There’s no formula for making music, or everyone would have cracked the code to a hit record by now. But there are certain guidelines that give us a framework to set boundaries and explore our creativity. When you listen to a lot of music from around the world with an intent to find similarities, you start to notice these boundaries. It’s like gravity—always there, but it won’t get in the way of your creativity.
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The process of making a song begins with an idea—be it a chord, a melody, an emotion, or a creative impulse. This initial spark of inspiration, whether planned or spontaneous, sets the stage for the entire composition.
Music composition transforms the initial spark of creativity into a complete song. It involves crafting melody, harmony, rhythm, and arranging these elements within a structured format.
Production refines the song by adding beats, effects, and layering elements. Using a DAW, you shape the track, blend recording with production, and experiment to create the final sound and vibe.
Mixing involves balancing and blending all elements of a song—vocals, instruments, effects—to create a cohesive and immersive experience. It’s about ensuring clarity, maintaining rhythm, and crafting a dynamic soundscape that pulls the listener into the track.
The final step in polishing a track for release. It ensures consistency and clarity across all playback systems by adjusting levels, enhancing sound, and preparing the track for various formats.
The process described is known as the production of a record. The initial composition holds a soul, and our role is to preserve and expand that soul through the stages of production. From arrangement to mixing and mastering, each step enhances and reveals the essence of the song, ensuring it remains true to its original spirit while reaching its full potential.
Wondering what terms like "feel," "alive," and "soul" mean for a song? Don’t worry—we’ll break down the technical details so you can easily gauge what feels right, making the process more natural and effortless.
These exercises work on a much deeper level, enhancing your musical instincts to an unprecedented level. No ifs or buts about them.
Any person, regardless of age or skill level, can practice these exercises and benefit from them, as they are universally applicable.
By improving your musical instincts through these exercises, you'll be able to understand, improvise, and compose music across any genre.
Helping you develop a well-rounded and effective playing style.
Essential Techniques: Explore fundamental and advanced techniques for modern guitar playing.
Biomechanics Breakdown: Understand the biomechanics of fretting and picking to enhance clarity and efficiency.
Technique Mastery: Master key techniques including legato, alternate picking, and funk strumming.
Targeted Exercises: Engage in exercises designed to build speed, accuracy, and stamina.
Ear training is the most crucial skill in music, and focusing on it can significantly reduce the need for extensive practice.
Our question-and-answer technique, combined with note prediction, audiation, and singing exercises, helps you develop a practical musical ear more quickly.
We start with interval training within the major scale to help you visualize the entire 12-note matrix. You’ll then learn to recognize various interval patterns and engage in two key exercises: playing back what you hear and predicting the next note (audiation), which enhances your imagination and enables intuitive music creation.
As you master the ability to mentally sing all intervals in any context, you’ll unlock a vast array of musical possibilities. Practice these techniques with our embedded ear training app.
This module delves into the key elements of melody creation, starting with note choices and moving on to structure and contour. You'll learn to use chord tones effectively, build melodic motifs, and create variations of melodies.
As we explore intervals and their relationship to harmony, you’ll build a repertoire of "good notes" that work with any chord, helping you create melodies on the fly.
Once you’ve mastered creating complete melodies, we’ll incorporate various scales—major, minor, pentatonic, modes, and more—to craft distinct melodic moods.
Learn how to arrange your song into key sections like intro, verse, chorus, and bridge, using patterns, repetition, and phrase lengths to build contrast and keep listeners engaged.
Discover how transitions and layering create seamless flow, while varying phrase lengths and section dynamics add tension and release.
Our Quick Tips & Tricks offer instant solutions designed to enhance your music-making process.
Whether you need to compose a solo that fits specific changes or create a framework for a particular genre, these tips provide immediate results. Focused on practical and actionable advice, this section will help you build a library of effective strategies that deliver quick and impactful outcomes.
Learn MoreThis module offers a full-fledged method for producing a track from scratch or refining an existing composition using your DAW, virtual instruments, and plugins. You’ll explore various song parts, including foundational, sectional, and transitional elements, to develop a logical system that makes your song feel complete.
We’ll delve into common production techniques such as vocal layering, creating harmonies, adding ear candy, applying effects, and layering instruments and more.
To reinforce your learning, you'll participate in a production boot camp, where you'll create multiple songs from start to finish using a detailed checklist of objectives. This hands-on approach will ensure you gain practical experience and a solid understanding of the production process.
Mixing serves as the "glue" that transforms your composition into a polished, fully finished track. We’ll start with preparing a song for mixing by covering essential steps such as editing, gating, reamping, tuning, and phase aligning tracks. Then, we'll delve into the technical aspects of mixing, including EQ, compression, saturation, reverb, delay, and early reflections. You’ll learn how to use these tools effectively and understand their crucial role in shaping your mix.
Once you've mastered the technical side, we’ll shift focus to making informed mixing decisions based on groove, feel, and mood to ensure your song achieves a professional quality. You’ll also explore Bass processing to further refine your mix.
To enhance your skills, our dedicated mixing ear training app will help you develop a keen ear for compression and EQ, enabling you to make bold and confident mixing choices.
We primarily use Reaper as our DAW but have experience with various other mainstream DAWs. To us, they all share similarities, differing mainly in workflow.
Technical Setup: How to configure your DAW for a smooth, flow-based workflow that enhances your music-making process.
Fundamental Concepts: Simplify key principles that apply across all DAWs to optimize your workflow, allowing you to focus on making music without distractions from your setup.
This highly detailed course will guide you through programming REAPER scripts from scratch, enabling you to create any functionality or process you need.
You’ll explore various ways and ideas for using scripting to develop a personalized music-making workflow that suits you perfectly.
We’ll start with the basics of the LUA language and how REAPER APIs work. From there, we’ll dive into the extensive possibilities of what you can achieve with your new programming and API knowledge.
We’ll also share our personal favorite methods for customizing REAPER to enhance your creative process.