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To anyone who thinks "it is easy", try this experiment: recreate a popular song (+100M views on YT for example) in some DAW. (the songs are produced in similar

by yobbo 5y ago

To anyone who thinks "it is easy", try this experiment: recreate a popular song (+100M views on YT for example) in some DAW. (the songs are produced in similar DAWs.) You won't be able to recreate the vocals, but you should be able to recreate the backing track almost identically. Put the original in right ear, your version in the left ear, and iterate until switching between versions sounds identical. Over 100s of hours, this will train you ears, and you will appreciate the production quality of today's pop music. This just covers the production and mixing, not the writing. Catchy pop songs sound deceivingly simple, which is the point and why they are so difficult to write.

analog31 5y ago
There's a long interview with Rick Beato and Pat Metheny. My opinion is that among "younger" jazz musicians, Metheny has a rare gift for writing catchy melodies. He can write melodies that sound like folk songs, or like the most advanced deep jazz tunes, or both at the same time, pretty much on demand. He said nobody teaches how to do this. You can study composition and arrangement, but they won't teach you how to create a melody. I don't know if he was implying that it can't be taught. But it's certainly valuable. I know someone who wrote tunes on speculation, and one of his melodies was chosen as the year's jingle for a major brand. It made him enough money to pay cash for a house. Of course this was many years ago.
- iainctduncan 5y ago
  Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us, and most of them have no idea how to explain how they learn/teach in ways that are useful to regular brains. I've met some of them, and they might as well be a different species. (Synthesesia is often part of it, I did a master class with a pianist who was basically tripping the whole time he played, listening to him describe his experience was so completely un-relatable to normal people.) Some of those folks are also great teachers, but a lot of them just say the most completely useless advice because they can't even remember not being able to instantly play whatever they hear.
  - jdgoesmarching 5y ago
    I’m not sure if you put Jacob Collier in this category, but I think his success has a lot to do with him attempting to make these higher abstractions of music more approachable.
    - hammock 5y ago
      There is something to that. He reminds me of Eric Whitacre in a sense. Whitacre reached "genius" "prodigy" "best composer" status among amateurs and beginner musicians because he published his music with all kinds of markings on it (e.g. explicitly writing crescendi and diminuendi for every basic phrase, and notating all kinds of subtle tempo changes) that a well trained singer would already understand implicitly without need for the markings (which in my opinion as a well trained singer with his own sense of style, are annoying). The effect is to allow bad high school choirs to get to decent-sounding choral music.
  - laserlight 5y ago
    > Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages. Of course, this is not a proof against some people’s wiring differently, but if one could become Mozart without special wiring maybe we shouldn’t count on the idea too much.
    - asdffdsa 5y ago
      Is "Peak" in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell or "Good to Great" which preselects a handful of prodigies across all fields then makes broad, definitive (unscientific) conclusions based on some posthoc observations?
      - iainctduncan 5y ago
        No, if anything Peak was written as a response to Outliers, which grossly misrepresents Ericsson's work. Peak is his popular science version of his own work, presumably to correct that. It's a good read, and can act as a guide to his actual academic papers. But bear in mind, it is still only as good as his studies, which were done on pre-professional players and athletes, not on the super-elite geniuses. Outliers is a complete piece of shit. No professionals take anything in that book seriously, it's cherry picked extrapolated nonsense by someone who wanted a good story and has no idea what he was talking about.
Slow_Hand 5y ago
Record producer/writer here. You're on the nose with this. Simplicity and clarity are skills, like writing essays, that are refined over many many years to make something appear effortless. You also allude to it, but there is a staggering amount of unseen effort that also goes into the writing and arranging of the song. Listeners only experience the end product and the final arrangement. For simple melodies it seems very obvious that that's how they should have been all along, but hidden behind that apparent simplicity can be hours and hours of false starts, dead-end paths, and a constant paring-down of complexity in some cases. It's not uncommon for me and a collaborator to write a full sketch for a song (verses, choruses, lyrics, etc) before hitting on a groove or turn of phrase in the bridge that absolutely KILLS. Quite often what happens is that we discard the entire rest of the song and build something new around this new inspiring nugget of musical gold. This will quite often turn into an entirely new song with a very different feel, message etc. It's a musical moment or hook that we would not have arrived at had we not gone through the whole process leading up to it. I've never regretted having had to go through the preceding steps to arrive there. It's always welcomed by the collaborators in the room and it's easy for us not to get stuck in a sunk-cost fallacy because it brought us to the place we're at now.
- anonymouse008 5y ago
  Any chance we’ve heard your work just in daily browsing? Or mind pointing us to your work? Would love to associate this comment’s context to the songs we hear
  - ldehaan 5y ago
    It's obviously Eminem.
moralestapia 5y ago
This analogy is moot. As if someone tried to justify that "it's hard to make a milshake" by saying "yeah but you couldn't make one exactly the same, at the molecule level, as this one I made earlier". Furthermore, I presume, not even the original creator could make another track with the same sound as one of its own, if it were to start again from scratch. Akin to how it'd be almost impossible for someone to draw the exact same sketch twice.
gavinray 5y ago
You can use Machine Learning tools to isolate the vocals from the original song. I've done this exact thing (song recreation/transcribing) as part of taking music theory lessons. For anyone else who would like to try this, I will share how to do it: 1. Use one of the popular models for Source Separation. Facebook's is called "Demucs" and one of the best. Deezer's is called "Spleeter", also very good, and then there's "OpenUnmix". There's a webservice to separate a song using Demucs here: https://demucs.danielfrg.com/ https://demucs.danielfrg.com/ And a great Dockerized webapp that lets you choose from several models and parameters here: https://github.com/JeffreyCA/spleeter-web https://github.com/JeffreyCA/spleeter-web Otherwise you can just install them locally and run them through the CLI, it's pretty easy (one command) https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs#for-musicians https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs#for-musicians https://github.com/deezer/spleeter#quick-start https://github.com/deezer/spleeter#quick-start 2. Now you can take the isolated vocals, and build the rest of the song yourself I've also found that it really helps to be able to listen to each of the parts of the song in isolation when trying to recreate them. The drums, the bassline, the lead/synth, etc. It can be hard to distinguish notes when they all run together. You can use an EQ to try to single out instruments but it's harder. Hope this is helpful to someone.

by yobbo 5y ago

analog31 5y ago

There's a long interview with Rick Beato and Pat Metheny. My opinion is that among "younger" jazz musicians, Metheny has a rare gift for writing catchy melodies. He can write melodies that sound like folk songs, or like the most advanced deep jazz tunes, or both at the same time, pretty much on demand. He said nobody teaches how to do this. You can study composition and arrangement, but they won't teach you how to create a melody. I don't know if he was implying that it can't be taught. But it's certainly valuable. I know someone who wrote tunes on speculation, and one of his melodies was chosen as the year's jingle for a major brand. It made him enough money to pay cash for a house. Of course this was many years ago.

iainctduncan 5y ago
Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us, and most of them have no idea how to explain how they learn/teach in ways that are useful to regular brains. I've met some of them, and they might as well be a different species. (Synthesesia is often part of it, I did a master class with a pianist who was basically tripping the whole time he played, listening to him describe his experience was so completely un-relatable to normal people.) Some of those folks are also great teachers, but a lot of them just say the most completely useless advice because they can't even remember not being able to instantly play whatever they hear.
- jdgoesmarching 5y ago
  I’m not sure if you put Jacob Collier in this category, but I think his success has a lot to do with him attempting to make these higher abstractions of music more approachable.
  - hammock 5y ago
    There is something to that. He reminds me of Eric Whitacre in a sense. Whitacre reached "genius" "prodigy" "best composer" status among amateurs and beginner musicians because he published his music with all kinds of markings on it (e.g. explicitly writing crescendi and diminuendi for every basic phrase, and notating all kinds of subtle tempo changes) that a well trained singer would already understand implicitly without need for the markings (which in my opinion as a well trained singer with his own sense of style, are annoying). The effect is to allow bad high school choirs to get to decent-sounding choral music.
- laserlight 5y ago
  > Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages. Of course, this is not a proof against some people’s wiring differently, but if one could become Mozart without special wiring maybe we shouldn’t count on the idea too much.
  - asdffdsa 5y ago
    Is "Peak" in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell or "Good to Great" which preselects a handful of prodigies across all fields then makes broad, definitive (unscientific) conclusions based on some posthoc observations?
    - iainctduncan 5y ago
      No, if anything Peak was written as a response to Outliers, which grossly misrepresents Ericsson's work. Peak is his popular science version of his own work, presumably to correct that. It's a good read, and can act as a guide to his actual academic papers. But bear in mind, it is still only as good as his studies, which were done on pre-professional players and athletes, not on the super-elite geniuses. Outliers is a complete piece of shit. No professionals take anything in that book seriously, it's cherry picked extrapolated nonsense by someone who wanted a good story and has no idea what he was talking about.

Slow_Hand 5y ago

Record producer/writer here. You're on the nose with this. Simplicity and clarity are skills, like writing essays, that are refined over many many years to make something appear effortless. You also allude to it, but there is a staggering amount of unseen effort that also goes into the writing and arranging of the song. Listeners only experience the end product and the final arrangement. For simple melodies it seems very obvious that that's how they should have been all along, but hidden behind that apparent simplicity can be hours and hours of false starts, dead-end paths, and a constant paring-down of complexity in some cases. It's not uncommon for me and a collaborator to write a full sketch for a song (verses, choruses, lyrics, etc) before hitting on a groove or turn of phrase in the bridge that absolutely KILLS. Quite often what happens is that we discard the entire rest of the song and build something new around this new inspiring nugget of musical gold. This will quite often turn into an entirely new song with a very different feel, message etc. It's a musical moment or hook that we would not have arrived at had we not gone through the whole process leading up to it. I've never regretted having had to go through the preceding steps to arrive there. It's always welcomed by the collaborators in the room and it's easy for us not to get stuck in a sunk-cost fallacy because it brought us to the place we're at now.

anonymouse008 5y ago
Any chance we’ve heard your work just in daily browsing? Or mind pointing us to your work? Would love to associate this comment’s context to the songs we hear
- ldehaan 5y ago
  It's obviously Eminem.

moralestapia 5y ago

This analogy is moot. As if someone tried to justify that "it's hard to make a milshake" by saying "yeah but you couldn't make one exactly the same, at the molecule level, as this one I made earlier". Furthermore, I presume, not even the original creator could make another track with the same sound as one of its own, if it were to start again from scratch. Akin to how it'd be almost impossible for someone to draw the exact same sketch twice.

gavinray 5y ago

You can use Machine Learning tools to isolate the vocals from the original song. I've done this exact thing (song recreation/transcribing) as part of taking music theory lessons. For anyone else who would like to try this, I will share how to do it: 1. Use one of the popular models for Source Separation. Facebook's is called "Demucs" and one of the best. Deezer's is called "Spleeter", also very good, and then there's "OpenUnmix". There's a webservice to separate a song using Demucs here: https://demucs.danielfrg.com/ https://demucs.danielfrg.com/ And a great Dockerized webapp that lets you choose from several models and parameters here: https://github.com/JeffreyCA/spleeter-web https://github.com/JeffreyCA/spleeter-web Otherwise you can just install them locally and run them through the CLI, it's pretty easy (one command) https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs#for-musicians https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs#for-musicians https://github.com/deezer/spleeter#quick-start https://github.com/deezer/spleeter#quick-start 2. Now you can take the isolated vocals, and build the rest of the song yourself I've also found that it really helps to be able to listen to each of the parts of the song in isolation when trying to recreate them. The drums, the bassline, the lead/synth, etc. It can be hard to distinguish notes when they all run together. You can use an EQ to try to single out instruments but it's harder. Hope this is helpful to someone.