What are YOUR best tips?

Epsilon-144

Musician and Producer
Share your tips with the rest of us. What have you learned that has helped you develop as a producer. Let's try to make a collection of these tips from the FutureProducer.com users. It'll be like our collection of tips for helping everyone who visits this website. These tips can be anything about music and/or production.
(If I can edit this first post, I'll start building a list of tips (with your user name, and tip). ...)

For me,

1. Don't rush a song
2. Don't overuse the good parts

I think an important tip is not rushing a project, when you're learning. Once you have the knowledge and skill to pump out a track fairly quickly you can, ...but it's still not recommended (unless you're DJ Quik). It is always better to take your time and fine tune everything. Work on the details of the track. Once the broad "outline" or "sketch" of the track is laid down, go back through and run more and more fine detail into the song. I think sometimes, the fine little details that only occur once or twice in a song bring the listeners back to hear the song again.
Don't overuse the exciting parts. There's a reason why a solo only occurs once in a song. It's the exciting/special part and shouldn't be overplayed.

What are your best tips? Hopefully we get some good ideas flowing here.
 
Last edited:
1-Listen to a lot of music, inspired but not copied.
2-Experiment
3-Enjoy
I know they may seem obvious, but not all of them follow this.
My 2 cents
 
The most important tip that I could give would be to take your time, Watch alot and alot of tutorials so you can see what your doing either wrong or right. Also watch alot of producers that you listen to make there own music in the studio if they have a tutorial available online. Also another thing to do which I did do alot was to walk away from your track for like a day or two and then come back to it again later so you can get a different perspective of your track. Honestly this helps alot sense we do kind of get ear fatigue.
 
1. live healthy - so you can give the best of you
2. be consistent
3. take a break when you get stuck and feel lack of concentration
4. before starting a project, get an idea what you want to make and stick to it
 
Know that the music business is more of the latter than the former but music is not to be solely an assembly line product.
 
Lol, I'm gonna go against the grain here (that's tip #1 right there) and say:
-rushing can be great
-as is imposing limitations on yourself.
-all classics were made on much simpler equipment than you can download for free on your home PC nowadays.
-tools are just tools, the creativity is what you put into it

Not to say you don't need to know your craft, put the time in to hone it and properly finish your material... but I'm at my most creative when under pressure and having to work with
limited means. A lot of people are. It's an ability you can train: conceptualise, commit to ideas quickly and learn to rely on your intuition. Technical skills and musical knowledge help with building that intuition,
but they can never take that place. May sound very counter-creative, but it isn't... it's invaluable. What it does is make you good at generating and executing on ideas.. that's an important skill to have. It allows you to
get them out there, see what work, see what doesn't, iterate on it and see how people respond to it. Your first rushes are gonna sound like utter crap, of course.. and maybe they won't be your final tracks at all..
doesn't matter.. it's good training. GET GOOD AT IDEAS!

-work with other people, duh.. if you're solo in the studio all the time you can forget that music = community and what you're, in fact, doing as a musician is communicating with other people. Having
brilliant ideas is cool, be able to get them across is another thing entirely. Arguably much more important nowadays.

-be a student of musical history: know the sounds, know where they're from, what they represent, how they were made... find amazing music you never thought possible. It's fun.
 
I'm going to go against the grain too and say that I believe it to be ultimately misleading to say "draw inspiration from but don't copy", or "don't copy other people's work". I just finished reading the book "Steal Like An Artist" by Austin Kleon and I'm also currently reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and Imagine by Jonah Lehrer (both for the second time) and they're all about how all creativity, inspiration, and insight come not only from hard work, repetition, and putting in the hours it takes to become a master, but also that insights come from looking at things that already exist.

Artists selectively steal from each other all the time in order to get something that is "inspired by" another artist. It's like saying that Conan O'Brian wanted to be David Letterman. Just because he could emulate him doesn't mean that he was him, just like if you knock off a particular rhythm or chord progression in order to get a similar sonic quality to your song or instrumental, it doesn't mean that you've done something wrong. What is it Einstein says, "know where the information is and use it. That's the secret to success."
 
a trick Ive used to learn new techniques is to pick a track that you that has an aspect that you think makes that track, be it the drums or just the kick or whatever. Then try remake that aspect as best you can. Then take what youve learned from doing what theyve done and then make a new beat based on the new concepts youve learned. ive found it helped me to learn about rhythms and structures to beats
 
If you want more organically-sounding instruments (such as piano or drums), adjust the velocity, attack, and release of various notes. Specifically, highlight notes that are on the first beat so you get more of an impact.
 
Best tip: You can be still be yourself even if you imitate others. Those who have already succeeded know the process. Kobe imitated Michael but no one ever called him a Jordan Clone. He was the Black Mamba!

So learn from those who are better at the craft than you. Because with enough training and endurance, you'll become just as good if not better. :)
 
Piece of advice I read somewhere (can't remember where, or even the exact phrase) was: "If you think it's brilliant, it's not. Try harder."
 
Back
Top