Making Beats: Does Practice Really "Make Perfect?"

[61Key]

The cominator is like fl layer too me, i love fl layer, but some of my best beats were in reason, i made about 6 hot tracks that i still have from reason.. Iv used sonar and made some of my first beats with that, they are actually impressive... Cubae I made some hard ass beats, got people making songs out of em and shit. but i have made the most beats with FL and thats the program I have the most practice with i guess you can say. i have used hardware drum machines and keyboards in cubase with fl rewired all playing at once through the mixer. this was in a corner in my room along time ago. im back on fl and i love it, im never going back to anything else. i feel like an exspert (but still learning tricks here and there) I really think my time away has made me a beast in my own lane.

Wait a minit. gotta scroll up and re-read.. what are we talking about here? lol

oh yeah, ok.

Anyways, I have downsized so much, sold everything except the laptop hooked to 2 screen monitors and wireless keybard/mouse. two studio monitor speakers, an audio interface midi keyboard.... not much at all, and a few good plugins, and few trusty drum kits that I have for over 10 years now. yep.

STICK TO YOUR GUNS! i lost track what im talking about lol Reason was fun though.

---------- Post added at 10:57 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:55 PM ----------

EDIT: actually first beats were on playstation, you could sample on it and everything LOL just throwin that in real quick.
I'm a proud mouse clicker!

[Trackanometry]

Practice definitely makes perfect, you learn to produce higher quality sounds and make your beats sound more professional. You slowly learn what sounds good and what doesn't. Your mind will automatically start to come up with better melodies, chords etc..... I can tell you this because I have been trying to learn techniques for past 1.5 years because my beats used to suck and I could never come up with any good ideas. And after listening to loads of different instrumentals from different sorts of producers, listening to different types of music, learning how to sample and watching beat making videos, I have definitely improved. I will link you my Soundcloud one day after I upload my recent beats, and when you listen through my beats you will see how much I have improved through practice. I have not necessarily reached the perfection stage yet tho, but I will.

I agree with this.. Been practicing new chords, scales, & learning how to make new sounds. Just learning something new each day and practicing helps tremendously for me.

[SwagProductionz]

Yes practice makes perfect... no producer sounds as bad as they did when they first started.

[Traxx1]

You can practice all day long making "beats" but if you don't know the theory behind music... you'll peak at making "bangaz" and be stuck and be limited in creativity.

You'll be a lot like me... stuck at "That sounds good..." but not really fulfilled because you don't really know what the hell you're doing.

You'll really be just mimicking what you like. You won't be able to just do some Scott Storch freestyle type ish.

It's like a person that plays football on a Xbox vs. a person that plays football on a real team. Xbox guy doesn't really know how to play football in real life. He probably can't catch, probably can't take a real hit, probably is clumsy. Guy on the football team knows how to brace himself for a hit, probably has caught 1,000's of passes and works on his coordination.

Making Bangaz (with Arps and ish) = Xbox Football Guy
Making Music Freely = Real Football Team Guy

Practice will make you better but only to a certain point if you don't continue to "learn".

Now me... I'm pretty content with being the dude making "bangaz"... because I'm too lazy to really learn music. I'm the "that sounds good" guy. No amount of practice will get me past where I'm at unless I start learning chords, scales and "alla dat".

I agree that there is a tremendous amount of value in learning music theory, but where making beats is concerned, I'd say its a toss up between learning theory and just knowing what sounds good (subject to opinion) and mastering some software. Nowadays, If you've got "good ears" and your software game is right, you can make some ish that will even make scott storch bob his head....without any formal music theory knowledge.

[RubeCube]

Making a great beat is no different than writing a great song. You need to be a musician at heart. You need to be able to play an instrument, understand music theory etc. You can go far with "feel" and "knowing what sounds good", but music production is like any other profession - you need to really know your stuff to be the best.

Too many guys who get into producing get caught up with the image of a "beatmaker" and they focus on everything but the actual skill behind producing. Guys like Chad Hugo, Storch, Pharrell, Rotem etc are all highly skilled musicians and they were fans of music and musicians before they became rap producers.

No one would try and start a rock band, jazz band or perform in an orchestra if they didn't know how to play an instrument, so why should rap production be any different?

[BiggRome 2.0]

I bought this to avoid learning music theory...

ChordPulse - Practice. Improvise. Compose.

You can resize everything...

It doesn't feel "natural" but you just make your progression and export it to .mid, then you import that midi file into your DAW and slap some vst instrument on it. It exports the parts you create separately so you could end up with a complete song with one click.

I normally just duplicate the channels and change the octaves of some of the instruments and alter some of the midi in the duplicated channels.

It feels like sampling so I don't really do it often. Pretty useful tool though.

I have this too... it does the same thing...

Cognitone Music Prototyping

I have this also... it does the same thing...

Chordbot - Introduction

Got this too... and guess what... it does the same thing....

EasyBand Studio | Musicians, Play!

Chordbot and Easy Band are phone apps.

... so many ways to cheat and crank out songs now.... when you have the time.

I buy "something" almost every payday... just for the hell of it. Nothing expensive though.

[Pumpthrust]

You forgot about iRealB for iOS and Android. This is my weapon right here.
You can build chord progressions in it and hear how they sound. Not only that, you can download over 1300+ songs to it for FREE. Its like sampling, but instead of raw audio, you can snatch the chords to any tune you can find for it. Almost anyone doing jazz music uses it for learning tunes fast. You can transpose tunes on the fly as well as see the roman numerals for each chord. Y'all niggas sleepin'.

[F00T]

The "Ten Year/10,000" hours to be a professional rule is real....just think of the all of the schooling for various professions that require 8+ years of higher education. Not to mention most really great athletes have played since pre-adolescence.

Was reading an article, about why great athletes fumble the win in clutch moments. Their years of practice train them to do every bit of the game subconciously, mindlessly and fluidly regardless of the situation, but when one is aware of what's on the line they start to over-think their movements and negate those years of practice. The analogy was how you're a great dancer when noone is watching but as soon as you're in front of people you overthink the movements and look clumsy.

Those years of experimenting and making wack to mediocre beats has trained you to subconciously know what notes and sounds go together in any situation so that when it's time to make bangers on a regular basis, there isn't much thought. You just do it.

For further proof:



Now this isn't to say you need LSD to do great things, but he stayed in the moment. He didn't think about his pitching skills at any point.


Great *insert skill* never come out of the moment.

[ManoHD]

The term practice makes perfect is incomplete.

Perfect practice make perfect is more correct.

You can keep practicing and practicing, but if you don't practice correctly you won't get to or take a really long time to get to where you want to be.

[bandcoach]

Practice makes it perfect is an impossibility, what you wrote

Perfect practice makes it perfect is even more impossible

I offer again

Practice prevents piss poor performance

and that can relate to anything whether it is in business, sports, music or life (I enjoy practicing some things more than others; nudge nudge wink wink)