Crafting Sonic Journeys: A Guide to Inspired Music Production (Patreon)

One of the most common questions I get asked is “How do I do it?” It’s an extremely open-ended question, given the amount of options that are available to us these days. However, with time and persistence there’s really nothing you cannot accomplish if you set your mind to it. Outside of sheer motivation and will, there are definitely some considerations and techniques you can use to make the journey more fluid. When I think about the question of “how” the goal is always the same: To reach the desired result and express myself in ways that can only be done through the medium of music. Self expression is my North Star, and then share my gift with others. That said, there are some strategies that I’ve learned along the way that can help make the process easier and help you avoid certain outcomes to prevent you from reaching your goals. If you can employ these as part of your mindset, you’ll find you’re making faster progress, and better music than ever before.

Start With the End Goal and Work Backwards

One way that I like to envision the process of music production is to start with the end goal in mind and then work backwards from there. By doing so, you can begin to embody the mindset that in the manifestation community is called “Acting as if” which means you are taking inspired action from the feeling that the goal has already been achieved. It sounds simple (it is) but then what happens when you reach a road block or a technical glitch that gets you hung up? You’ll no longer see them as obstacles, but more as “part of the process” and you can keep moving forward with inspired confidence.

The other main benefit of this mind change is that it allows you to envision the type of music you want to create before it’s been created. Remember: you are starting with the end goal in mind. Whether that’s something that you’ve already produced in the past (always a great reminder) or something that you want to produce, it’s helpful to work from there and then start at the beginning of your track, building it piece by piece. I’m always taking inspiration from others and whether that’s a single part of the track, or even the entire feeling the track gives you, there are ton of ways you can get inspired by something without directly copying, and vice versa.

Mix With Your Heart, Not With Your Head

When I first started producing ambient music, I had no idea how to mix. Even with no idea, I never thought I was “bad” at it because I had no starting point of what bad was, I just winged it and let the chips fall where they may. You can clearly hear this in my first two albums “Language of the Ancients” and “Branches in the Sky” that there was no clear line of what was too loud, or what frequencies needed to go where, I was going strictly by feel and nothing else. However, as my career progressed, I became more self conscious of what I was doing and it became more difficult to reproduce the same results because I was over-thinking the process, rather than feeling it out and making decisions from an intuitive place.

As you can probably gather, there are pros and cons to both of these approaches. The upside to using “intuition” is you are mixing from your “heart” and not the “head” if that makes sense. You are using your senses and ears to guide the piece along. When you are head mixing, you are crunching the numbers and trying to get every aspect of the sound right from a technical perspective. The best way I’ve found is to find a balance between these two approaches. Don’t strictly rely on intuition, but at the same time, don’t ignore what your EQ and compressor are saying either. Use your heart to make choices and then try and feel where the track wants to go. Mixing can be a make or break moment for your track, it can also be a very creative part of the process, rather than one you have to avoid or dread. Find the middle ground and you’ll end up loving the process along the way.