Your Knowledge is Your Virtue

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The challenges of an upcoming producer: How to get started

Before starting or beginning to write this article, I had a lot of debate, about the reader of the article...how would I define an UPCOMING producer? Is it somebody who has already started? Or is it somebody who is getting started...tough one right? Well then there is always no better place to begin that at the very beginning, right?

Beginning or getting started with production can be quite amazing, all the learning that's there to be done can be really fascinating, challenging and most importantly exhilarating...why most importantly You might ask, well truth is that very exhilaration is what will sustain Your love for music production when all else has but hidden away or when the CHALLENGES of production kick in…Soo if it does not take Your breath away, You might wanna reconsider as early as now.

Okay enough about that for now, on to the real production talk...You have a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) * and You want to make great music, what do You do? Need? Have? Must have?...yes I do realise I asked about Need and Must Have, trust me in music those two tend to differ, You will see as I go on.

For me:-A GOOD KICK is the absolute fundamental of a GREAT/GOOD track or song or I.D or whatever You choose to call it...

Kick

Kick

Defining a kick can be quite tricky(the actual name is actually KICK DRUM)..I dare You to try and google it and see how long it will take to get the right definition or just ask your producer friends and watch them turn pale trying to figure out what really is a kick...worse still ask them to define a good kick...LOL

To really define a kick, one has to go back to live music where there were or there are DRUMS and live instruments...no matter how degitalised we are, have been and will be those live Drums and Instruments are still the fundamentals of Music as we know it and in those DRUMS, "The largest drum of the orchestra" ,(http://www.google.nl/search?q=what+is+a+kick+in+music)

The bass drum that should rightfully make the biggest punchiest(well not always)and most direct sound is the KICK.

Orchestra

Now imagine you own or manage an orchestra, very popular, very famous and very much in demand...You are playing for somebody very important, say...the Queen of England or the president of the USA or the president of Your own respective country and You point to the Drums guy to begin the perfomance with a very powerful, energy boosting and mood lifting Kick...puuu! it sounds like a little audible fart...or maybe Your favourite Drummer is about to do the best Drum solo of all time...5,4,3,2,1 aaaaand by some mistake he has two cymbals instead of a kick...see the importance of a good kick yet?

Now how does one choose a Good Kick? We can get really technical and boring talking about frequencies and graphs and charts and all, we can buy amazingly expensive equipment just to try and select the perfect kick...but in all honest truth, the best and only way to select good kicks is to develop a GOOD EAR for GOOD MUSIC and learn from it...not only is it going to save You money but also valuable time in the long run.

Time

The best I can do to help a beginner producer at this stage is to point out characteristics of a Good Kick.

A good kick must sound Good on its own (a good kick is one which You can listen to on its own and actually dance to... it takes time to learn the difference and actually train the ear to differentiate between a good Kick and a bad Kick but trust me it's worth it...better still, learn to make Your own unique kicks that will suit Your style of production) (WA Productions has amazing samples of amazing kicks and sub-kicks alike, visit their soundcloud page for these incredible samples and many more music production goodies) http://soundcloud.com/w-a-production

A good kick works with the song not against it (To say Your kick is a GOOD kick, it must add value to the selection of instruments You have selected not take value from them...let's go back to our orchestra scenario, imagine that everybody is playing together in perfect harmony and the crowd is loving the melodic harmony and unison of a well -oiled orchestral machine, when suddenly enters the drum guy, drunk and super loud on his drum playing randomly at no specified intervals...that's what a bad kick can do to an otherwise brilliant track...trust me.)

A good kick should be punchy and direct (not all over the place/mix*...it should penetrate the mix and hit You deep inside and leave a long lasting impression on your soul, it should create emotions and orchestrate feelings...it should drive passions and derive the music of an individual soul)
When You finally have all those...then You have a good kick...

To get slightly technical, a punchy well balanced kick can be enhanced or is mostly strong around 84-150Hz# on your EQ....play around those frequencies You will hear it get better or worse accordingly.

Kick EQ

Kick EQ 2

For a typical house beat or track...there is mostly that 4 to the floor kick...listen to Your favourite house track and count...they go in intervals of 4...that's the typical house beat...as for hip hop, trap and other genres it can get quite tricky because it varies almost every other week but with practise You can be one of the people setting those trends...

Beat 1

Beat 2

I would Love to talk about instrument selection but in all fairness it deserves an article of its own as trying to squeeze it here won't be fair to the reader, instrument selection is an art on its own, it can either make or break, so please allow me to dedicate the next article to helping You select the right instruments to create the right feel and MOOD for the listener and make those chart topping hits.

#Hz-are units of frequency in the SI system of measurement

*http://www.google.nl/search?q=DAW

Your W. A. Production team

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