TPF Beat Cypher

Good morning, everyone! It is time for Week 4 of the TPF Weekly Beat Cypher. Just post in the thread below that you're joining the Cypher and download the samples, follow the simple rules posted below, and spend the next 7 days working on a 1 minute beat. Private message me with a download link to your beat by Saturday, July 2nd at midnight Pacific Time (UTC -8:00), and come check out the thread Sunday morning around this time for the results and next week's Beat Cypher!

THE BORING PART - THE RULES (there's only two)

• You must use both samples provided, and you must compose in the BPM provided. One sample will be a transition sound you place at the start and end of your track, and the other is the featured sample for your beat.
• You have to both post in this thread that you are joining AND private message me with your track in 32 or 24 bit, 44.1 kHz WAV or AIFF file format before 11:59 PM PST on Saturday for your submission to count.

If you're unsure of how the beat cypher works, here's an article describing it, a video that touches on it, and lastly here are all the Team Supreme cyphers, so you can hear how they did it:


Here’s last week’s cypher:

Here’s the Beat Cypher playlist:
Now, onto the fun part: This Week's Challenge!

Our first sample is a live recording I grabbed on the streets of San Francisco of a street performer playing on a homemade drumkit. Quantized and ready for chopping!

Our transitional sample is a sweep I created out of some noise and the sound of a mechanical knife sharpener.- Place this at the start and end of your 1 minute beat so I can blend them all together at the end!

Our tempo is 122 Beats Per Minute, so you need to write 32 bars of music to complete this week's challenge - well, a little bit less but let's make it even.

Challenge starts now, so get to beatmaking!

REGISTERED CYPHERS:

• Mussar
• Lydian
• eidolon
• ScottCampbell
• Aric James

I decided to start a podcast to help teach myself and others ear training. I'll be doing 2 episodes a week - one that introduces a new concept and drills you on it, and the other is straight ear training drills, start to finish. I'll be going over intervals, scales, chords, modes, harmonic progressions, and eventually other stuff too as I learn it!

The first episode was just posted, where I go over Minor Seconds and Major Seconds.


Here's the iTunes link, if you'd like to subscribe.

Take a listen and let me know what you think! I've never done a podcast before, so any feedback would be super appreciated! :)

Good morning, everyone! It is time for the inaugural TPF Weekly Beat Cypher. Just post in the thread that you're joining the Cypher and download the samples, follow the simple rules posted below, and spend the next 7 days working on a 1 minute beat. Private message me with a download link to your beat by Saturday, June 11th at midnight pacific standard time, and come check out the thread Sunday morning around this time for the results and next week's Beat Cypher!

THE BORING PART - THE RULES (there's only two)

• You must use both samples provided, and you must compose in the BPM provided. One sample will be a transition sound you place at the start and end of your track, and the other is the featured sample for your beat.
• You have to both post in the thread that you are joining AND private message me with your track before 11:59 PM PST on Saturday for your submission to count.

If you're unsure of how the beat cypher works, here's an article describing it, a video that touches on it, and lastly here are all the Team Supreme cyphers, so you can hear how they did it:



Now, onto the fun part: This Week's Challenge!

Our first sample is a clipping from Kanye West's Get 'Em High - "Uh-uh. I'm try'na catch the beat."

Our transitional sample is taken from the concept music for the video game "Frozen Synapse", a track called Nightpath - Place this at the start and end of your 1 minute beat so I can blend them all together at the end!

Our tempo is 96 Beats Per Minute, so you need to write about 24 bars of music to complete this week's challenge.

Challenge starts now, so get to beatmaking!

REGISTERED CYPHERS:

• Mussar
• myda
• Tympest
• MikeConn
• AnnieTP
• Eidolon
• tom
• Lydian

Youtube Link, cuz Soundcloud Go is balls.

I'm sure I might get some hate for this, but I saw this posted on Reddit earlier and it hit me with a burst of nostalgia so I wanted to share.

Ain't no shame in it.

Wasn't exactly sure where to put this, but I guess this subform is as good as any.

Last night on twitter, Deadmau5 said he was planning on bundling and releasing a bunch of MIDI files that he's never used in songs, because everyone releases samples. He previewed the 50 different MIDI files with this one pair, so go grab it and check it out!

Ideally you won't just use these to try and make your own songs, but instead try to learn from them! No matter what you think of his personality, the man has been around for a long time and probably could teach us all something about composition or arrangement. I've been having a blast pulling them apart and trying to understand the chord progressions and how I could break into that genre of music.

King of Moombahton is back!

In the spare time I have between semesters at university, I find myself procrastinating way too much. I fall into the black hole of reddit or youtube, and spend almost no time making music until it's about 2 hours before I go to bed and I feel incredibly rushed. I can motivate myself to do random things here and there, but it's difficult to operate without a consistent structure. So after writing down a whole bunch of stuff based on various tutorials and pieces of advice I've seen posted on here and elsewhere online, I've come up with a daily schedule to make sure I am always doing something to instigate progress and development within myself as an artist, while helping speed up my workflow and instill a deeper sense of responsibility and time management. Each day I set a 90 minute timer, focus ONLY on the task at hand, then take a 30 minute break where I force myself to get outside and walk around the block once or twice just to clear my head and keep my body from getting too sedentary. I have four separate days with four separate goals, and I cycle through them repeatedly:


Day One: Learning Day

• 90 Minutes of Manual Training - Start going through all your manuals one by one. Experiment with the things the manual talks about. Write notes about what seems interesting, or questions you have about something. If you learn a neat trick, make a preset that uses that technique just so you can build it into your memory. Start an R&D folder with all the projects for every manual you read, just so that you can refer back to it when you need to. When you finish the manual, see what questions you can answer on your own. Anything you can't, google! Either way, as soon as it's done just start another manual.
• 90 Minutes of Synth/Effect Training - Pick an instrument or effect (ideally one you've read the manual for) and load a session of your DAW where you open two copies: one for presets, one for experimentation. Try to recreate every single preset. If it's an effect, put a few different loops through to see how each preset affects them. Write notes/questions to add on to the ones you got from the manual, and see if you can answer questions from the manual from random experimenting. Don't forget to make R&D projects for these too. After all the presets, make sure you have clicked every button or moved every knob at least once to see what effect it has. Then make a new project: If it's a synth, make a song using ONLY that synth. If it's an effect, make a song that uses the effect in three different ways.
• 90 Minutes of Theory Practice - I recommend going to musictheory.net. If you don't know theory, go through each of the lessons while your DAW is open and try to connect everything you read with physical action in your DAW to hear what everything sounds like. Take a lotta notes, and when you feel comfortable switch to this routine: 15 minutes of note identification, 30 minutes of key signature identification (15 major, 15 minor), 15 minutes of interval identification, 15 minutes of chord identification, 15 minutes of practicing scales (with an instrument ideally, but otherwise just practice drawing out scales in the piano roll so you can get used to their look and sound).
• 90 Minutes of Ear Training - Skip this until you're starting to feel confident in your theory, but it's a CRITICAL skill for producers: 20 minutes of note ear training (a.k.a given the reference of C, identify the played note), 20 minutes of interval ear training, 20 minutes of scale ear training, 20 minutes of chord ear training, and 10 minutes of trying to identify notes in popular music or songs you like.
• 90 minutes of Song Analysis - pick a track you like, open it in your DAW, and start putting markers in for the different sections of the arrangement. Start putting in blank clips (in Ableton I just make a bunch of color coded empty MIDI clips) and label them the various elements of the song. Start with big clips, then start refining them down, separating them into their various layers, and work your way back until you have an arrangement that to the untrained eye would look like a finished track. Then put it in a "To Be Remade" folder and start swapping this every so often with remake practice, where you start replacing all those MIDI clips with the actual synths and samples (or as close as you can approximate).

Day Two: Sound Design Day
These will all go in their own Sound Design projects so that you can go back and look at the source for each thing if you need to in the future.

• 90 Minutes of Drum Loops - Set a goal for the genre and number of loops made for each genre, as well as trying to recreate loops you already have with your own samples or recreating loops from songs that you like.
• 90 Minutes of Lead Sounds - Just make a bunch of presets. Try to make at least one lead that would fit in each genre you made a drum loop for.
• 90 Minutes of Bass Sounds - See Above
• 90 Minutes of Pads and Atmospheres - See Above
• 90 Minutes of FX, Fills, and Transitions - This is the time to just mess around, do a lot of really weird stuff that will be good one shot SFX like blips and bloops, various drum and synth fills, and big risers/falls and other transition effects.

Day Three: Composition Day

• 90 Minutes Writing Song Ideas - Get a notebook or notepad app. Pick a genre, a BPM (or general tempo guideline), and at least 10 emotive and/or descriptive words. e.g. "Dubstep, 145 BPM. Razor-edged, Aggressive, Heavy Metal, Killer Scorpion, Angry, Sudden Drops, Fast Drums, TalkBox, Alone in the desert, Murder." Things that you can keep in mind when sitting down to produce. Then pick the element that will be the focus: The drums, the chords, the melody, the bass, or the vocals (if the track has any). If you're just starting out, pick one to three artists who you're gonna imitate or use as inspiration for the track. Write down the skeletal song arrangement. e.g. "16 bar intro, 4 bar break, 4 bar build, 32 bar drop, 16 bar break, 4 bar build, 32 bar drop, 16 bar outro." Write down some hooks or lyrics, or use your phone and record a few ideas for some of the musical elements. As soon as you run out of any information to help flesh out one of these points (or feel like it's ready to be made into a song), start working on a new idea. Get as many ideas as you can before you sit down at your DAW. Keep in mind remixes count for this!
• 90 Minutes Writing Chord Progressions - Can be informed by song ideas or just noodling around. Every time you have 4, 8 or 16 bars that feel good, label and save that MIDI file. "8barHappyFMaj" "4barMelancholyEbMin", etc.
• 90 Minutes Writing Basslines - See Above
• 90 Minutes Writing Melodies - See Above
• For these three, mostly make original ideas but at least once per cycle try to see if you can build a Chord, Bassline, or Melody off of one of the others you've already made, then pair them as a larger stack . "Chords_Bass_8barHappyFMaj" "Melody_Chords_16barMelancholyEbMin". If you can finish a stack of all three, label them and put them in a "Quickstart" folder." Make sure to use a piano VST or very simple waveforms like sawtooths or squares, so that you're focusing on the musicality and not the sound design.
• 90 Minutes Writing Sketches - Pick one of the song ideas you wrote at the start of the day and just get to work. Spend at least 90 minutes working on it, and when you feel brainfried for the day just save the project for tomorrow. This is not the time for any critical analysis. It's okay to stay in loop land, but if you can flesh out something larger go for it!
  

Day Four is more freeform - just sort of go at your own pace, but try to stick to the 90/30 intervals to ensure that you stick to the routine your brain is getting comfortable with and again, to make sure you GO OUTSIDE AND MOVE AROUND. I cannot stress how important your health is as a producer.

Day Four: Songwriting Day
If you don't have a song you're already working on or you weren't feeling the sketch you had going last night, pick one of the song ideas you haven't started or start fiddling through your MIDI files to find inspiration. If starting from a MIDI file, spend some time before starting to make music writing down a general song idea based on the MIDI file. Give yourself a direction to go in before you start working. Pick a section of your song that you want to start from, and try to create that as if it were completed. When you're done with that, go through and make your sample selection and sound design decisions. Use the song idea notepad to inform your decisions, and try to get them to all feel like a cohesive sound. You can layer now or when you're refining, whichever feels more natural to you.

Then, duplicate that section out to fill up your entire arrangement for however long you want your song to be. Mark out the sections of the arrangement based on your skeleton. Tweak them if need be, then start removing the sounds that would not show up in that section of the song. Sculpt your arrangement, and start renaming/consolidating clips for their various sections. Listen back, and decide what needs changing. Keep refining until your last 90 minute cycle. Even though your ears are exhausted, develop a rough mixdown of whatever you have and find a reference track that you can use for the next day.

If you're already working on a song, just focus on finishing the song. Use your first 90 minutes and your last 90 minutes to worry about the mixdown, and the rest of your time should be spent doing the arrangement. If you're getting too frustrated with any particular section, go to a different one for a while and see if you can find it. If you're really getting frustrated with the project, pick up another project you've been working on or start a new one. For this routine, you can only have a max of 4 WIPs at any one time. You cannot start a new one until you've finished at least one track in your queue. Only reference the song at the end of the day, to see if it has the same impact and quality. If you feel like it's ready, put it in a "Polish" folder and start replacing one Songwriting day a week with one Finalizing Day a week.

Day Four (Alternate): Finalizing Day
Pick three songs that you think sound similar in genre and/or style to yours that you think would make good reference tracks. See if your track stands up to theirs in terms of their mixdowns and loudness. Focus only on the final polish of your track (additional sounds for transitions, bouncing if necessary, cleaning up your FX, mastering for release if necessary, etc) - If you think it needs more work, put it back in your WIPs folder. Listen to your song in both stereo and mono on at LEAST 3 different speakers, 1 pair of headphones, and if you can 2-3 listening environments outside of your studio like your car or someone else's house.






I think for people who have trouble knowing where to start or how to go about their process, this could be a good foundation for your own methods of growth. Feel free to share your questions, comments, opinions, and other thoughts if you'd like!