I’m fairly new here but the technique I’m trying to adopt at the moment is to get an 8 bar loop going, often within a template, and hammer out spontaneous ideas, layering instruments almost recklessly, essentially creating what will become the ‘high point’ of the song in a pretty short amount of time.
I would try to do a handful of these over a few days, and if I like the sound of what I’m hearing after a rest day, I would spend the rest of the week creating structures from these rough loops, then ironing out any creases and adding a bit of variation to each section, in addition to mixing/mastering.
I’ve found it’s quite a fun way of writing, and allows me to throw away dud ideas without much difficulty.
I agree: having everything ready in your perfect-sounding inner ear is a huge time-saver, although sometimes it’s frustrating when you are unable to replicate what you hear in your daw, I suppose is to get as close as you can.
There’s always that story about Picasso making a royalty free music track on his PC and a buyer asks him to license it. Picasso says he’ll only license it for $19 and when the buyer says “that only took you two minutes!” Picasso says "but Envato takes 50% so I’m only left with 9.50 minus the US withholding tax».
All of my portfolio tunes I’ve produced between 1-2 hours per tune. I don’t believe it’s worth spending more on stock music unless you have some special reason. It’s a matter of efficiency - you have to know your tools, your sequencer and VST libraries well so that the basic setup takes 5 minutes and then you just create and finish. I tend to put a deadline for myself and decide that I have to wrap this tune within an hour and it makes me work diligently and not fuss around with details.
Or that time Picasso drew a sketch on a napkin and it was rejected by the waiter, who told him he wasn’t allowed to resubmit it because it wasn’t up to the restaurant’s standards.
This makes sense to me. If you are able to sell an average of ten licenses of EVERY track you produce, then you will make about $100 per track. If you use 2 hours per track that means $50 an hour, if you use 2 days it means $50 a day and so on…
It’s kinda good point. There were a couple of months, when I finished 1-2 tracks per day. And it’s great and stuff. But I couldn’t improve my skills, couldn’t go forward. Of course, money is the reason we’re here,but I personally want to evolve, develop myself, not to be just random artisan, even if nobody cares of it except me. And also having fun is very important - when I’m not, I just don’t write any music… But spend some time on sound design.
Agree with what you are saying. And I think its important to make other, more artistic music just for fun or for learning and evolve as a composer in addition to the stock music.
At the same time, I never make music I don’t like or think is fun doing even when I’m writing for stock markets. I just try to not use so much time on each of these tracks. Besides, the more I’m working with the mixing the worse it sounds…
Yeah, this is true. Before I used to add more plugins and play with this long chains of processing. But now often I just delete them and mix sounds better.