Want professional advice for your music?

[Phase Ghost]

Hi!

Professional one-on-one advice doesn't come free.

yes it does.

isnt that the whole point of a production forum, where more experienced producers help beginners for free.

Right on.

[hydrogen]

thanks for posting this Kim. your blog is great and full of information.

[AK]

I dont have an opinion on the general idea you are trying to sell, however, 'advice' esp when related to the music itself can be very dangerous. It's always in the eye of the beholder and one mans meat is another mans poison so to speak. I had a track appear in future music magazine some time back and the review made me try to write more commercially accessible music rather than writing what appealed to my musical taste at the time (chromaticism and slight atonalism) i kinda realised after that, that it's inherently wrong to critisize anyones choice of musical phrasing within something they have written. There's no right or wrong in music and I'd personally feel I had no right to offer any insight into the music from a compositional perspective.

You say you dont write techno, then how can you have any advice if you do not understand it? It's one of the most experimental genres there is and can at times use very uncommon harmonies and polyrhythms, esp to western ears, not to mention the distancing of conventional song-like arrangement structures. This is why I find it scary when you mentioned offering, song structure help.

Good luck with your endevours though, i don't mean to sound negative, it's just that apart from sound design, technical stuff and mixing etc, it's a tricky area to give advice when dealing with musical aspects. It's easy to try to mould something into your own comfort zone by advising this and that, esp if you don't 'get' the music.

Don't mean to rant but it's one of the reasons I stopped posting music in forums. Not because I'm ignorant to critique, I was already musically competent, that wasnt the issue. The issue was that I started making music the way I thought other people might prefer it. What was worse was that those people werent even into the genre and I actually ended up quitting music for a while because of losing my creativity and experimentalist approach.

[Kim Lajoie]

I dont have an opinion on the general idea you are trying to sell, however, 'advice' esp when related to the music itself can be very dangerous. It's always in the eye of the beholder and one mans meat is another mans poison so to speak. I had a track appear in future music magazine some time back and the review made me try to write more commercially accessible music rather than writing what appealed to my musical taste at the time (chromaticism and slight atonalism) i kinda realised after that, that it's inherently wrong to critisize anyones choice of musical phrasing within something they have written. There's no right or wrong in music and I'd personally feel I had no right to offer any insight into the music from a compositional perspective.

It sounds like you got some bad advice. As you've pointed out - there are many different approaches to making music, and many different tastes and tonalities. I get it. I really do. I'm a producer - in the sense of working with other artists to take their music to the next level - and I totally understand that my role is *not* to make them sound like my taste in music. My role is to make them sound more like howe they want to sound.

You say you dont write techno, then how can you have any advice if you do not understand it? It's one of the most experimental genres there is and can at times use very uncommon harmonies and polyrhythms, esp to western ears, not to mention the distancing of conventional song-like arrangement structures. This is why I find it scary when you mentioned offering, song structure help.

Good luck with your endevours though, i don't mean to sound negative, it's just that apart from sound design, technical stuff and mixing etc, it's a tricky area to give advice when dealing with musical aspects. It's easy to try to mould something into your own comfort zone by advising this and that, esp if you don't 'get' the music.

I don't have any techno projects on at the moment, but I certainly understand the music. I grew up on techno in the 80s (cheesy techno with rapping, but techno nonetheless!). I'm not interested in force people into a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure. I'm not interested in forcing people into classical western tonality or rhythm. It's about making your music more effective at what you're trying to do.

Don't mean to rant but it's one of the reasons I stopped posting music in forums. Not because I'm ignorant to critique, I was already musically competent, that wasnt the issue. The issue was that I started making music the way I thought other people might prefer it. What was worse was that those people werent even into the genre and I actually ended up quitting music for a while because of losing my creativity and experimentalist approach.

I'm sorry to hear it. I hope you get back on your feet (if you haven't already).

-Kim.

[AK]

It seems you have an ability to empathise with peoples music then and would be able to offer advice within the realms of what they are trying to achieve. Hope it goes well for you.

I wouldnt say it was a bad review that I had as such (this was yrs ago) more that the guy was obviously stuck in conventional ideas of harmony and didnt have any forward thinking and musically challenging concepts thrown at him at the time. I wasnt scared to use chromaticism in diatonic scales but the review seemed to suggest I was nuts and people wouldnt be 'ready' for that at all. Of course you hear it everywhere now, so much so that people think of it as almost a cliche.

But yeah, all the best to you.

[TechnoMusic]

Kim I think your offering will do far better on Pop Rock & Acoustic music forums than here. techno & Electronic music forums have a notoriously "Go your own way" and DIY ethic.

Both MNML & IDMF forums or on the cutting edge of this and you are likely to get mostly negative responses from both.

Besides there are already a number of well established commercial dance music & electronica production courses available on-line already, I think you will find it hard to compete with these.

[loureed]

yeah great idea but if you don't have the any knowledge of the musical history.........

i wrote a report

with techno being post modern genre you need to date, compare/contrast previous releases of this kind of sound... it is truly like high fashion with different themes moving on down the summer.. you don;'t even have to know names (remember when trumpets are big last year? now the early 90s are cool, slight dubstep feel is cool, and distortion is edgy)

even someone like me who finds themselfs going for a quite old school tip you need to know previous releases


and if you don't find the history of techno relevant then bullshit
you can figure out the problem of this situation on your own if you want

absolutely

i would pay the owner of a something like funktron one to listen and give a detailed report to my own self mastered track playing through there system. the reason for something like a funktron one is not because of the caliber of the system but because its like a staple in clubs.

IT WOULD BE AN INSANE BOOST OF CONFIDENCE TO KNOW THAT YOUR SOUND IS SICK COMING THROUGH A HUGE SYSTEM . CAPITOL LETTERS ARE THERE BECAUSE I WANT TO PEOPLE TO DO THIS!!!!!!!



this person too would have too have some serious knowledge too (club owners are idiots)

i would also pay studios or people with nice & interesting stuff to run some samples for me or entire tracks through there equipment..... (GOLDBABY ARE YOU LISTENING?)

I would also pay superstar producers money for a detailed report.. but this on a more mainsteam level (i also seriously produce and engineer local bands)

[Kim Lajoie]

Kim I think your offering will do far better on Pop Rock & Acoustic music forums than here. techno & Electronic music forums have a notoriously "Go your own way" and DIY ethic.

You're probably right. I suppose there's an irony here - the reason I came here first was because people here had linked to my blog. But that's probably more because they want to learn on their own. ;-)

Besides there are already a number of well established commercial dance music & electronica production courses available on-line already, I think you will find it hard to compete with these.

Just to clarify - I'm not offering a course. I don't have lesson plans or a graded learning structure. Each person is different - they have different goals, they have different needs. 'Courses' are a one-size-fits-all approach, and they're great if you happen to be at the right stage in your development to take advantage of them.

What I offer is different though - it's tailored personal assistance. I focus on what YOU need, what's holding YOU back, and what YOU can improve on. It's an entirely different approach to a structured course.

-Kim.