Becoming a Music Producer: My First Two Years
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Is your goal to become a talented and respected music producer? Are you interested in learning the secret to overcoming your fear, developing bulletproof work habits, and mastering the infinite plane of musical manipulation?
Cool, me too! But I actually can’t help you with that.
What I can offer is a little slice of life from my point of view.
For the last two years, I have been teaching myself how to produce music. As the two-year mark approaches, I’d like to reflect on this period and in doing so give some clarity to my own thinking and hopefully bring something valuable to other artists (like you!) at a similar point in their journeys.
Who Am I?
My name is Vrac and I make dance music — mostly house and techno but I’m into anything that’s groove-driven. I strive to make the best music I possibly can and endeavour to help other artists bring forth their creative visions.
I think I probably always wanted to make music but was too afraid to approach it. Even now it’s tough for me to say, “I am a musician,” though I’ve made dozens of songs at this point and have hundreds of beats sitting on a hard drive.
A part of that fear comes from a lack of musical training (I had guitar lessons as a kid but never practiced). But I think the main reason it feels scary to say is because of the accountability involved. Until I say I’m a musician, there’s no risk that someone will tell me I’m a bad musician.
I feel like this is a relatable feeling for most people with dreams of creating. Until we gain the confidence, we tend to squirrel our creativity away in closed journals and dark bedrooms, emerging only after many long nights of self-doubt and torment.
If that sounds like you, read on.
How I Got Started With Music
The first clear step on this path was when I tried out a friend’s DJ equipment. He showed me how to twist the knobs and push the faders, how to cut the bass using a high-pass filter a drop it back in for that oh-so-delicious moment of the drop.
There was no turning back. I was in love.
I grabbed up a beat-up DJ controller from someone on Kijiji and plugged it into my laptop and spent hours (days, weeks) learning as much as I could about bending and twisting the sonics of my favourite songs. It became clear that even on a laptop DJing is a much more delicate art than pressing the play button and throwing your hands up. I have a lot of feelings about the craft of DJing but I’ll save it for another piece.
Despite realizing the difficulties of DJing, at a certain point I thought, “How hard is it to program a kick and snare?” and figured I could probably make dance music pretty easily.
I was wrong. Shit’s hard.
Producer Baby Steps
That same friend got me producing using Ableton Live. The very first song I tried to make was a dub edit of Don’t Phunk With My Heart by The Black Eyed Peas (because I love them fiercely). Later, I bought a tiny MIDI keyboard with drum pads and made all sorts of dinky, rambling songs that averaged 7 minutes in length.
Though I was very happy with my baby beats, I was paralyzed by the idea of showing them to people. I’m not a natural sharer and the mean voice in my head whispering, “bad musician,” was hard to drown out.
Eventually I got around to it and showed them to my roommate at the time, Charlie. It‘s funny now but I remember wanting to play a song for him in particular because I knew that:
- He had good taste in music, and,
- He wouldn’t be able to hide his feelings from me if he didn’t like it.
This was a pretty reckless thing to do in retrospect. If Charlie didn’t like what I played it could’ve very well sent me to a prison of self-doubt and stopped my music producer journey in its tracks.
Fortunately for this story, Charlie ended up liking it and he and I went on to make music together, calling ourselves Teen Simba and releasing an album, Dreaming of You.
One Foot In Front Of The Other
About 6 months after I decided to buckle down and figure out this music thing, I had completed an online course about Ableton Live and music theory, finished a handful of songs, and consumed way too much random, questionable music advice from YouTube videos. I was also DJing a lot at home and put out a couple of mixes.
I signed up for Distrokid and put out my first song, Selfless, co-produced with my friend Sam and featuring a wicked solo on the keys by Henri.
Although I was having a lot of fun making music on my own I began to hit a wall. While rhythm and percussive elements come naturally to me, melodies and harmonies continue to be tough. I realized it would behoove me to try to link up with Henri after working on Selfless with him. Charlie also plays guitar and the three of us started gathering at Henri’s place and jamming.
These nights were always great fun. I used Live to loop the others and applied some cool-sounding delays and reverbs to their instruments. I pencilled in little drum loops in Live’s piano roll because I didn’t have any external gear to make beats with yet. Still, we came up with halfway-decent grooves and I made sure to record every single session.
Even though on the surface we were simply hanging out and having a few beers, under the surface I felt like an imposter on my little laptop beside two people who had been playing instruments since they were kids. I was really insecure.
So, in order to deal with this feeling, I worked my ass off in between our jams so I wouldn’t feel like the anchor. I became much more fluid with Live and spent several evenings creating project templates to smooth out the bumps in the recording process.
As a result of all this focus, I got really excited about our jam nights. I would leave every session and immediately scrub through the recordings with my girlfriend, babbling about how much fun I had and all the new ideas I wanted to try. I was amazed that I had a role in creating these beautiful, meandering soundscapes. They were much more complex and emotional than anything I was able to create on my own.
Eventually I decided I’d take one of our transient grooves and commit it to something lasting. Over what was meant to be a winter-wonderland family vacation spent skating in the Muskokas, I spent a rained-out week cutting a 90-minute long recording into a solid half hour of groove.
This is what became Spaghetti Western (the first album the three of us released as “Spaghetti Boys”) which was given it’s name because of the cowboy vibe we rode that evening.
We went on to release another album later that year, Bolognoise.
Solo Career
By the beginning of 2019, I still felt self-conscious about my own abilities. I didn’t want to put out any of my own music.
Even though I had released two albums already, I felt that they didn’t really count because they were edited jams and because I felt like my friends had carried me — I was “just” doing the looping and “only” applying transitions and creating “simple” edits out of the recordings.
I was getting caught in the perfection trap. I thought it was better to not put anything out than to put something out and have people dislike or ignore it. That “bad musician” thing again.
At the same time I knew I was getting better. Charlie and I had been making music over the past year (apart from the Spaghetti Boys) and I could hear the songs becoming more nuanced, less repetitive, and in general more clear and mature sounding. My old stuff sounded stale by comparison and I became embarrassed by it.
Yet, at a certain point a switch flipped in my brain and I knew I was simply going to put out the favourite tracks I’d made on my own as an album… or “mixtape”, or whatever. Concerns over perfection went out the window all at once.
Why?
I saw another, more scary trap. I realized that if I didn’t put out my old songs right away, I would use the excuse that they “sound like the old me” and not release them. And that I could feasibly keep doing that, keep moving the goal posts in terms of what I felt represented me. And never release any music.
Thus was my first album born. Not as the perfect, Platonic package I envisioned it as but rather as something more honest: a snapshot of me and my abilities as they were at that time.
The present day
Two years is a funny amount of time; it’s not exactly the beginning of the road, but it’s certainly no ten-thousand hours. Two years is enough time to know that you’re committed to something but not long enough to stand out or claim any real mastery over your craft.
But it’s ultimately an arbitrary date — and I’m nowhere near done.
I was fortunate enough recently to stumble across a lot of motivational material, including the BlapChat podcast and from there into a rabbit hole of Gary Vee content.
Motivational material can be its own trap (you can get addicted to feeling pumped but never actually do anything) but it’s lit the right kind of fire in me.
I reflected on what I want to do in my life and realized that my appetite for music is infinite and so I better get moving if I want to achieve even half of what I dream to do. And so I’ve set explicit goals I want to achieve over the next couple of months:
- I am going to engage more with others and build a wider circle of creative people around me.
- I am going to develop a better relationship with my own fear and continue to put out work publicly even though it feels scary (and probably always will).
- I am going to commit myself publicly to completing a 30 day beat challenge where I will post a piece of music everyday for 30 days on SoundCloud and promote it on Instagram.
- I’m already putting in work to get up a couple of hours early to make beats in the mornings before I go to work.
- I’m getting out there by posting content on social media platforms (and Medium!) and this is helping me to feel more confident and reduce the pressure I put on myself that causes me to hide myself away until I’m “perfect”.
The Main Takeaway
Probably the most important thing that I can leave you with is that what you eventually create as your end product doesn’t matter.
In my experience, focusing on the product will leave you feeling frustrated and paralyzed when things aren’t happening fast enough to validate your insecurities.
It has made a world of difference for me when I decided to change my mindset from, “I am going to work until I make something I like,” to “I am going to work for 3 hours.”
What really matters is showing up for yourself everyday — process over product.
Thanks for reading this to the end.
I hope you got something out of reading from my experience and that my words have encouraged you to remain committed to whatever it is you’re striving toward.
It’s been a wild emotional and creative ride and I am thrilled for what I am going to be able to do and what I’ll be able to show you.
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If you want to hear more of what I have to say, I’m planning to be around on Medium so please subscribe to my posts. Also consider following me @djvrac on Instagram and Twitter.
My latest album out is Dreaming of You by Teen Simba, available on all streaming platforms.
