I recieved another email from boyinaband.com reader Ash recently…
The Question
Hi Dave,
Thanks again for your reply. I have been doing some soul-searching recently and have decided that 10 years of ignoring my desire to create music as a profession, is long enough, and that the regret I’ll feel if I don’t give it a bash whilst I still can (young-ish, single, no family/mortgage/etc), outweighs the irrational fear of giving it a proper go. This is obviously a big step which I’m still figuring out, but I’ve spent 10-15 years in the IT industry moving from soulless job to soulless job and had a wakeup call recently which made me realise it’s time I thought about doing something I love. I’ve dabbled in production for years, did my first course (weekends, for 3 months) with Point Blank back in 2003, etc. But have never put a full effort into it – often my soulless IT jobs have hoovered up all my energy and left me a bit drained at the end of each day.
Anyway the reason for the above gratuitous information is because I’m wondering if you can help me shed some light on what options I would have. I’ve always seen myself as a bedroom producer, and that I’d give that a bash as a hobby, see if I can ramp it up somehow into a job (doing what?), etc. I’m not even sure what I would do and what sort of music I would produce. As you can tell, I don’t know where to start… I just know that I love music too much to just be a listener, I want to make music too. I would start with electronica, dance music type stuff, I think.
[in a previous e-mail I mentioned some people dropped out of my music course] You say that most of the people from your course dropped out – why is that? Did the remaining ones get work anywhere? Do you know what they ended up doing? In your opinion, was your course worthwhile? (doing a decent solid course is something I would consider maybe as my first move – I’d meet plenty of like-minded people, and would no doubt get lots of ideas for what sort of work I could do, maybe even get some job leads at the end). I’m not worried about money at this stage, I accept that any career change would probably mean starting near the bottom again – the priority here is to at least try putting more energy & direction into music and seeing where it goes. I’d rather get to 55 years old and say “yeah I tried that and it turned out I was rubbish!” than say “yeah, I would have liked to try that, but was too scared so I stayed in the safe IT world” …
Anyway – sorry if my email doesn’t exactly ask direct questions. I figured you would be a good person to flick an email to though, just to compare notes, and to try and feel my way forward with figuring out my next move. I guess what I’ve been trying to say at the start of this email is that I want to change music production from a hobby-which-I-sometimes-dabble-in, to something more structure which I will commit to seriously – starting with learning/training, exploring what areas I’m good at and could find work in, then evaluating a move into it as a career. Does that make sense now?
chat to you soon – thanks for your time!
Some good questions that I’m sure many starting-out producers are asking themselves. I know I did when I started.
So the question - how do you go about becoming a money-making producer? My answer…
The Answer
Firstly, good on you for deciding to give it a try! I share the same philosophy – give it a try and there’ll be no regrets.
The best piece of advice I can give is to try and make some friends who also want to produce music. Not necessarily in a group, but just having someone there to compare music and share your passion with motivates you a million times as much as going it alone in my experience.
Job-wise - considering your background in IT a video games sound designer would be ideal – there are not many people who are both adept with code and composition in the world and so there are much more jobs out there for that position than for just composers/producers.
A good thing to do to find your style is to try your hand at everything. I’ve produced tracks from reggae to death metal to hard trance to classical… it’s helped me find which parts of those genres I enjoyed and allowed me to incorporate that into my style. If you haven’t already, a good starting point would be to try my 7 day song tutorials, then to try emulating other genres of music.
People dropped out of my course because they were lazy. I haven’t really kept in contact with many people from the course – the only one I have kept in contact with is now running a blog on video production after he did a sound and multimedia course – it’s pretty difficult to get a job doing music production.
Honestly, I think I’ve learned more from a few months of making tutorials than I have from the whole 2 year Music Tech course. YouTube is an infinitely better resource than traditional educational facilities to me, but I suppose that could just be because I’m a visual learner.
Combine that with music production forums and websites with articles on production and you’re pretty much sorted for education.
I really don’t think there’s any better way to improve than by making as many songs as you can – If you’re anything like me, you’ll get frustrated with how your productions don’t sound as good and go googling for resources that can teach you how to improve. It does work, I’ve got much better at production through practice and internet research.
I hope that helps, I’m intending to turn the boyinaband.com forum into a community of producers of all kinds who just want to improve and help each other to improve at their craft, so feel free to join up and ask some questions there!
I hope that helps some of you guys too – Just try to be as prolific as you can, get involved in communities and don’t forget to help other producers once you’ve found your feet! I’m a firm believer that the best way to learn is to teach.
What do you think? Any pieces of advice you would offer to someone starting out as a producer or musician? Leave a comment below with your opinions!
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A community, that would be fun. I tried, not very hard, to put up some of my favorite created synths into your forums for people to mess with but it doesn’t accept the files :[
Is there something I am missing?
Hmm, I’m not sure – have you tried zipping them first?
No I have not, doh. DX thanks.