Emu XL-7 & MP-7 User's Group

Great post from another website I frequent, author unknown:

"Alright, you know how kids are always going "How do I make my mixes sound 
better?" and what not. The answer is so simple really. Just love what you 
do, study and practice.

Think about it all day, every day for years and keep learning, keep trying 
new ideas all the time.

First off you have to be creative enough to come up with a good idea and 
some people just don't have that. If you do have the ideas then you need 
to have the patience, knowledge (technical) and confidence to bring it all 
together into something that you know is good. There aren't any formulas 
for that. It takes time and effort, more of both than most people have or 
want to give. People are so quick to ask for eq frequencies and 
compression settings and what software to use and what synth is good for 
this and that. There are more than enough books and web resources that 
will give you general guidelines.

Man... this is art and people want recipes. I understand that there is 
nothing wrong with asking questions, I do it more than most. But when you 
ask for a decade's worth of knowledge and experience in one broad question 
it's obvious that you need to be more self sufficient and dig for what you 
want. Does anyone want the journey from here to there... or is it all 
about achieving everything right now?

I don't know why people think that electronic music is any different from 
drawing, writing, sculpting, etc... You don't see people on forums asking 
"How do I paint like Michelangelo?" but somehow... because you can click a 
few notes into a drum grid on a shareware program and say "Whoa I made a 
beat!" the idea that a finished product is right around the corner 
presents itself. Then people start doing stuff and in a month's time don't 
understand why their mixes aren't on wax yet. You can load a drum kit 
consisting of clean hits that are already processed to work together into 
a softsampler, spend a while learning to write basic patterns, then throw 
a sampled bassline or melody over it... and on pc speakers hear a real 
track. This is akin to doing a decent job on a paint by numbers project 
and then expecting to paint for a living. 

It's normal to be ambitious at first and you should be, but you have to 
keep things in perspective.

There is something that a lot of people forget... In dance music half of 
the art is in the mixing and engineering. It's not a science, it's taking 
theory and technique and learning it so well that it becomes 
transparent... and you start using that knowledge in a thoughtless, fluid 
way. It's the fact that you know the rules and know them well enough to 
break them in your own fashion. The guy that engineered the latest pop 
tune on the radio would probably do a rotten job at making an underground 
dance tune tear it up because that is not his passion. If you don't really 
want something it's just not gonna happen. If you do and have the knack 
for it, it will. It's just a natural progression. That has been the way 
forward since the beginning.

Nowadays it is so easy to start making music with computers... everyone 
wants instant gratification. There was a time when you had to commit 
yourself to this because you had no choice but to spend a lot of cash just 
to get started. Then you had to rely on your own ambition and creativity 
for new techniques. It seems like the attitudes have gone wrong in dance 
music. People used to take it as a joke because they thought it was easy 
to do... just computer generated, robotic beats. Now people are taking it 
seriously, trying to be producers and want it to be just that easy. I 
don't get it."

rEalm









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