You know how it is. You want to know how to make music, so you spend hours and hours watching hundreds of technical tutorials to find out everything you need to know.
There are no shortage of such tutorials online – and there is certainly a place for them because you can learn many useful skills this way.
But what if you end up spending all of your time on them? What do they really help you achieve? One thing they don’t do is help you to write full pieces of music.
In the music production world, a huge emphasis is placed on polishing your music and achieving technical excellence. But this is often at the expense of crafting memorable, exciting and original pieces of music.
You may have discovered this already. Thousands of hours of tutorials are at your fingertips, demonstrating mix down techniques and more, allowing you to learn everything you could possibly want to know.
But too few focus on the most important thing of all: how to write a track.
Turning Your Ideas into Finished Products
There is nothing more frustrating than being stuck with all of these ideas but being unable to turn them into finished tracks because you lack the skills and knowledge to develop them.
You need to understand how music works – and this means developing a far deeper understanding than you can get from technical tutorials alone. Doing this will provide you with a number of fantastic benefits, including the following.
1. Get Past the Loop Stage
Many music producers get stuck at this stage. They endlessly focus on loops, but never develop them and never arrange them into a piece of music. But once you have a deeper understanding of music, this becomes easy and enjoyable.
2. Keep the Track Fresh
Even once you have started finishing tracks, another problem can occur. They become stagnant. They become dull and repetitive, and they all sound the same.
But when you have a deeper understanding of music, you can develop your ideas far more successfully so that they are always exciting, fresh and new.
3. Take the Listener on a Journey
There’s something about the truly great tracks, the ones written by the best music producers in the world. Sometimes it can be hard to put your finger on what it is that makes them great – so how can you possibly hope to replicate them?
A great track will take the listener on a journey that keeps them enthralled to the end and makes them desperate to find out what comes next, all building up to a thrilling climax and a satisfying conclusion.
You just don’t get that from technical tutorials. This is something far deeper.
4. Master the Emotion
Amazing tracks are the ones that affect you, that touch you in ways that others do not. When you develop your understanding of music, you can set the mood and determine the emotion of your track. But most importantly, this won’t be something that happens by accident but will be something that you can control.
5. Create Tension and Release
Great tracks are exciting – and you need to learn how to make your tracks exciting too. This means learning how to create tension and release, how to alter energy levels. This is the sort of thing that gets people talking about your track, that makes people feel your music rather than just listen to it.
Finally, it’s all about enjoyment – something that may have been in short supply lately.
There is nothing quite like creating great tracks that you can be proud of. But to truly enjoy writing a track, you need to understand what you are capable of. It is a fantastic feeling to finish an amazing track – but only when you know HOW you did it. If it’s just a fluke that you have no idea how to replicate, you’ll only be frustrated.
Once you get to this stage, writing music becomes more enjoyable and much more satisfying.
And this is exactly what you’ll get when you truly learn to understand music.
