Here's a typical day in the life of a home studio musician who produces their music...see if you can relate:
You've got a great idea for a song, so you rush into your studio and fire up your computer, plug in your instruments and open up a fresh session in your DAW.
You put down a few chords on the keyboard, or strum a chord progression on your guitar, trying to stay inspired long enough to put your idea down before you lose it.
But no matter what you do, that cool idea in your head sounds empty inside your DAW.
And because your awesome song doesn't immediately sound like a full-blown production, you get discouraged and wonder whether you should continue wasting your time.
You try to make every track as exciting and lively as the professional tracks you listen to, but your song just doesn’t have the same energy that you hear on pro recordings.
Regardless of whether you record live instruments or use software synths, your songs sound like a far cry from the full-blown productions you love, and you hesitate to even to show them your friends.
You’re not sure how you’re supposed to arrange your song, so you constantly second-guess whether you’re making the right arrangement choices. You try to create contrast and interest that makes the song flow with tension and release, but you’re not sure whether you’re overdoing it...or worse yet, haven’t done enough.
Having an idea for a song always feels fantastic, but without direction, that idea fades into frustration because you don’t know how to flesh out the arrangement properly.
However, you don’t give up so easily. You try to add more instruments and tweak the arrangement, but you eventually lose your mojo and get distracted, the initial burst of inspiration replaced with a feeling of boredom.
So in the end, you end up with a ton of unfinished tracks on your hard drive thinking that you’ll get to them eventually.
You’ll fix them in the mix, you tell yourself...but let me tell you: Although mixing is a lot of fun, it's not going to make your song great.
Those fancy new plug-ins won't save your song. No amount of EQ'ing, parallel compression or saturation will help.
These are the Three Most Important Elements to Make Your Song Stand Out:
- Songwriting - A well-written song with a great song structure will make any demo flow like a completed song, even if it's only played with one instrument and a vocal.
- Arrangement - Interesting arrangements transform your songs from a three-chord strum to an engaging arrangement full of diverse instrumentation.
- Production - What instruments you choose and the sonic decisions you make while producing your songs will take your music to the next level, giving your music more impact.
When producers pull together a track quickly it’s because they know exactly what they want to accomplish with the arrangement.
The arrangement and production and how you combine (or remove) sections is what makes your songs sound more exciting. Even if you want to record yourself as simply as possible to make a demo, you still want the songs to feel professional.
If you wish you had a better method for making your compositions and arrangements more consistent when you’re producing music by yourself in your home studio, then you’ll love our new course.
