4 secrets to take your music to the next level

Taking your music to the next level is one of the hardest things to do as a producer. It requires a lot of work, and sometimes investment, but here is what I would do if I were you to take your music to the next level…

4 THOUGHTS FROM ME

1. Practice A LOT, especially what you’re struggling with.

The first key ingredient to taking your music to the next level is practice. It’s not enough to only do what you’re comfortable with, but you also need to focus especially on what you struggle with. However, it can be intimidating doing what you don’t know as it’s normally fun to do what you suck at, right?

But, here are a few things you could do that could help you push through your issues:

1. Start with your issues when starting a song. Do you struggle to make leads, or breakdowns, etc? That’s the first thing you need to do. If doing this alone is not working, commit to working on your issues in a collab since when you commit to a collab, your ‘image’ and ‘word’ are in the game as you don’t want to disappoint your collab partner, which normally makes us push through more than if we were trying this alone;
2. Do practice/study sessions to focus on what you’re struggling with. Set aside time to learn how to fix your issues by analyzing songs you love, and later apply this to your songs. The moment you like what you did, stop, and move to the next study case as the song’s development is secondary for now;
3. Create a workflow for your creative, mixing, and sound design sessions. Whenever you create a workflow, you’ll likely become faster and better with whatever you’re working on. For this:
   • Copy other workflows from other producers, like my mixing workflow, or;
   • Create your own set of steps that you always do when producing and repeat them over time.

2. Learn from the people who are better than you by working or collaborating with them.

One of the best ways to learn is by working with someone better than you, and there are multiple ways to do that:

1. Collaborate with other producers to learn from them. Invite someone who you want to learn from to work on an idea with you, and work on it like any other collab. But, after they have done their part, go into the final project and debug whatever they have done to learn from it. For this, it’s always better to collaborate with someone in the same DAW as you’ll have access to samples and midi, but this can also be done with stems;
2. Hire producers or engineers just to learn from them. Find and hire producers to work on your song’s development or mixing and mastering, and then debug what they have done to learn and develop yourself. Later, do your own version of their job, compare it to what the PROs did, compare the differences, and learn from them;
3. Find producers that can teach you and help you solve your issues. It has already been mentioned several times in this newsletter, but finding a mentor who can teach can help you more than any other collab as the person would be focused on spoon-feeding you all the things you’d have to find and learn by yourself, like items (1) and (2).

With all these methods, regardless of whether you finish the song or not, if you learned something, you should consider it a success as the focus is not on the end result, but the learning you’ll get from it

3. Find the sounds and the moods that define you and your music, and push them to your songs.

To take your music to the next level, you’ll have to make something in your music that people relate to and will start to expect from you when hearing your songs. You can still later grow and develop your sound, but you need to find something that ties your songs together and makes you unique.

For that, here’s what you could do:

1. Define the mood and vibe that you’re after. Ask yourself this question and write it down. What is the vibe that you want people to get when they listen to your tune? Now, for every song you work on, make sure that this mood is within the melodies, chord progressions, and also your sound selection;
2. Define what you want people to remember you by. When people hear >>your artist name<<, what do you want them to remember? For that, I love doing a mind map exercise. Find 3 or 4 words that you wish people to remember you by. Now, write 3-10 elements you can use in your music that remind you of those 3 to 4 words.
   Now, make sure to implement these elements in your songs, and in your branding, and you’ll likely retrieve these feelings in your songs (check my version of this exercise below):
3. Find your signature sound(s). After you’ve done these two first steps, you can look for your signature sound, as now you’re looking for something that will truly define how you want to be seen. Your ‘signature sound’ doesn’t need to be one single synth or sound, but sometimes a collection of sounds that makes people remember you.
   For example, Simon Doty’s signature sound is not a sound per se, but the housey and melodic vibe he has in songs, which are all translated in the elements that he selects for his the tracks

4. Learn how to make your songs’ storytelling more interesting.

As you progress as a musician and your technical skills are no longer the issue when creating music, and taking your music to the next level will highly depend on the stories that you’re telling in them, i.e., the composition and arrangement.

For this, here are a few tips to make your songs’ stories better:

1. Make your songs as small as they can be. When a song is unnecessarily long, it often gets repetitive, and this can be a trigger for someone to skip it. It doesn’t need to be a ‘short song’, but a song that is enough to tell the story that you want to tell;
2. Create movement in your song with different elements throughout the song. To me, for every 8 bar, or 16 bar (depending on the genre), something new has to happen in your song, and if it doesn’t and the next 8 bar sounds the same as the previous one, I’d just cut it out. Or, you can add not only melodic elements, but also percussive elements to keep the song growing and moving forward;
3. Save the best for last. As Greg Newman, Sekora A&Rs, said in our feedback livestream, if you give the main idea of the song away in the first drop, you risk making the second drop repetitive and boring. Instead, tease the main idea in the first drop, and then make it shine in the second one;
4. Find the best ideas to work with. More important than any arrangement trick is to find a GOOD and enticing idea for your song, and for this, you need to do sessions to work on multiple track ideas so you can find and work only with the best. You can sometimes combine two ideas into one song, but also make sure that they somehow can relate to each other, or it can end up feeling like you’re telling two stories in one.

1 QUESTION FOR YOU

What else should you do to take your music to the next level?

1. Keep pushing… for a long time!
Persevering for a long time is one of the key factors in taking your music to the next level. I’m not talking about ‘working every day’, but mainly consistently putting in the work and finishing tracks for 5-10 years, as this will make you push through your issues, doubts, and also define yourself as an artist, as mentioned in all topics above;

2. Push yourself heavily as a DJ.
One good catalyst for your music career can be pushing yourself heavily as a DJ. The more you DJ and the bigger you get at it, the more resources and people you’ll know that could help you later push your music through collaborations, promotion, and credibility due to the shows you play;

3. Inspire yourself with multiple artists and not just one!
When you get inspired only by one artist, you risk falling into the ‘copying’ mode. But, when you inspire yourself with multiple artists, you can copy one thing from each inspiration and create a mashup of your inspirations, and that’s a cool way to make something unique;

4. Listen to your favorite podcasts for inspiration.
I’m waiting badly for Lane 8’s Fall Mixtape (here is the latest, Summer, Mixtape) as these always bring new and fresh ideas that I can later take to implement in my songs. Find the podcasts that inspire you, and listen to them to find references and also understand ‘what’s fresh’ in the market.