Curation to Creation

This is my first blog post about music production.

I have no formal experience with music production, no formal education, just a passion and a drive to learn.

Where does my passion come from?

I've always had a fondness for different genres of music. My parents introduced me to 80s hard rock, disco and Motown, so that was the soundtrack of my early childhood: Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Madonna, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, The Jackson 5, and more.

That changed a bit when I got older and my sister got into electronic music, back in the late 90s, early 00s. That's when I started learning about the likes of Eric Prydz, Alice Deejay, Tiesto, ATB, Cascada, etc.

My sister grew up in the era when Pleasure Rooms and Wigan Pier were popular, so I ended up hearing a lot of emcees and NRG type tracks too. I loved the high tempo bounciness of that era of dance, and it's probably why I was drawn to Melbourne Bounce once I got older and started exploring more electronic subgenres.

As the years went on I had my emo/gothic phase, where my taste shifted mainly into post-hardcore, nu metal, thrash metal, etc. Of Mice & Men were incredible live, and it made for a very memorable first concert.

Eventually I realised my taste isn't narrow at all, I can go from metal to dubstep to rap to Melbourne Bounce. I even discovered a liking for jazz and 40s-60s era music, thanks to playing Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

Finding electronic music

Electronic music remained my most listened to genre (or umbrella of genres, really). Starting in the early 2010s I got into curating playlists, watching sets, and digging through unsigned artists and underground radio stations. I wanted to find the gems nobody else had found yet. I'm still proud I found "Meduza - Piece of your heart" when it had less than a thousand views, sent it to all my friends telling them this is going to blow up, and that's exactly what happened.

For a while I considered starting a YouTube channel around this, something like SELECTED or Proximity Music, but my focus at the time shifted more towards gaming and learning tech, which of course eventually led me to becoming a software engineer. That's a story for another day though.

I never stopped curating playlists. Even now my Spotify is full of them, some of which have been getting regularly updated for nearly 15 years.

What would you do if money were no object?

I was listening to a recorded Alan Watts lecture called "Do You Do It Or Does It Do You?", and at one point he asks: "what would you like to do if money were no object?" That question stuck with me, because at the time my answer was to be a DJ.

I heard that lecture 10-12 years ago and I've gone back to it a few times since, but my answer has never changed. Even now, watching the likes of BUNT or John Summit feels like watching someone live my dream.

But when I researched both of them, neither started out as a DJ. They got famous as producers first, and only became DJs afterwards to appease the live audience. Even Avicii followed the same path.

So many of the DJs I listen to today started this way.

That's when I shifted my focus from curation to creation.

Suno

I discovered Suno a few weeks ago and was amazed at what it could do. Song ideas I'd had in my head or scribbled down were finally able to come into reality. At first it was an intense high, plenty of dopamine, and I made numerous songs, but the quality and the sound artifacts bothered me. They still do.

I learned how to master, enhance, and correct some of those details in a more traditional DAW (Ableton), but the more I did that the more I realised I was spending more time on audio repair than I was on actually creating music.

That early high faded and just left a sort of hollow feeling. I still like the music I made and still listen to it, but I don't feel proud of it.

Learning to produce properly

That's when I realised I needed to learn how to produce music properly, without leaning on AI tooling.

Since then I've been using Ableton a lot more. I scoured the internet for some free sample packs, found a YouTube tutorial to get me started, and got to work.

I'm sticking with the basics for now, learning how to build a loop layer by layer: starting with a drum track and a 16-bar MIDI, then the bassline, a lead melody, some effects (just delay and reverb for now), and finally a vocal sample.

I only built about 15 seconds of audio, just a single loop, but I felt so much more proud of it. I understood what I'd done and why I'd made those decisions.

It also made me realise just how much I still need to learn. This should be second nature for a software engineer, but I haven't learned something this unfamiliar in a long time.

What's next

I'm going to keep sharing my journey as I make progress. Writing about it here should keep me accountable, help me keep learning, and hopefully turn this passion I have for music into something special.