subject: Number One Tip For Getting Better At Making Your Own Beats And Tracks [print this page] For this article I'm going to make an analogy between painting and music production. We've all seen, in the movies at least, one of the ways that painters learn their craft. They spend countless hours in front of live human models or famous works of art and attempt to replicate or emulate what they see before them. I'm going to discuss how the same method of learning can be applied to the art of music production, composition, and making your own beats.
Please keep in mind, this exercise is meant for practice purposes only. You do not use this method and then pass off the result as your own creation. Copying for the purpose of study and learning is legal, copying for the purpose of distribution is not. The benefit to you comes from all the skills you learn by attempting to emulate and copy a great beat, track, or composition. And the next time you endeavor to write your own original music the skills you learn using this approach will be carried over.
If you want to eventually program drums that sound like they were produced by Dr Dre and could very well be from the latest Eminem record then you need to study one of their tracks using this method. The keys to this exercise are listening, emulating, and copying. To be clear, when carrying this out, the purpose is not to create something that sounds kind of like what you are listening to, the purpose is to replicate it exactly (as much as possible) as you hear it, just like a painter would try to do when studying a painter or an object.
As an example let's pretend that you are going to attempt to copy the instrumental track from Eminem's 'Cleanin Out My Closet'. The first 15 seconds are a great place to start. The track begins with a chord on the keyboard that slowly rises up in volume and then falls away as 3 more sounds kick in. The 3 sounds that kick in are a Beat, Bass, and Pianoish riff. So far there are 4 sounds in the first 15 seconds that you are going to attempt to re-create. One by one you TRY to build these sounds from the ground up, from scratch, using your music software. This will entail playing the same 5 seconds over and over and over again as you try to replicate it in your own music production software, and it can be a tedious process, but what you learn in the process will improve your skills 10 fold.
Obviously this style of listening is very intense and radically different from just listening, enjoying and feeling a piece of music and then saying "Hey, I wanna sound like that". This intense listening style is hyper focused and it can be exhausting to the mind and the ears so make sure to take frequent breaks, but the best thing about this is that it gets easier and easier with time.
What you're trying to do is increase your ability to perceive the detail of exactly what is happening in a sound, music composition, or beat. This will drastically increase your ability to understand what you're hearing when you listen to something you like. Ultimately what this leads to is more easily understanding the original ideas you hear in your own head and thus being better able to bring them to fruition with less effort and frustration.
If you practice this way, I guarantee that you will expand your skills in all areas of music creation including production, composition, rhythm, theory, melody, harmony, drums, and beats.
