Creating Your Own Music

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(Image via Produce Like a Pro)

Joshua King, Arts and Entertainment Editor

As an experienced musician, I understand the feeling of wanting to create original music. As incredible as creating music is, it can be a very hard process. Without prior knowledge or experience, it can prove to have a difficult learning curve and be a very discouraging process. Because of this, some will simply give up. I want to help people familiarize themselves with the process and half some sort of an idea of where to go.

Writing: the first step to creating original music is actually writing it. There are a few ways to start this step, and choosing what to start with depends entirely on how your ideas come to you. The first and most basic way to write a song is to create all the parts bit by bit, making sure everything goes well together as it goes along. To do this, start with a few lines of lyrics or music, and build the other things with it, to the same amount, and then repeat this bit by bit until you have the full song. The advantages of this method are that you know everything goes well together and you do not need to backtrack as much. The downsides are that it can take a bit longer to get everything working together correctly and you will have to write new parts of the song every time you finish the previous bit. The other method is creating every part all the way through one at a time. For example, start by writing all of the lyrics, then do the rest around that. The advantage of this method is that you can build everything off of one central idea, which will make that central track come out more. The disadvantage of this method of writing is the large margin of error provided by setting in stone everything that one instrument will do, and then finding that it doesn’t fit with the rest of the song, and having to remake the entire thing. But once you find out exactly what you want and are happy with the song, it’s time to move on to the next step.

Recording: even if you don’t plan on releases your music online for download or on disk, it is still good to have recordings of your music to reference later on, and of course if you are releasing your music, recording it is necessary. Whether you are a solo artist doing multiple instruments or you have a 20 person big band, Your options are all at once or one at a time. With looping software, you can to play a few measures of music and have them loop until another few measures are played over it. There is a learning curve to this software, but how it works is this: you have every instrument and microphone hooked up to the same sound system that has the ability to loop. Because every connection to every mic or instrument is being processed as individual things by the system, it keeps track of exactly which item is putting out audio at any given time. Because of this, you can set some to loop and some to not, and when you play each instrument the system “records” everything you do from when you start playing until you stop, and once you stop, the system loops that recording over and over again until something tells it to stop or you play something else on the same instrument. This system, along with a pair of headphones, allows you to have everything that you want playing at the same time and allows you to hear all of it at the same time and change your recording in real-time. The other option is that you simply record each instrument or track separately and then edit them all together. With that option, you have to make changes and re-record entire tracks if something doesn’t fit.

Releasing: once you have the song recorded, if you are wanting to, releasing it is the next step. Again, how to go about this varies, but my personal suggestion is that you start by releasing on smaller platforms for free or little money, spread it to your friends, and possibly, if people like it and you like it (which I assume you would since you made it) then possibly make some, but not very many, physical copies. When starting out, I would recommend releasing music one piece at a time, then transitioning gradually into full albums. My philosophy behind this is that releasing them on at a time gives you more opportunities to learn and familiarize yourself with the process. It also allows you to create a more intimate connection to your music.

Not being discouraged: making music is hard, and like I previously mentioned, it can be extremely discouraging. Remember that if others don’t enjoy your music, that doesn’t make it bad, it just means it’s not their style. People have told me that they don’t like some of the music that I make, and that’s okay. It is impossible to make everyone happy, and you aren’t expected to, and you shouldn’t be expected to. Be proud of your creations, they are a part of you and you deserve to be able to express yourself. Don’t give up, because although the journey can be discouraging, it is so rewarding and worth it in the end. I hope that I’ve helped at least a little, go out there and make some art.