Cockdiesel wrote:all that said, I wouldn't know where to begin writing a r+b song much less mo-town style. hats off to all of you.
Man, you'd surprise yourself. With some focused practice, you'd be producing what you want, when you want.
Here's something I don't tell many people, because I can't stand talking about myself. But... After I quit my first job, I studied at Berklee school of music for a couple semesters - focused on music production. Couldn't take it (or hack it lol), because I didn't excel at an instrument I think. Anyway, I learned a few lessons from that, and those lessons guide me to this day:
(In no particular order)
1. Learn how every instrument is played (NOT how to play each one, but HOW each one is played). One easy way to tell the level of a person's production skills is to listen to the realism in their productions. Are their drums programmed in an unrealistic way? Are their keys programmed unnaturally? To this day I can't stand listening to music where the sound isn't natural. Even great trap music producers - they have a natural / realistic sound to their trap beats (except for those damn machine gun hihats lol). Every producer in EVERY genre that excels, all have that in common - their music sounds natural, realistic. There's a reason BIG time producers use live instruments in their productions.
2. Learn how, when, why and where you use instruments. Listen to songs from every genre, and understand the role each instrument has in the songs. How they use them to tell the story... the lesson is - every instrument has a purpose. A good musician makes the instrument say what they want it to say. Their ego makes it about them. But an excellent musician knows that the instrument speaks for itself. They're just pressing the keys or picking the strings to tell it how high or low to speak. And PLEASE know, by "excellent musician", I'm not talking about level of expertise in playing an instrument. Excellent musicianship is only partly about how well you play the instrument. When I studied at Berklee, we studied songs from just about every genre, every era, and discussed what made the songs great. That understanding is also a big part of musicianship. In fact, maybe we should start a weekly thread like that. Pick a song, and we all chime in and discuss what we think makes it great.
3. A good producer tells you how good they are. A great producer lets the music speak for itself. Many don't know that Quincy Jones was a MASTER producer long before Michael Jackson. Frank Sinatra, his own recordings. But he was so quiet and humble about it, everyone thought he "arrived" with Michael Jackson. In fact, the story is, when Michael asked for Quincy Jones, his label thought he was nuts and said "no way a jazz and orchestral producer can produce a pop record". But guess what - he was a producer. He knew how instruments were used, how to create emotion, how to create a vibe. Granted we're not talking about reaching those levels, but that's what we should be striving for. Be humble about your s---, study, put the work in.
4. If you can't take a way the vocals and have the music stand on it's own, you're not done producing the song yet. And once the vocals are recorded, the song is NOT done. In fact, after the vocals are recorded, most people these days say "all done!". That's why so much music these days doesn't last. You could easily take a Chris Brown track and swap his voice with The Weeknd, and it would sound perfectly fine. Because they probably recorded the vocals and said "done", without crafting the music to fit. And that's also why you couldn't take a Prince song and swap his vocals with anyone else's. It would sound a mess. But in reality, the vocal recordings happen at about the 50-75% production point. There's still more work to be done. Learn what that work is. What needs done. How it's done.
Hope those thoughts are helpful. Just sharing my experiences, even some personal with where I studied, and that's a no-no for the way I usually live. In fact, there's probably some people on this board reading this going... "I didn't know you studied at...". LOL
Grain of salt, I'm NO expert by far. I'm still learning A LOT every day. And every single day the phrase "oh damn, I didn't know that" comes out of my mouth. I'm definitely sharing some positive mileage here, but your mileage may vary.
no MPC? You mean you can do music without the MPC? Well l do declare lol
