let's try to keep the shitposting to a minimum, please? (tho wow, those two songs are so similar in form and sound design i thought they were the same track at first)

this is definitely in the deep house or future house range, though tbh i don't really think there's too much of a difference between the two.

If you're getting caught up in the genre, try categorizing your songs by how they feel. Assign arbitrary descriptions and start putting things in that sound similar enough so that when you start DJing, you can transition between genres more easily by following their common elements.

This is one of the most common struggles with any artistic pursuit, and there are a few possible reasons why it could happen. From my own experience, and from watching others, it tends to come down to 3 different areas. I don't know which applies to you, so take or leave them as you wish:


1. Your taste is better than your skill. When you first started out, your taste was equal to your skill, so everything you first made sounded good because you just didn't know any better. As you continue to make music, both your skill and your taste improve, but not at the same rate:

Your understanding of what is good will always increase faster than your ability to create what is good. So it's important to lower your expectations just enough so that you can push forward and keep making art.

2. You're relying too much on your memory of music and the emotional impressions of the songs you love, and working inside a vacuum. When you're working on a song, your only basis for comparison tends to be "the way it sounded before vs. the way it sounds now." That comparison doesn't tell you whether it's better or worse, it just tells you whether it's different. The best way to fix this is to reference other songs, both before you start writing a song and throughout the entire process. Spend some time studying song arrangements, and go further: recreate the whole songs. Write down all the different attributes you figured out, and use that to develop your analytical ear. Then, every time you decide to start a song start pulling attributes out of that list and decide on some songs you can use for references. Pull those songs into your DAW, and every time you feel stuck you can compare your song to the reference and ask "What are they doing that I'm not doing? What are they not doing that I am doing? Do I like those differences? If not, what can I do to change my song to be similar without directly ripping them off?"

Eventually, you'll need to compare the songs less often and the things you're comparing will become more detail-oriented. I think everyone should reference before they finish the song just so they're not living in the dark, but you'll rely on them less and less.

3. You've put making music too high on a pedestal and you've psyched yourself out of being able to write music. You sit down with the intention of writing fully realized and perfectly crafted songs, and forget that no fully realized and perfectly crafted song starts out as one. Everything starts out as a first draft, and first drafts always suck. So instead, focus on just trying to do one thing. "I'm gonna design a bass patch today." "I'm gonna write three different chord progressions, and save the MIDI to a new folder called 'Chord Ideas' for later." "I'm gonna write a few drum loops." Collect the seeds of ideas and use the best ones as foundation points for your next few songs. Keep the rest for later, and if you think of a way to change or use them you now have a library of ideas to draw from instead of having to constantly be focusing on new material.



I hope this helps. Take a look around, and in particular look at some of the videos in the Tutorial Videos thread over in Sound Design. I've posted a bunch that focus on mindset and workflow, and they might help you out of this rut! The most important thing is that you keep making music.

No problem! Happy to help.

An expander does the opposite of what a compressor does - instead of reducing the distance between the loudest point and the quietest point, it increases them. It has the same (or similar) controls to a Compressor, and many compressors have an expander option. You can think of it like this: "Below Threshold = Off, Above Threshold = On (and maybe LOUD)"

A noise gate is a good example of an expander - If the signal doesn't go over the threshold you set, it's cut off completely.

Hey there! Welcome to the forum.

I know you're probably really excited to share your track and get some feedback, but as you can see there are a LOT of people who want to share their music as well, and not enough people who want to provide feedback. In addition, the rest of the forum is almost completely dead, and we would love to see you stick around! So before posting your track, here are a few things you might consider:

• Hop over to the Introduction Thread and tell us a little bit about yourself! We'd love to know who you are, what you're interested in, an all that fun biographical stuff.
• Check one of the discussion subforums and see if there's something you might want to ask, or something you think you could add to the conversation! I'm sure you have a ton of information in your head, and I'd be grateful if you could share it with the rest of us!
• Provide feedback on a few other user's tracks before posting your own! Some of my biggest revelations about my own weak spots as a producer came from applying the suggestions I've given to other artists when giving feedback on their work. Heck, you might answer all your own questions, just from trying to help someone else!
• Join our Slack channel! There are producers of all ages from multiple continents in there, and it can be much more active than the forum at times. We have rooms for discussing music production, music theory, and we even have a room where you can post your track for feedback (and actually have it listened to!)

You obviously don't need to do all of those things, and you don't even need to do one of them - I just have a feeling you will get much more out of this forum by giving it a shot instead of making a post with your song, asking for feedback, watching the views on your post rise, and waiting for someone to respond. Even if you've already posted your track, consider giving these ideas a shot!

Thanks for coming to The Producer's Forum, and enjoy your time here!

I heard somewhere that snares hitting slightly before the kick contribute to a quicker, more tense feel to the song, while snares/claps hitting slightly after the kick contribute to a more slow and relaxed feel.

This has to deal with the fact that the human ear is really good at noticing when something is out of place. In fact, from an evolutionary standpoint we have one of the most developed senses of pattern recognition of any species. So those minor deviations are detected but not really consciously perceived.

You can apply that same sort of timing discrepancy to any instrument, by pretending that the person playing it is either energetic or lazy. If your drummer is really excited, even if they've got a great sense of timing they're gonna be charged up to hit that snare drum - so they will jump a bit ahead of the beat, making everything feel a bit faster as he just wants to get to that next snare hit ASAP. If your drummer is feeling lazy (or maybe he got too stoned before the show), he'll be playing catch-up with the beat and lackadaisically taps the snare drum when he needs to.

Looks like someone already answered the question before I could. The synth doesn't matter that much, and anyone saying you can make something "better" in one synth is just more comfortable with it.

You can make bells and deep house plucks easier with FM, but it's not essential. Like the person who replied on reddit said - learn the basics!

There are a ton of really cool ideas in this song, and I love the stereo image you have - super wide, lots of little ear ticklers with clever panning, and apart from the choruses it feels like everything is placed perfectly in its space. Great use of foley, and you clearly have a ton of creative energy.

My biggest point of feedback is that this song feels like a memory of a DJ set more than it does a complete song. You have a very defined song structure, but a lot of your transitions seem sudden and there are sections of your song that feel completely unrelated to other sections of your song. Your mixdown is kind of all over the place, with certain parts feeling pretty good and other parts (like the chorus) sounding like everything is either mono or pushed super wide, and things like the pre-drop sounds being so much quieter than everything else that it threw off the flow from the build into the first drop.

I would suggest looking for a few reference tracks - KSHMR, Sander Van Doorn, Martin Garrix, and other electro/progressive house and EDM producers who have drops that sound similar to yours - and bring them into your session. Directly compare and contrast their songs with yours, and note down everything you notice. See if there's anything they're doing that you're not doing that would make your song better if you did it; see if there's anything they're not doing that you are doing that would make your song better if you took it out. If you want, you can even mark down things that the reference tracks share with each other, and use that as a guide for where you can go next.

Keep going! Looking forward to seeing what else you have.