My "Start To Finish" Challenge

When I first started producing, I started out by learning basic music theory and familiarizing myself with DAWs (this was in 2010). Then, I started learning the fundamentals of music production (2011 & 2012), by doing Boy In A Band tutorials on YouTube. Starting in 2013 – all the way ‘till 2016 – I focused most (if not all) of my attention towards sound design. I had just discovered Skrillex, Kill The Noise, Datsik, Excision, and the world of Dubstep the year prior. When I found out that they used sound design to create the sick, badass sounds that you hear on their tracks, all of a sudden I became interested in sound design (before this, I had no interest in sound design). That way, I could make my own badass sounds.

This proved to be a worthy investment in time and resources, as sound design would go on to become a very important skill in an Electronic Music producer’s arsenal. The market has become very saturated and now more than ever, you need to know sound design in order to stand out from the pack. However, I did have to make some compromises in order for that to happen. I would have to say that the biggest compromise I had to make was in finishing lots of songs.

Sure, my focus on sound design was a big reason for this. But, there were other factors that played a role too, namely: 1) lack of proper resources and information, and 2) poor productivity skills.

Back when I got started producing, there weren’t a lot of online resources out there. The information that was out there, were usually scattered around and lacked comprehension. This was especially true for full track tutorials. At the time, the only full song tutorials that were out there were from Boy In A Band, and those were just limited to one per genre and there weren’t enough for me to practice (but regardless of that, those tutorials were great for learning the fundamentals of music production).

Something that’s always plagued me is a lack of productivity skills. This mainly comes from the fact that I’m naturally averse to order – I prefer things to be spontaneous and “on the fly”. This made it difficult to complete songs. To make things worse, there weren’t a lot of great resources out there to teach budding music producers like myself how to be more productive, in order to get more done.

The great news is, all of these issues have been resolved, mainly thanks to people and sites like Sam Matla and his EDMProd website, along with music companies and programs like Cymatics and their Academy.fm program. It is thanks to Sam that I finally learned the art of productivity (and how to love it). It is thanks to Cymatics that I learned how to market myself and my music, and master the art of sound design.

It is because of all of this that I can finally do something that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – and that is quite overdue – which is to practice finishing more songs. This is something that I’ve been doing since the creation and release of my single “25” last year. However, in late January, I decided to also start re-making songs with the help of full-song tutorials. I’ve been focusing on just that since then and haven’t been making any original tracks since then. Just recently, I learned how to make room for that in my daily schedule. So far, I have finished up a total of 3 tutorials and I started my 4th one not so long ago.

At the same time I'm doing these remakes, I’m going to make an original track on the side, based on what I did for a given day (for example, if I worked on the intro for a remake, then I will write an intro for an original in return). I plan on documenting my progress, just for the fun of it (although I'm still experimenting with how I'm going to do it). I'm thinking of uploading clips to DTube as a way of showing my work, but I'm still trying to figure out how to go about it (I have an idea but I have yet to experiment with it). I really don’t think I’ll be releasing any of these completed tracks as officials but I’ll be showing them off regardless (just to show what I’ve learned). I originally planned on doing this for at least 6 months, but I'm mostly likely going to do this for the rest of the year. Even if I end up doing this for the rest of the year, I’m going to assess my progress after 6 months, in order to see what I’ve improved on, what I need to work on more, and go from there (and do it again after another 6 months).

I went into 2018 wanting to finish more songs – and getting better in the process. In order to do this, I need to do what I did early on in my music career/education - or in other words, I need to return to basics. I like to call this journey my "'Start To Finish' Challenge". I think following this plan will help get me to where I want to be. Finishing a bunch of songs is really the only way to get better at making music, and eventually becoming one of the greats (which is one of my biggest goals). I really can’t wait to see where I’ll be in 6 months, 12 months, etc. from now. I hope you will join me in this journey. I would be so grateful if you do.