With the advancing development of digital technology, today’s aspiring electronic music producers enjoy a significant degree of creative freedom. For a cost that seemed unimaginable 10 years ago, electronic music producers now can set up studios in their own homes and produce highly accomplished soundtracks. So professional are some of these tracks that they can literally be sent straight to the record company for final mastering.
This facility has led to a boom of both interest and creativity in the areas of music production. Many independent artists are now producing their own unique music independent of market-led forces. The development of the World Wide Web further enables them to upload their tracks to a potential audience of millions. The degree of freedom such producers now enjoy is clearly unparalleled.
One of the downsides to this freedom is a glut of available music with sometimes dubious quality. Previously, music had to attract the attention of a record label or a radio station to get heard. To do so, it probably had to be music of a high standard in terms of both its originality and its salability. Now anybody can post music online, even if they are just starting out. In some ways this can be useful, because feedback obtained from listeners enables a musician to make improvements. But it also means that there is a lot of bad music out there.
One of the biggest mistakes would-be producers make is believing that by carefully listening to and studying their genre, they can acquire all of the knowledge necessary to be a successful producer. This knowledge can certainly get them a long way toward that point. But sometimes it simply is not enough.
Producers need other kinds of knowledge, such as knowledge of how music works as a language. It is no good writing an effective bass line, lead, and pads, for example, if they are all in different keys. The result is chaotic and unpleasant to listen to. Yet this is a common mistake I hear over and over again. The student’s knowledge of the genre is unsurpassed, but the final result falls down because, in purely musical terms, the producer doesn’t really know what he is doing.
Beneath all of the enormously different styles of modern electronic music lie certain fundamentals of the musical language that are exactly the same no matter what kind of music you write. It is very important to acquire an understanding of these fundamentals if you are to develop as a music producer. Put simply, you need to know what you are doing with regard to the music that you are writing.