Don't Just Do It — Think It!

Something that took me a long time to get my head around is the philosophy that I call 'The Process Is The Product'. One aspect of this is that the major point of your practice and production is not to actually produce things, but to train your brain: train it to compose, to arrange, to do sound design, to mix. The ultimate aim is pure creative flow, but getting there is a long arduous process, at least unless you are one of the few very talented individual to which this all comes naturally. (As you might guess, I am not one of those.) The dream is that you simply imagine a tune, its harmonies, its arrangement, the sounds that make it, the choice of synths and settings that produce those sounds, or the selection of samples and how to manipulate them and then, with a suitably trained brain, you just do it. The aim is to have creative flow with nothing getting in the way. But to get there, you have to systematically remove everything that blocks the way for your creative flow.

To train the brain entails being deliberate, focused, intense, and repetitive. You learn by repetition: achieving something leads to reward, reward leads to reinforcement, reinforcement leads to a trained brain. So when we practice—and when we produce we should see the practising of production as the main part of what we are doing—we want to aim to emphasise these. So when using synths, take time on a regular basis to 'read' through patches and to write down a description of how the sound is made: what sort of oscillators, filters, modulation, and effects are used. Then possibly reconstruct a patch from your notes, either on the same synthesiser, or try to do it with another. The same applies to effects. Importantly every time you just use a preset, you cheat yourself out of a learning opportunity. This is especially important in the age of AI where you can press a 'magic button' and have 90% of the work done for you. You may get a pleasing result that you like quicker, a gigging DJ may get something to play more quickly (and this is a case where judicious use of AI and presets is justified, since for the DJ, the product is their set and the peformance), but long term, if you want to produce original tracks, you need to train your brain to transform your imagination into sound. There are few secrets, and there are no shortcuts.