Production Update

In addition to be an aspiring author I am also an aspiring bedroom music producer. It all started in 2014. Up to date I have released 10 music projects on streaming platforms using the aggregate called distrokid. If you do not know distrokid allows you to release an unlimited amount of music to all your favorite streaming platforms for 20 dollars a year. A cheap price for an excellent service. You even get to keep all your royalties and can add and manage teams. That means if you have more than one artist, producer, or songwriter on a track you can set up splits, so everyone involved gets paid equally. This also works especially well for beat makers as well. Wrong as they can do revenue splits and percentages for any given song. I have used distrokid since January 2019 and have been incredibly happy with it. And although I've been making music for around 7 years I only stated my foray into streaming a year and a half ago. Not all streaming because I've used Sound Cloud lots in the past but mostly into the wider marketplace like apple, Spotify and iTunes. So distrokid is what I would recommend to aspiring musicians who are looking into getting their music out there.

Music production for me started with a laptop and an inspiration. Everyday i would sit and source new material, find new sounds, find new musicians I like and make new tracks. Some of the stuff is drafty sounding and demoesqe but I hold no remorse for ever trying it all. People who I saw teaching this computer music and giving lessons were always a new way of learning something new and creative. Then there were documentaries such as the beat scene documentary that I found lots of new musicians doing their thing from across the country in LA. This one musician I follow on SoundCloud and makes good material. His beats I had on replay for a while. My friend showed me that documentary and even lent me his livid ohm hardware synth for a little while. A little bit after that they put together this av jam sesh in the gallery downstairs and he put these cool graphics on the wall while the makeshift band jammed out. I just recorded the music onto my laptop while that was going on and then played the drums for like two minutes.

The first production tip I learned about that helped me was this cool harmour vocal resynthesis thing. You can take a vocal sample and put it into the plugin and add effects and make it sound chopped up and makes for good dubstep or drum and bass. It is called additive synthesis actually and I made my first mini mixtape/EP using that technique. I dubbed it the Squidward EP. Because he is so bad at the clarinet although he claims to have intense musical talents. I think I spammed that so somewhere which was a huge beginner mistake and no professional is going to listen to it if they didn't ask to see it. But either way it came out ok for my first project. then there was project 1.2 which was some of the first tracks I have ever even made. That which I never released onto any streaming platforms other than SoundCloud. I was trying for a while to harness a following on SoundCloud and that is where I would post all my music religiously. I feel like that was a good place for my craft to gain some exposure and eventually I had somebody message me to buy my music. Which I sold my first couple beats for 100 dollars. I was hyped at that point and kept me inspired to keep making beats. The type of beats people who rap or are artists would be interested in. I am sad to say that to this day I failed to sell a single beat other than that other one for 100. But more recently I have been using beatstars in hopes to get them sold and that seems like the best platform to do so. Starting sometime in may of this year I've been making beats non stop day in and day out and posting more than one time a day on my YouTube and beatstars account in hopes of exposure. The one thing I learned about in regards to YouTube is tag metadata and search engine analytics. Which I have been using tube buddy to search tags and see the good ones to use. I found out that tip from dj pain 1 and he is a good musician and comes out with a lot of good content and offers great advice for beatmakers and producers. I used that for over a month but the tags I used only trend if it's specific to the type of beat I make and it happens to match the title. The one that trends was mow town funk trap soul type beat, and was the third video ranked for that tag. So SEO tag ancylites and metadata was the thing I was pursuing to find a niche I could occupy.

So I'm addition to doing all that recently and selling my music and becoming an artist on Spotify. I received a certification from NYU for music industry essentials and was an incredibly fun and rewarding informative class. I was thrilled that I could add that degree to my LinkedIn profile and my resume. It is a great starting point for someone like me trying to break into this music business. The only caveat is it is not an actual credited college course. Meaning that if I would go to get my associate degree it would add zero value to trying to obtain that goal. But it is a cert of great value that I will cherish for years to come. They taught many valuable lessons with insights into the industry from highly skilled and knowledgeable professionals and teachers. The class is from the staff of the Clive Davis institute of recorded music in NYU. They taught history of the recording industry, content in artistry and marketing and even a workshop on how to build your ideal dream studio. They wanted to hear me make a song with lyrics on the content for artistry portion of the class. They expect you to upload your track to SoundCloud and provide a page with the meaningfully Lyrics of the song. I made a track called "Forever" which includes a kind of poem that my good friend Howard beckerman put together on his phone recorder. Then I added a verse from Dante's inferno which seemed relevant to the overall theme of the song. The lyrics of the song are as follows.

Midway this life were bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right path was lost and wholey gone,

Lost in the woods,

Alone in the woods,

Wondering, wondering,

Forever.

I passed that portion of the module thankfully and moved into a project of building my dream studio. Which I had a little bit of fun with and took A few liberty's into the style of where I wanted to put my ideal setup. I took a few ideas from some of the studios they showed me and thought of some unique ways to build my own studio. I would have my own room with analog synths and my own vocal room and a bit of a lounging area all within the studio. Then seeing as I live in an artist gallery I said we'd have a decorated reception area where artist could sign into their sessions. It was a cool project that luckily I passed. I had a fun time with that class and seeing as it wasn’t timed I could've taken as long as I wanted to finish it up.

Other ways I stay creative in regards to staying musical is to write new Melody's on a midi piano and record them into my daw. The digital audio workstation I use is FL Studio and I think, biasly, that it is the best software out there to use for all your digital recording needs. The piano roll is big enough to create Melody's easily and the playlist allows you to add and edit plugins and the step sequencer let us you add drum patters. You can color code all your instruments and different tracks to stay organized. And all your samples stay in the pack folder to help find new sounds easily. I love it.

I am thinking of taking all the beats I have been make lately and combining them into one large album project on Spotify. This way anybody can listen to all my creations right on my Spotify profile. I've yet to decide what I should call this project or what cover art I will be using but I am hopeful that it will all come together in good time. Times like these away from my home and laptop make me feel like I am missing out on work I could be getting done. I love my laptop and recently had to replace my charger so I can use it again when I get home. Actually they sent me two chargers so that's all good and dandy. I cannot wait to get back into the flow of making beats.