How to Practice Music Production
Adam Pollard delivers an assortment of of music production tutorials! See how to practice music production techniques that will hone and sharpen your production skills. These music production videos are designed for the new producer just starting out, but are also great for anyone who...
Author: Adam Pollard aka Multiplier
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- Contents 22
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0:40
Introduction
Multiplier welcomes you and goes over what the series is all about.
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2:40
Analyzing MIDI
Analyzing sample pack MIDI is a great exercise for learning timing. The people creating them are experts, who know all the "correct" ways to do it for that genre. I show two examples: tech house drum rhythm, and an idea to make chords sound more "human" and realistic.
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3:41
Construction Kits
Construction kits are a great way to learn how full tracks are layered, and sequenced. I illustrate this with an example, showing you the best workflow for analyzing them effectively and efficiently.
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3:03
Create 64 of Something
As an exercise, try creating 64 of something. Without task switching. You'll gain a much deeper understanding of the thing you're creating, and be forced into a more creative frame of thought, as you'll need more than your usual 3 or 4 approaches to the problem. And as a bonus, you end up with a sample pack full of stuff to use... that's yours!
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4:32
Deconstructing Presets
Deconstructing presets is a great way to learn how things work. I provide a few tips and tricks for doing so effectively, while deconstructing a Serum preset I created for a sample pack I made for Splice.
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2:33
Deliberate Practice
Try doing "deliberate practice" of a task you want to improve at (e.g. EQing drums, or compressing vocals). Do just that one thing, over and over again, without task-switching. In this example, I show how this would work if compressing a folder full of sample pack vocals, including a useful tip for which folder to choose!
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0:54
How to Finish Tracks
Entering remix contests is a great way to practice finishing tracks, as the deadline forces you to finish things. It's important to practice going through all the motions, and completing tracks, even if you aren't happy with them yet.
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3:47
How to Hear Sound Design Imperfections
To train your ear to recognize mixing mistakes, or sound design imperfections, create the mistake. Push it too far. Learn how the problem sounds when it's obvious, and that'll make it much easier to hear when it's more subtle. Here I use limiting artifacts in mastering as an example.
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1:09
Keep the DAW Open
We learn by doing. Don't just passively watch tutorials or read manuals. Learn with the DAW open, so you can pause it every time a new thing is shown, and try it for yourself. It sounds obvious, but most people don't do it.
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2:38
Learning from Presets
We can learn concepts by analyzing presets. In this video I'll give two examples to spark your imagination (both using EQ Eight presets in Ableton). The first illustrates one way to make a mono sound stereo. The second illustrates what structurally makes something sound like a vowel.
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8:46
Learning from Plug-Ins
We can also use plug-ins to learn music production concepts. Here, I use a chord generating plug-in (Captain Chords)to learn how to best add notes to a chord and to thicken it up. We also see when it's best to change chords, and what rhythmic structures generally work.
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12:13
Playback: Frequencies
See how to gain a proper understanding of how we hear frequencies differently, depending on the situation. Our ears, the volume, our speakers, our room, and even where we place our head in the room, affects how we hear frequencies.
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4:57
Playback: Stereo Imaging
Following on from the previous video, but this time, learn how various stereo imaging techniques translate in different situations.
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5:14
Playback: Use the Wrong Speakers
As a thing to practice, every 3 or 4 sessions, produce on "bad" speakers, i.e. something the end listener might listen on. Understanding how your engineering decisions translate to the full range of playback devices/situations, is THE most important thing in music production. You MUST routinely train your ear in this way.
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2:25
Recreating Tracks
Recreating tracks you like is a great way to practice music production, however, most people find the process frustrating/impossible, and almost immediately give up. There's a trick though. Don't recreate the sounds, and don't recreate the notes. It's all about learning the structure, both macro (arrangement), and micro (sequencing & layering) structures.
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2:25
Resonant & Unwanted Frequencies
Discover how to train your ears to pick up on (unwanted) resonant peaks, whistles, and ringing sounds. I demonstrate this on a high hat.
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1:01
Set a Reminder on Your Phone
Set a reminder on your phone to practice that technique/concept you just learnt, in two weeks time. To make sure you don't forget it. And keep setting reminders for a few months.
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1:43
Use Metering
Whenever possible, use level meters, and spectrum analyzers, to help you understand what's happening. It's a more efficient way to make sense of what you're hearing. I provide two examples, detuning, and how chords are a natural way to spectrally fill up a mix.
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0:45
Using Synthesis to Train Your Ears
Learning synthesis is an efficient way to train your ears for the structural components of sound (pitch, amplitude, stereo imaging, harmonics, etc..), as you are isolating, and manipulating each individually. This translates to other aspects of music production too, e.g. mixing. It's easiest to learn "phasing" while learning synthesis, which makes it then possible to hear this issue when mixing.
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4:07
Visual Feedback
When learning music production, we need to use tools with visual feedback, otherwise, it'll literally take 50 times as long to understand what's happening. Once we've learnt the concepts with visual feedback, we can use tools without the visual feedback. In this video I demonstrate using Serum, comparing to Massive & Diva.
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1:51
Visually Analyze Waveforms on the Grid
We can visually analyze waveforms (comparing to the "grid"), to learn how things "should" line up. In this example, I do this to show how we usually nudge claps and snares a bit to the left of the 2's and 4's.
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3:43
Why?
As an exercise to practice, ask yourself WHY you do what you do, or WHY you insert a "standard" element like you do. Understanding the functional reason for that thing, allows you to pick a more creative alternative, that serves the same function. I show two examples, off-beat hi hats, and white noise risers.
Product Overview
Adam Pollard delivers an assortment of of music production tutorials! See how to practice music production techniques that will hone and sharpen your production skills. These music production videos are designed for the new producer just starting out, but are also great for anyone who produces music.
Starting things off, Adam shows you how to analyze professional MIDI tracks, construction kits, and presets, so you can peek behind the curtain and see what makes this content work. Next, Adam reveals powerful practice techniques that will supercharge your production abilities, including "deliberate practice", how to finish tracks, how to learn to hear sound design imperfections, and understand how frequencies and stereo imaging work.
Adam then gives you even more tips and tricks to take your production skills to the next level, including how to effectively use metering and other visual feedback to improve your eyes and ears, helpful workflow concepts and much more.
To see what each video teaches you and how it can help you produce music better, see the individual music production tutorial descriptions on this page. If you're new to producing music and want to really get better fast, this collection of music production help secrets will do just that... See how to make better music productions today with “How to Practice Music Production".
Reviews
ADAM aka Multiplier perfect as ever
This tutorial is a gift, well explained, with good "visual feedbacks" ;) Adam knows how to be effective choosing small subjects and providing goods and different examples to push the concept beyond the cliché or the "known by heard". Very interesting Great jobs, thanks !
I am a: Semi-Pro, Musician, Producer, Sound Designer, Sound for Film/TV, Ableton Live, Cubase
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Very Helpful
Multiplier delivers another great course. These strategies have helped to further refine my musical self study.
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Very helpful!
I used to struggle with being discipline in developing my skillsets for music production, but these videos have opened up many new avenues for me to improve consistently. I find them helpful!
I am a: Beginner, Student, Hobbyist, Semi-Pro, Professional, Musician, Producer, Beat Maker, Audio Engineer, Sound Designer, Game Designer, Mastering Facility, Sound for Film/TV, Ableton Live
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Great Covid Price deal..
I haven't had time to try it at the moment due to corona/Covid .soon as I can I will upgrade or down grade the video's but great price during Covid
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very inspiring stuff
multiplier is a very good teacher, sharp and focused, i learned a lot. thanks.
I am a: Hobbyist, Musician, Producer, Beat Maker, Ableton Live
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Less gesticulation, more information. Please.
Less gesticulation, more information. Please.
Response from :
Precise & Straight to the point.
It is tough to find video tutorials nowadays, where the content is delivered precisely to the point and avoiding talking about the optional subjects, which makes the audience can not continue to watch because they are too long. Adam Pollard, aka Multiplier, is a great instructor in this tutorial collection. Not only did he jump right away to each subject (with tiny description at the beginning), but all the examples that he is showing in these videos are precise, short, but contains all the right points of each segment. That quality makes me able to connect and able to understand them, even though I am not a native English speaker. That, to me, is a great plus. Being able to connect, with the diversity of audiences without having to know them personally, and ready to engage is not something that the majority (yes, I say the majority) of instructors out there can do. Of course, this based on my personal experience of watching content on the internet. Great job, and thank you very much for this Adam Pollard. You have helped me as an indie artist to become better at creating my art. I hope everyone that watches your tutorial will feel the same way as I do. Warmest Regard Argales
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Insightful...
This tutorial series provides a palette of learning techniques that can be used to advance the understandings of concepts used in music production at any skill level, and within any genre.
I am a: Student, Producer, Audio Engineer, Sound Designer, Ableton Live, Reason
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Dope
and unique !
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Awesome!
Everything you never knew you needed to know! ???? Seriously one of the best tutorials! Watch it now!
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