02 Dec Pro-tip: Producing a tune is like carving a statue.
I don’t know how other people go about producing music from square 0 to square 100 but the way I do it is like this…
Imagine you are Michelangelo about to carve David from a huge block of stone. You start off with a huge pillar of blank stone. This is like your blank project.
First, you chisel away big chunks of the stone and get a rough shape of David going. This is you at your PC coming up with big, simple ideas and basic arrangements for your tune.
Next, you start chipping off smaller bits of stone and making David look more and more like a human. In our producing analogy, this is you fleshing out your arrangement, designing sounds with more depth and bringing some personality and vibe to your tune.
Now, after a chipping away at David for a few weeks or months, he looks basically like a normal person from afar but up close, there are some annoying imperfections and things to be cleaned up. In music, your tune is now done; it would work in a club but upon closer inspection, there are details missing and it still sounds a touch copy-paste.
Finally, you bust out the fine sandpaper and start working on David, smoothing a touch here and sanding down a little there to bring his level of realism to full. You come back every day and repeat this process until all the creases are ironed out. At your PC, you come back each day and listen to your tune and EQ a dB out here, raise this track volume a little there and day by day, the creases in the tune get smoothed out to perfection.
Now, after months and months of detailing and re-analysing and painstaking attention to detail, David is unveiled as a marvel of human creative endeavor to the world. Back in the modern day, after weeks and months of careful EQing, your tune is unveiled to the internet, receives a grand total of 183 SoundCloud plays and you delete the folder and start a new project.