Finally, what’s the most impactful piece of production advice you’ve ever received from a mentor or just learned on your own?
If I had some advice to give, it would be to focus on dynamics in the tracks you produce. It’s not just about making the track as loud as possible. Some elements need to stand out, and Transient Master is perfect for that, no matter the style of music. It adds depth where it’s needed.
From experience, an idea is never great right from the start. You have to work on the idea, choose the right sounds, mix the track well, and put the effort in. Sometimes I come up with an idea that seems good, then I put it in the track, and it sounds bad. But as soon as I spend time on it, work on the sound, everything starts to take shape, and the idea becomes good. All that to say, an idea is rarely bad if it’s intuitive. You just have to work on it as much as possible.
This inevitably brings me to the topic of not giving up on a track too early. There have been many times when I left a track resting on my computer only to come back to it months later. It wasn’t necessarily a bad track – maybe it just wasn’t the right time to work on it, or I didn’t have a clear vision at that moment. It was about taking a step back and reworking it! Sometimes it’s hard to translate what we have in our heads into the software.
We’re not robots. It takes work, time, and perspective.
The simplest melodies are the strongest. Easy to say, but it’s true. And curiously, it’s the hardest thing to do. Because a simple melody needs extremely strong sound design to stand out. But once that’s figured out, it’s a win.
My last piece of advice is to have fun and not overthink it. Music is a feeling, an art, and it should be intuitive. Today, we’re inevitably pushed to think about marketing in music creation, and we tend to put that instinct aside, but people can feel it. That’s the essence of music. A simple idea, no matter how basic, but made with heart, can touch people.
