shrike

Ok well let me know if you need anything and/or have more questions. I love to help.

And at the very least, go back and grab a selection of SG tuts, and that will be the best starting point you can have. For the price of a single night out you can amass a metric-fuck-tonne of good bass design and composition info.

Welcome to the fold, my friend. You’ve come to the right place.

I’m certainly no expert on finishing, it is something that I struggle with too, but I have developed some tools and skills over the years to make things much better for me.

1) work FAST. If you’re just looping the same shit for an hour, get up, take a break, and come back to it when you can work fast. I refer to it as the flow, and you wanna be in it: where you always see something that can be done next, you hit that thing, then you move to the next thing. It can be a challenge getting into the flow, but it’s something that can be worked at

2) collect “scraps”. I switched my DAW to Ableton earlier this year (from PreSonus Studio One), and have been 10x’s more productive because I can save every single sketched idea or scraps in a manner that gives me a library of my own “problem-solving” bits. Midi clips, inst racks, fx racks, presets, audio clips, automation…whatever. I allow myself many sessions that are just sound design and sketching. This way, when I am in the flow, but get slowed by some problem, I have a whole library of potential fixes, all of my own creation.

3) shake up the workflow. If you always start with drums, and then lay in a bass, and then loop that shit until you’re dead of old age, maybe try and build a tune, from scratch, from the intro, in a more linear fashion. I think this can help with writing “into” the drop, as opposed to just creating a drop and then wondering how to get there. And if it doesn’t work out, that’s ok, you now have an intro that might kitbash well with some loop you write in the future. Now do this for all things: create trancey arp layers that just sound cool on their own, make stuttery breaks and fills that can be quickly slammed in to any tune later, create a pre-drop composition just for the fuck of it, without regard to anything that it might drop into. If it’s *you* creating it all, then eventually you’ll have a coherent catalog that all sort of lives in the same universe in terms of sounds, style, etc.

4) find a theme. One of my fave things to do is to get a movie or vocal sample, and write around that. It helps inform me as to *why* the tune exists in the first place, and where I might try and take the whole thing. Creating in an absolute bubble is hard in any art form…find something that helps fuel you through the process

5) research. Listen to as much of everything as you can possibly manage. Your music that comes from you is an aggregate of all of those previously experienced tunes. Feed that monster, whenever you can.

And most of all: keep fucking going. Never ever quit. A bad day is only one bad day, and I’ve had some of my best sessions after some of my worst sessions, and vice versa. Ignore the negativity that may pop up in your brain, focus on why you are doing it to being with, and don’t quit. EVER.