Soft Skills 2021
The Process of Making Music
Greetings, reader. Today we will talk about such an interesting process as creating music. I am a musician and for 4 years I have been writing music. Have I been successful? Relatively. Due to my perfectionism, I could not begin to finish projects for a long time. But recently, I started writing material that I really like. And so now I will introduce you to my craft.
Idea
It all starts from here. The musician lays the foundation for the song. It can be a political view, a message, an emotion, a mood, a description of an object. Each idea can be developed in its own way. This is the creative process.
Demo
Musical instruments are selected according to the mood. Each instrument has a sound that can accentuate emotion and message. Then the process of improvisation and testing begins. With the help of musical scales, modes, rhythm, and accents, a melody is created. After that, a few more instruments are applied. In this case, vocals are also an instrument. The structure of the song, its character and composition are invented. Music has three components: rhythm, melody, and composition. And each of them affects its mood. A fast rhythm will make the song groovy, while a slow one will make it calm and relaxing. The melody will give character: sad, cheerful, gloomy, light. The composition will denote the narrative.
Recording
When the demo is ready, it is necessary to estimate the amount of work, to correct certain parts of the composition itself. When the money is raised and the musicians are ready to play, the recording process begins in the studio. Which, in turn, ends with the mixing of the composition by the sound engineer and the finished song. Today, this process is digital: that is, everything happens exclusively through a computer, where the "magic of sound" takes place in specialized software.
Distribution
For music to sound from all cracks, you need to sell it. This is done either by the music label or by the musicians themselves. How labels work is a separate conversation that will take a lot of time. How can a musician share their music and still earn money? Services! There are many services ready to distribute music for money on all sites. They vary by various factors. Some charge a fee for one song, some provide a subscription for a certain period, some take a percentage of sales. Independent musicians are very excited about this opportunity, as they don't have to bear the burden of label censorship. But this is not enough. In our world, we must fight for human attention.
Advertising
There are many ways to promote your product. Audience orientation comes in. It is necessary to use each method of advertising among that age and cultural group of people with which it is more effective. For young people it’s through social networks, for the elderly — through newspapers. I'm exaggerating. In general, you need to try to get in, and when you succeed, stay there.
In fact, the process of making music is much more general, varied, and more complex than described in this article. But because of this, it does not cease to be what I live for. I hope I was able to shed some light on this nebulous and magical process for you, my dear readers.
Written by Leonid Dzyatko
Subscribe to my Instagram page to follow my musical progress.