500 WORDS, DAY 63: Music Production

Today I thought I’d write about something I spend a lot of time doing, maybe even most of my time even, or at least my free time. I decided I would write about music production today. I’ve been into music for more than a decade now. It all started with hip-hop, but the more music I listened to over the years the more music I grew to love and appreciate. Music kept impressing me in many different ways. New music, old music, songs of all genres that would catch my attention as soon as I heard them, either because they were nostalgic or eerie or trippy, or even just catchy or chill, everything inspired me about it. It was all new music to me really, since I hadn’t heard any it yet! I was just discovering it as a kid. I eventually knew I wanted to be involved in music, to make music in any way I could. Like I said, I started with hip-hop. I always wrote my own rhymes and had a lot of fun doing it, it was really the main thing I was into for quite a while. Although I was rapping a lot more in those days, I was always producing in the background too. I wouldn’t say my beats were bad by any means, even when I started, but they weren’t quite at the level of the beats I wanted to rap on, so I kept on learning and experimenting with producing, always trying new things and learning about music production on YouTube. Back in those days it was all in FL Studio. I worked with lots of VSTs that I would download from any source I could find, constantly trying out new ones, as well as some of the native FL Studio plugins, meaning ones that come with the program. The accuracy of the type of arranger view that a DAW, meaning a digital audio workstation, offers is definitely unmatched by any groovebox or synthesizer, so I did make a lot of cool beats back in those days, even if I didn’t even have a midi keyboard, not to mention any other studio gear. All I had back then was my laptop with my mouse and typing keyboard, as well as my USB mic for rapping. It wasn’t so bad really. It wasn’t bad at all actually. The mouse and keyboard made every decision super easy to pencil in on the piano roll or step sequencer, and gave me extra accuracy, like I mentioned before. I guess that working with computers all day long though, with so many call centers and the like over the years, made me not want to make music on the computer any more, and after seeing videos popping up of legendary producers hitting pads and making beats on MPCs, I knew it looked fun as fuck and so I knew I wanted one, at least just to try it and see how the thing works. I was aware of MPCs before, and that a lot of classic beats had been produced on them in the early years of hip-hop, but for some reason I had never really thought of getting one. I really wish I had thought about it sooner, because when I did, it quite literally opened up the door to a whole new world for me. I’ll try to go more into detail about that tomorrow though.

If you have a few minutes check out my song/beat ‘garden of peace.’ I appreciate you.