my +12 year journey as a producer
In the world of electronic music production, where trends come and go, and new technologies emerge almost daily. For over a decade, I’ve been a part of it, and learned that the most valuable lessons in production often come from simply refusing to give up.
the beginning
About twelve years ago, I almost accidentally embarked on a journey into the world of electronic music production. Armed with passion, creativity, and an unrelenting spirit, little did I know about the challenges that awaited. The road ahead was filled with countless setbacks, moments of self-doubt, and frustrating creative blocks. Yet, one thing remained constant—the refusal to quit. The feeling of honest passion kept me going even when things got tough and this was the driving force behind this hobby. If you are doing things because “it’s cool” or something like that, your road will find it’s end really quickly. It’s all about finding your passion. I started with FL Studio 6 or 7 if I recall correctly.. Good old times. My friend gave me a copy of the program somehow and introduced me to it. He didn’t really know how to use it and neither did I. Now that I’m remembering the feeling of “new and exiting” FL Studio, it was the best feeling . Learning something really huge and new almost everyday, which I still do today after a decade, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore. I’ve been trying to get back into that same feeling of “not knowing anything” by trying plugins or DAW’s that I knew little about. With my journey I also got familiar With Renoise, Cubase, Ableton and Obviously FL Studio, learning something from these different DAW’s is so valuable and hard to explain. If you are ever feeling “down” or “stuck”, open up a completely new DAW and I guarantee you’ll be really exited about it.
How i got into hardcore?
In this fast-evolving world of music production, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and disheartened. New software, hardware, and techniques emerge constantly, and the temptation to throw in the towel can be strong. However, I understood that in the face of adversity, the only true option was to persevere and stick to the basics. When you hone in your basics, like Basics sound design with simple waveforms and techniques, mixing with EQ, Clipping and Compression and arranging beats you’ll get much further than trying to learn little of everything new. I want use myself as an example. I had no “talent” in music production. My first 4-5 years of production were completely just struggling to create something decent and it took so long to create something that I would even half proudly represent. Not all my years were spent in the Hardcore genre. I’ve been through a lot of different eras of electronic music production from early 2011 to this day. I’ve gone through from the Hands Up Trance to the Original “real trap shit” (Still makes me laugh.. :D) Then there was obviously the “Everybody copying Martin Garrix - Animals” phase to trying to learn how the Legendary Avicii was producing. I’ve also worked a lot in Hip-Hop and now the last 3-4 years in Hardcore. And now comes my point. Even when I started to produce Hardcore I already had a deep knowledge of different realms of music and basic mixing & sound design. However, when I tried to produce Hardcore for the first time, I was completely lost, having no idea what to do. And it FELT AMAZING! For the longest time, I had been looking for this exact feeling and now I got it again! Producing Hard Dance Genres is so unintuitive compared to other genres and the culture of “not sharing production knowledge”, it was amazing to get to figure this “secret” out by myself. I put all of my passion and resources to learning Hardcore Sound Design and Production as fast as possible and started to create patcher tools that basically printed kicks out for me and tried to learn screech/lead sound design as well. I intentionally tried not to watch tutorials so I don’t get “influenced” by how other people do stuff. Obviously, I looked into how the basics work (Distortion, EQ Distortion, EQ..) to have a starting point. It took about 1-2 years to get solid sounding kicks that were decent in the mix, all though still to this day I’m struggling with the low end of the kicks. I just recently made a discovery on this topic! (more about this coming soon.. ;D). In my current situation, I’m sharing all of my knowledge when it comes to production through YouTube and Patreon. I want to give tools to other people just like me when I started to produce.
What can you take away from this?
Learning any skill is going to take years and years of honest work, there are no shortcuts. I’ve been saying this for a while but I’m gonna say it again “Making good sounding music is not easy, otherwise everybody would be doing it”. It’s not easy even for the “professionals”. What is similar with all the people who are really good at something? In the end it is hard work, like it or not. If you are still reading this you might actually have a burn to learn more, for that I’m going to cheer you up, go and do it.