LOL so glad I listened all the way to the end

Excited Nonetheless is a great name, I like it I also like the chords. And the girls

Actually one thing I would add just to make my advice even more ambiguous - there are not enough people who make tunes that bridge the gaps between genres for my liking. If like me you DJ but don't want to play or listen to just one genre for an hour, it *really* helps if there are people making tunes that let you transition between styles.

That Madeon screen cap, lol

I usually go for about eleventy layers, sometimes eleventy and a half

I'd say that as least as far as DJing is concerned, people like to know what they're getting, and the biggest DJs seem to be the ones with the narrowest selections. To the extent that you're interested in building a brand or a name for yourself it's something to think about.

Personally I would never encourage anybody to prioritise popularity over artistic freedom. But I'm idealistic like that, and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with being dead set on making a living from your craft. Making a living from music probably beats the hell out of sitting in an office five days a week. But bear in mind the importance of brand and identity if that's what you're going for. Depending on how big you want to get and how important it is to you to get big, people will more or less need to be able to pigeonhole you, which will be all the more difficult if you've spread yourself across a dozen genres instead of maybe one or two.

One way you might work around this is to use aliases - I know of a few artists who release things under different names depending on what they're making. This would allow you to build a number of identities. Anybody who's that enthusiastic about your output will figure out that it's all one person, and for anybody who's just into a couple of styles, no harm done.

The other thing that occurred to me is that all genres have techniques etc. that define them and which take time to learn. Unless you're a musical genius, you're more likely to end up making good music by learning a few things in depth rather than by trying to learn bits of everything.

But fuck all that though tbh, I say do whatever makes you feel fulfilled as an artist and producer 

...automatic detection. Where's the fun in that? No, but seriously, if whatever software you use can't crack it, you can "science the shit out of it". Load up frequency analyser (ideally with frequency-detection) and follow the lowest loudest sinewave. That's the fundamental of their bassline and usually chord is based upon it. If you read few of these notes, you can figure out chords and key of that song in few minutes by trial and error. Not so quick, kinda dessert-island method, but it works.

Not disagreeing with you, but to anybody wanting to use this as a substitute for learning how to do it yourself, I'd add that ear training/learning enough about music theory to be able to identify song keys would probably have a much better payoff in the long run.

It does exist already.

http://theproducersforum.com/index.php?board=5.0

I think it might still be worth having a separate forum for problems and technical things in general.

I always kind of assumed that you should only use pan and volume automation for effects and fade ins/outs. I figured doing otherwise messes with the balance of your mix. But I've never seen anybody say anything about this.

Let's say you have an arpeggio that sounds balanced in the build-up of your track. But later on, when there's much more going on, it sounds too quiet. My assumption is you would fix this with EQing or sidechaining (assuming the problem isn't a frequency clash), or maybe even modulate it differently so that it has more presence. But to what extent is it ok to change the volume or panning of something so that it sits right in different parts of a mix?

Thanks peeps.