My creativity is gone...

Try making a beat over acapellas/remixing a song. I've made a few beats that sounded just all right at first, but sounded totally refreshing as soon as vocals got laid down on it.

And yes, learn at least the basics of music theory. It might seem a little tedious at first, but if you really want to improve your beatmaking skills you'll slog through it.
 
Picassoo said:
Thanks salem, I understand what ur saying. But when I look at these top producers and trust me I study them, they dont have these "nano" type sounds. It sounds basic at the macro level but somehow they make it sound interesting. Thats what im confused on. I go on Youtube and I listen to these top producer instrumental and they sound so simple. People say the simplest beat are the best one. That is why im overwhelmed.
Thanks for the article too D-Funk
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You're misunderstanding. It's not small sounds, it's small details.

It's a painstakingly crafted pad in the background behind the chords which you don't notice.
It's ghost notes on the high hats that you can't quite hear.
It's compression settings on a lead instrument that a producer poured hours into.
It's vocals with meticulous fader-rides, and appropriate fader rides for the backing vocals as well.
It's vocal lines de-breathed, de-essed, and noise-gated manually.
It's LFOs, envelopes, and automation applied subtly to synth parameters to keep them from sounding "stale".
It's highly experienced producers, mixing engineers, and mastering engineers pushing themselves to the limits of their skills in order to make a track that hits your ear as "simple".

By the time you hear a Billboard producer's track, a bare minimum of three highly-skilled professionals have ruminated over every last subtlety and decided which things should be changed, and how.

If you're not hearing the subtle details, it doesn't mean that they're not there -- it means simply that you need to hear them. I would suggest a classical music appreciation class -- that'll get you accustomed to noticing the details in music.

-Ki
Salem Beats
 
Stuck? Work harder. Find workarounds. Collab. Youtube. Take a small break do something else. Then another night of hours staring at the screen mixing, arranging etcc.. Sure you will feel stuck. But keep on broadening your horizon.
If you give up after 2 hours thinking your beat or mix suck, then remember this:

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"Max Martin and writing-producing partner Rami use the same standards when they apply the musical cosmetics — mixing, polishing and layering vocals and instrumentation. "It's sick," says Martin Dodd, a longtime friend and head of A.-and-R. for record label Zomba Europe. "They'll stay up literally for three days just to get a drum sound right." Even then, songs don't always turn out as planned. With the mixing of Oops! ... I Did It Again, "after a week, Rami and I realized it sounded like shit," he says. "It didn't groove." So they scrapped it and went back to bar one. Two weeks of 18-hour-plus days later, the song was done. "It wasn't that we had an extreme deadline," Martin says. "That's just when you get psycho. That's when you get manic.""
(From Time magazines article Top of the pops)
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Wanna give up? Sure, patience isn't for everyone.
Wanna be good at it? Keep on mixing. For days/weeks/months/years. Learn and earn.
 
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Heyclown said:
Stuck? Work harder. Find workarounds. Collab. Youtube. Take a small break do something else. Then another night of hours staring at the screen mixing, arranging etcc.. Sure you will feel stuck. But keep on broadening your horizon.
If you give up after 2 hours thinking your beat or mix suck, then remember this:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Max Martin and writing-producing partner Rami use the same standards when they apply the musical cosmetics — mixing, polishing and layering vocals and instrumentation. "It's sick," says Martin Dodd, a longtime friend and head of A.-and-R. for record label Zomba Europe. "They'll stay up literally for three days just to get a drum sound right." Even then, songs don't always turn out as planned. With the mixing of Oops! ... I Did It Again, "after a week, Rami and I realized it sounded like shit," he says. "It didn't groove." So they scrapped it and went back to bar one. Two weeks of 18-hour-plus days later, the song was done. "It wasn't that we had an extreme deadline," Martin says. "That's just when you get psycho. That's when you get manic.""
(From Time magazines article Top of the pops)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wanna give up? Sure, patience isn't for everyone.
Wanna be good at it? Keep on mixing. For days/weeks/months/years. Learn and earn.
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+1 to that,

I'd double-like it if I could since your story featured Max Martin -- he has been relevant for longer than almost any other producer and has created some of the catchiest tunes in the last 15 years.

-Ki
Salem Beats
 
Haha sounds like what goes on during my mixing sessions. I agree a lot of time has to be put in to small details to get them "just right"
 
I seen you title your song "Drake type beat" and thats the problem. Your trying to copy someone else.

Creativity is about your own sound and your own flow.

Sit down with your music tools and relax. Just play around and have fun. Don't be so serious about it and the creative ideas will flow out with ease
 
Take lessons or teach yourself. A lot of things you can do in order to improve, so learning Piano and theory is one thing that is defiantely going to have a positive effect,
 
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inspiration

inspiration and creativity is a growth process. for most producers, when you start out, musical ideas don't come in abundance. this is because you have not yet trained yourself to design, visualize or realize music efficiently. the good news is the more you do this the faster, better and more efficient you become. you have only been producing for 2 months, studies show that it takes 10,000 hours of doing something to really be great at it. so doing the math: 5 days a week, for 8 hours a day for 2 months = 160 hours. so in theory you have 9,840 more hours to put into your craft. your personal drive cannot be artificially designed or created without true inspiration and motivation.

another thing to acknowledge is that beginners have not typically mastered the equipment they are using. once you know each of your tools inside and out your mind becomes a directory for ideas flow easier, realize faster and build efficiently. what i mean by this is it's hard to complete a composition when you are stuck looking for the sound you are hearing in your head.

now in answer to the question, in times of a creative lapse i go sound and drum hunting and drum kit building. [when i have a song in my head the last thing i want to do is build kits] so when i don't have songs in my head, naturally, i build kits and find sounds for when i'm feeling creative. this always helps and always does the trick for me.

another thing that helps in creativity loss is researching. whether it's learning about new mixing techniques, new plugins or vsti's, researching your craft is typically something that is non-creative but equally valuable.

listen to music. not with the intention of inspiring a new song, but with the intention of appreciating new types of music. having an open mind approach to all genres of music will give you a greater capacity for growth.
 
Start with some piano practice. If you´re not into chords, learn AM - F - C - G first. Those 4 are enough to many Hot 100 #1´s.
Now learn to play these or draw them into a piano roll in ways that sound interesting.

What is really demotivating is not being able to make the sound that you want to. And it can be hard to find the way around that obstacle. Because there are no shortcuts; nothing that brings you around that hurdle in 30 minutes, which seems to be the time new producers think it takes. When you finally has passed that hurdle and look back it´s not there any more. Rinse and repeat. And this race is so much longer than 110m.

There are 2-3 ways to come across those obstacles on your path to the sound you REALLY want to make but cannot yet. And those can be summed up in few words:

Collaborate, read articles (forums/youtube), work hard.

Also; try to remake songs. It´s a great way to develop your craft. But be warned; remake a good production from scratch is hard too and it takes a lot of skills and knowhow. But thats how we all learned. By covering ground, painstakingly slow. For every step you learn something.
 
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Work with other musicians and get them to play on your stuff. It will open up your mind to new ideas. Being a producer doesn't mean you have to play everything on the record. Also look into sampling different types of songs
 
Salem Beats said:
Small, gradual changes had added up to make a huge difference.
Your listeners don't become acclimated to all of the tiny changes you make -- they hear the sum total of each of them, all at once. As the producer, you take my perspective, and need to realize that every "cookie" missing is going to add up to a big difference down the road.
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this is exactly what i needed to read right now, thank you :)
 
Picassoo said:
So far ive been producing for 2 months, this is my latest beat.my problem is that i feel like my creativity is slowly fading away. I don't know if im lacking ideas because honestly, i dont know anything about music theory or piano, i sometimes go on youtube and see how other beats are made but it doesn't help me. I'm wondering how do these top producers make such a high quality beat without losing any ideas? I feel like I've used up all my ideas and when i try to make a beat, it sounds repetitive or not interesting anymore. What do you guys, or these top producers do in order to have unlimited of creative ideas? How can i improve as a producer other than making beats on FL? Because making beats is only going to get you so far that, even though there is so much to learn. What should i do? Trust me I've rest my ears and i still cant get anything to kick in.
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I sorry but I don't believe that this is a real post.
 
Picassoo said:
What should I do to in order to slowly improve? Learning piano and theory?
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Music theory has nothing to do with creativity.

Music theory will just help you to break down music into details so you can have more control over things like emotion and how you want a song to sound. It's real good if you want to get into other genres.

Creativity is all about zoning out/spacing out. Spacing out works for me every single time if i want to get creative.
 
creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes, art is knowing which ones to keep - scott adams

My point: you can't make mistakes if you don't why they are mistakes in the first place

Zoning out is not a part of creativity, it is a cop-out, an abnegation and abrogation of responsibility.

You might as well say "I get drunk and let the muses guide my hand and mind where they may" which is what the Greeks did for a long time, even though their artists and playwrights knew that this was only half true at best - that they needed to understand form and line, language and meaning if they were to successfully craft anything that came close to being a lasting work of art - and a complete lie at worst.

Any theory of music is a tool that can be used to unpack existing works or to scaffold new works. By theory here, I mean anything that you use to understand what it is that you do, not necessarily what is written in books and websites the world over.
 
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Music theory can be a form of creativity sure. But the creativity I'm talking about is a lot more abstract and fulfilling.

Saying zoning out while making music is copping out of responsibilities is going way off topic.

Good luck to the OP in whatever he wants to do. Music theory and creativity. Probably can't have one without the other really.
 
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