps of the greats. But every great lyricist started somewhere – and becoming a good lyricist, like any other craft, is the result of study and lots of practice. Here are five of the best practices to get you writing better lyrics today.
The Single Vs Album Dilemma
The idea of a band focusing their energy on writing and releasing singles instead of an EP or album wasn’t taken seriously a decade ago, but it’s now a strategy that countless artists are adopting. But while pumping out single after single has its advantages, something gets lost when a band throws its energy into writing a song or two at a time instead of an entire album.
So, what’s the best decision for you? Here are a couple of good questions to ask to find out if you should write a single vs an album:
Why Honesty Is Important In Songwriting
Faking it is something we’re sometimes told to do that will help us be successful in music, and there’s definitely some truth there. Getting up on stage and performing takes a lot of bravery for some musicians, and when they don’t feel brave, acting like they do is the next best thing. But when it comes to writing music that actually means something, honesty has to be at the core of your process. No, this doesn’t mean you need to sit through an hour of therapy before you write music, but it does entail coming to terms with who you are and how you really feel about the world around you in order to write engaging music.
Why You Should Finish Writing All Of Your Songs
Songwriting can be frustratingly unpredictable. You might write for six hours and come up with nothing memorable one day and come up with something incredible the minute you sit down the next. But believe it or not, songwriters are best off pursuing all their ideas, even the ones they think won’t go anywhere. Musicians risk cutting themselves off from opportunities to develop good ideas when they’re too rigid about their own creative processes, and one of the best ways to combat this is by following through on finishing all of your songs.