Some production lessons/tips that I have learned along the way:
- Use what you have, what you know, and what you love. Sometimes your setup can be an inspiration but it can also be a major distraction. My favorite piece of gear is not the one with the most features but the thing that I connect with the most, my Baldwin upright piano that I was gifted from my parents for my 18th birthday. I can never see myself getting rid of it and I have no reason to do so.
- I recommend going through your own GAS stages, try out different types of gear, keep the things that work the best for your artistic process, and cherish the things that mean the most to you. If you don’t know what works for you will know the day you sell it and don’t know what to do without it. I have a Korg MS-20 Mini that I almost sold at one point but quickly realized that I will not find another monophonic synth that is as intuitive as it for me.
- I have developed my own rules for types of gear that do and do not work for me.
- The DAW is the most powerful and productive workstation that I could use. I have owned three different models of MPCs (MPC 2000XL, MPC Live, and the MPC 500), as fun as they were to use they never satisfied the features and easy to use workflow that Ableton Live offers. I just couldn’t justify giving up the power of Ableton Live for something like them. However, MPCs might be a better workflow for you or even the style of music you are going for. You might find the workflow to be better for something like Boom-Bap or House. Maybe someday I will get an MPC 1000 to use solely as a drum machine running through the DAW.
- Synths with presets are not for me, depending on their workflow. I owned a Prophet Rev-2. I remember playing the first note after turning it on and it was one of the greatest sounds I had ever heard. I enjoyed the sounds that came out of it however mixing together the ability to save your sounds and edit them afterward was difficult when I had the plugin that would do the same thing and would change the position of the knobs when the preset changed. Obviously most hardware synths do not do this and I’m not sure one does at the time of writing this. Because of this I ultimately found it to not be very productive for me. I think after selling it I realized that my gear is not for productivity but for making sounds in an intuitive way that could inspire me. If I’m looking for a synth sound I have plugins that I can easily pick a preset, and edit it very quickly. The polyphonic synth that I found was best for the combination of presets and editing these presets was the JX-3P from the 80s. I bought it in Oregon while living in a van in 2023. You pretty much edited the sounds with one fader. You select what you want to edit and move that thing up or down. At first I thought it would be difficult to use since you have to look at the matrix to figure out which button changes which parameter but I found it to work just as good as a DAW synth. The only reason I got rid of it was because it wasn’t in great shape, a few of the buttons would short out randomly and the MIDI function was not the best. Although it is not as feature packed as something like the Rev-2 it has an absolute magical sound to it and if I were to purchase a polyphonic synth again I would most likely get this or the JX-8P.
- Movement
- Experiment with field recordings, and if you have any, use real instruments.
- It doesn’t have to be perfect. Follow “Production rules” to an extent.