Seeing the Big Picture

Often we get caught up in the little details. Which is okay, since all the little details make a large difference to the final song.

Now and then, however, we need to step back and see where we're headed. If we finish one song and dive straight into the next and rarely take the time to reflect on our long-term goals and direction, we may lead ourselves into a creative rut. We may compose, produce and mix our songs in habitual ways, not growing as much as we could. We may get bored and disillusioned with the music we make, feeling that our last five songs were just minor variations on the same theme.

We may have lost touch with musical trends; we shouldn't follow trends for the sake of trying to be successful - if the trend doesn't naturally excite us then we're not going to be able to create exciting music in that trend. Being aware of trends can be helpful even if they don't excite us overall. Perhaps among the new sounds we don't like there's also a trend towards a drier sound (that is, less reverb), which we may see as appealing.

Seeing the big picture with regard to which of our songs are strong enough to warrant taking them through to completion involves leaving some time between the original composition and the subsequent production. I've read interviews with people who have worked on classic albums, where each of the eight to twelve songs are very strong. The artists/ bands would have up to 80 songs to choose from when they started recording the album. Not every song was developed past an initial draft. We can learn from this - if we want to create one or two very strong songs, we should compose ten to twenty rough ideas before deciding which ones to take through to the next step. This saves an incredible amount of time compared with taking every single idea through to completion.

Seeing the big picture with regard to learning about and working on aspects of our art - songwriting, production, engineering - means we may not finish any songs for a while. However, it also means that every single song from then on will sound better (well, if we have learned and practiced effectively). If we're struggling to make our bass sound good in our mixes it will make a big difference to put aside our current song and spend a week or two focusing purely on bass sounds.

I've done this a number of times and improved a lot as a result. I once put together around 100 combinations of kick drum and bass sounds. I went through all my synthesizers and samplers and found appealing bass sounds, then matched them with kick sounds which complemented them. A large number of the 100 attempts were rubbish. But 20 sounded quite good and five sounded fantastic, providing me with solid foundations to build five of my next songs onto. I may not have created any songs for a couple of weeks, but I had a lot more experience with my sound sources and putting these sounds together. Vastly preferable to working on and finishing a song with a kick and bass combination which may have fallen around position 30 of the 100 and despairing that the song doesn't sound great overall!

This approach can be applied to any aspect we wish to improve - writing melodies, creating chord progressions, improving our arrangements and song flow, finding better ways to group sounds, finding ways to make better use of our send effects and a thousand other things. If we listen to enough great music we'll have a good feeling for where we need to improve.

Touching again on sound sources - seeing the big picture means getting to fully understand and appreciate the sounds each of our instruments, samplers, drum machines, synthesizers and so on can give us. Each instrument has a range of sounds it can produce - there is no synthesizer which can produce the sound of every other instrument. As in the previous paragraph, this happens largely through working with the instrument, using it in a large number of productions/ practice sessions, experiencing how the sounds fit together with the other sound sources at our disposal. It takes time to understand and get the most out of an instrument. New sound sources can be inspiring and very useful, but if we constantly look to the new to provide us with "amazing sounds" we will struggle with achieving solid, well-produced songs.

As always, I hope some of you have found this useful. It's very satisfying to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come and how much potential we have to create even better music in the future!

Fabian