Did you successfully get through our original 7 music production challenges? Run the sonic gauntlet again with this follow-up septet and feel your creativity flourish.
1. Try a genre you don’t normally work in
How do you know you suck at EDM production if you’ve never tried? And what makes you assume you’re rubbish at recording guitars if you’ve yet to even attempt it? Put yourself to the test and expand your musical horizons into the bargain by making a track in a genre you’d never normally go anywhere near.
While you can just hurl yourself in at the deep end by listening to a few tunes in your chosen style and cracking on, we’d recommend looking up a few tutorials on it first, to at least give yourself a grounding in the fundamentals. YouTube is overflowing with guidance on producing everything from techno to metal, and there are plenty of informative walkthroughs and tips to be found on the broader internet, too. Who knows, you might have an untapped Calvin Harris or Steve Albini within you, waiting to emerge!
2. Make a track using nothing but free plugins
This one shouldn’t actually be too difficult these days, what with the quality of many of the freeware instruments and effects seeing release every month being so high. The quest, quite simply, is to record, process and mix a complete track using only free plugins, and the educational value here lies in discovering the approaches taken and limitations enforced by independent developers in the alternative presentation and functionality of the tools you rely on every day.
Having downloaded a few gratis synths, compressors, EQs, delays and all the rest of it (hit the FREE PLUG-INS link above for inspiration), it might be helpful to hide all your usual paid plugins in your DAW, just to get them out of your eye-line. Some DAWs will offer such concealment as a built-in option, but if yours doesn’t, you could either move them out of your plugins folder temporarily, or install the freebies to a separate folder and redirect your DAW’s preferences to that instead.
If you’re feeling really thrifty, you could even do the whole thing in a free DAW, such as Garageband, Pro Tools | First or MPC Beats.
3. Try an odd time signature
Western music being what it is, It’s highly likely that you’ve never worked in any meter other than 4/4, with the possible exception of the almost equally mundane 3/4 or 6/8. But odd time signatures aren’t just for jazzers and prog rock heads – writing in the likes of 5/4, 13/4 or 7/8 can really test your compositional abilities, especially when it comes to making beats sound like they want to occupy that temporal space, rather than being forced into it.
The resulting track will end up being more for listening than dancing to, but if the idea of taking your sound in a more cerebral, artsy direction appeals, this particular exercise could be life-changing.
4. Remix an old track
If, like many of us, you find it hard to go back and listen to your earliest material, with its naive sound choices, sledgehammer processing and ill-advised mixing decisions, why not exorcise those technical ghosts by remixing it up to the standard to which you now aspire?
Having loaded an old project in your DAW, first go through it and get rid of everything that crosses the line into ‘irredeemably excruciating’ territory, then get stuck into the process of replacing weak but conceptually solid sounds with new ones, readdressing the arrangement, and rebuilding the mix (and all effects involved in it) from scratch. Obviously, the central theme or idea behind the track has to have some merit for there to be any point in doing this, but your nascent productions can’t all be that bad, surely…
5. Score a video
Change up your musical headspace by soundtracking a video of some kind. It could be an old home movie, a new one shot specifically with a musical idea in mind, or a few muted scenes from a favourite film – anything that encourages some degree of interactivity between music and visuals.
If you’ve only ever made beat-driven tunes before, the programmatic, reactive approach required to compose and arrange an effective soundtrack will prove eye-opening, and the real challenge comes in working your usual stylistic proclivities into the mix – both literally and figuratively. After all, the idea is – as ever – for the end result to sound like ‘you’, so if trap is your bag, don’t be shy about rolling out those 808s; or if you normally deal in acoustic pop/rock, reach for that guitar before presumptively firing up a synth pad. Such unfamiliar deployment of your regular go-to instrumentation can shift your entire perspective.
6. Misappropriate everything
Subvert all sonic expectations by substituting each and every expected instrumental sound source in a track with something wholly unsuitable, wrangled into shape using plugins and destructive processing.
Build a drum kit out of messed-up guitar and piano samples; pitch a flute recording down to make a bassline; design a lead line using drum sounds; smash a vocal up into a percussion part… you get the idea. As long as every element in the track that ultimately emerges isn’t what it appears to be – and the track itself works overall, of course – it’s mission accomplished.
7. Make a track using only found sounds
Doubling down on that last suggestion, how about piecing a song together from nothing but samples of domestic and environmental noises? Grab your phone or mobile recorder and capture the sounds of anything in your house and/or the outside world being struck, shaken, scraped, dropped, kicked or otherwise ‘triggered’. Pots and pans, furniture, children’s toys, traffic, conversation, cafe ambience, wildlife, water, wind… There’s no shortage of man-made and nature-powered signals out there waiting to be looped, pitched, stretched, distorted and exploited as musical source material. And no, we’re not specifically talking Eno-esque ambient numbers, either – the trick is in turning those disparate waveforms into melodically, harmonically and rhythmically engaging ‘instrumentation’. It’s much, much harder than you think.
If you come up with anything worth sharing as a result of taking on any of our challenges, post a link in the comments – we’d love to hear it!