7 Reasons To Learn Music Production (Newsletter 11)

I've been studying and producing music for a long time.

Recently, as I was commuting to the post-production studio where I work, I put on some of my old music (circa 2012 stuff).

As I drove the familiar highway and city streets on auto-pilot, my mind wandered (as it often does). I contemplated how music production has been such a big part of my life up to this point.

Why is it the art I'm the most drawn to? How has it stayed so fascinating for such a long time? What inspires me to produce music year after year?

With every highway turn-off taken and song played, I thought deeper about my relationship with music and music production.

I got to the city streets and solidified my thoughts while I waited in traffic.

As I parked outside of the studio, I sat in my car and jotted down some answers to these questions. These notes on my smartphone eventually turned into this letter.

You may be a lifelong musician like me, or you may only be getting into the world of music production. Either way, here are my 7 reasons to learn music production:

1. For Its Deep Intrinsic Value (Because You Truly Want To)

I’m starting with the most important reason.

In ethics, the concept of intrinsic value refers to the value something has “in itself” or “for its own sake”.

Yes, music also has “intrinsic value” from a market definition (a measure of what an asset is worth), and we’ll get to that. 

But at the end of it all, the best reason to learn any art is for the art itself.

I’ve dabbled in drawing, writing, graphic design, drafting (house design), music performance, video editing, motion graphics, and theatre. Music production is, bar none, the one I enjoy the most.

I've spent countless weekends locked away in my room, up early in the morning and late at night, forgetting to eat, andproducing music. It's been a consistent source of flow for me for well over a decade now.

I remember spending a lot of time at my neighbours’ place growing up. They had three boys: one my age, one 3 years younger and one 3 years older. They also had a family computer with software called “Cool Edit Pro” (which has become Adobe Audition today).

We would mess around with a keyboard, a guitar and one of those gooseneck tabletop microphones that came with those early-2000s desktop computers.

It was so much fun to just create music, record it, and play it back.

I was particularly fascinated by the magic of playing back our records. Being able to burn the MP3s onto a CD and take them home and to school on my Walkman was the coolest thing in the world. Kids, look that stuff up (it was a different world back then!).

We did it because it was fun and interesting. We weren’t trying to be cool, we definitely weren’t trying to make a profit, and we weren’t told to do it. It came naturally and was intrinsically valuable. Decades later, my skills are refined, but I feel the same way about music production.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of one of my favourite books “Flow”, defines the flow state as follows:

“…a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where we are fully immersed in what we are doing. It’s one of, if not the most enjoyable states in life, and one that comes naturally when I’m producing music.

The more time we can spend in the state of flow, the better our lives will be.

So consider how deep into flow you get when producing music. Do distractions and anxieties fall away? Do you forget to eat or sleep? Are you completely focused on the task at hand? Do you feel “like a kid again”?

If so, you’ve found the best reason to dive deep into music production.

I’ll be writing more about flow in an upcoming newsletter. I highly recommend Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as reading material on this mental state.

2. To Share Your Music With The World (Without Having To Perform Live, In-person)

Music has been around as long as 43,000 years (I wasn't around back then, so here's my source).

And before the phonograph, invented in 1887, there was no way to reproduce recorded music.

43 millennia versus 14 decades…

For the longest time, music could only be enjoyed in person. This meant we needed to become musicians, have access to instruments, and, if we were lucky, access to sheet music (and the ability to read). Or else, we would depend on live performances by professionals or members of our family or community to perform for us.

Today, we’re spoiled with streaming. We have access to nearly every song ever recorded at the touch of a screen. It can be easy to forget how truly revolutionary the production of recorded music really was (and still is). It completely changed the way we interact with, consume and enjoy music.

Today, all you really need is a musical idea and a laptop to have your music available for the world to hear.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. We need to have musical ideas worth sharing and the musical skills to make those happen. The production process, from ideation and writing through to mastering and distribution, is paramount.

3. To Capture Memories

Above, I wrote about listening back to old music and reminiscing on the past.

I am now in my fourth decade of life. When I meet up with friends, conversations centred around nostalgia are beginning to creep in.

And as we go through life, creating more memories, the furthest ones begin to fade.

When I listen to some of the earliest stuff I’ve produced (dating as far back as 2008), I feel a few things:

• Impressed by the musical ideas that I can now put a name to (after studying music production and music theory over the years)
• Slightly embarrassed by the relatively low-quality production
• Nostalgic about the time surrounding the writing and production of the material

I can easily remember life’s ups and downs through the music I’ve produced. Where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, the good parts of life and the not-so-good parts.

Side note: memories bloom, so the bad is never really as bad as it seems in the present.

I think of music production as documenting your life through works of art.

We can journal about our lives and return to the periods we’d like to revisit—I've only recently picked up the habit of journaling, and can immediately see its benefits.

We can also produce music and listen back to revisit where we are (and where we’ve been) in the future.

4. To Give Yourself A More Holistic Understanding Of Music

Plato listed music as one of the seven liberal arts in The Republic. The study of music is deeply intertwined with the liberal arts’ role in developing universal understanding.

By the way, I’m writing about the classic liberal arts (not the modern liberal arts):

1. Grammar: how language works
2. Logic: how to think properly
3. Rhetoric: how to use language and thought to speak well
4. Arithmetic: what numbers are
5. Geometry: how numbers exist in space
6. Music: how numbers exist in time
7. Astronomy: how numbers exist in time and space

If you’ll afford me a brief tangent, what I love about the liberal arts is how deep we can get into their study. Each of these arts is essentially infinite in how deep we can go. Just as the universe is ever-expanding, these arts are ever-evolving.

These arts have stood the test of time as important areas of study, and have even been expanded (rather than replaced) with the evolution of technology.

I agree with Plato that these arts are essential skills and fields of knowledge required by a free, well-educated citizen.

As I wrote above, recorded music is relatively new in the grand scheme of things (and, as an art, music is constantly evolving). The production of music, to me, has become integral to understanding music as a whole.

Just as great composers understood how the different voices of the symphony worked together, the modern producer must understand how different tracks work together in a session.

In addition to the musical role of each track, producers and engineers ought to understand many other aspects of audio and sound, including:

• Decibels
• Frequencies
• Dynamic range
• Effects/processes
• Signal flow
• “3D mix space” (width, depth and height)
• Tone/timbre
• Recording techniques
• Electronics
• Acoustics
• Psychoacoustics
• How to achieve a desired sound or outcome in production
• and much more

From my personal experience, the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know. Music (including music production) is an infinite game—one worth playing for life.

“The more you know, the more you know you don't know” — Aristotle

By the way, if you want to learn more about mixing, check out my mixing ebooks and video course!

5. To Compose Beyond Your Abilities As A Musician

As discussed earlier, the phonograph was invented in the late nineteenth century. However, it wasn’t until 1955 that multitrack recording was invented.

It used to be the case that, to record an ensemble, everyone had to get together and perform the music in one take.

Nowadays, we can overdub as much as we’d like, collaborate across the world and program or sample instruments we can’t necessarily perform ourselves. We can produce entire ensembles and symphonies completely by ourselves.

For example, I’m a guitarist. Almost everything I compose is written on the guitar (and if not the guitar, then the piano). However, my solo project incorporates much more than just guitar. There’s bass, synths, drums, horns, woodwinds, special effects and even foley.

I can work with these instruments I have no clue how to play, physically. I'll learn their ranges and the basic techniques and then program or sample them within my production sessions.

I can perform pretty much any instrument virtually via my MIDI controller. And if I can't play it out sufficiently, I can slow down the tempo of the session to perform it in MIDI before bringing the tempo back up to speed.

Furthermore, even on guitar, I’ll mess up takes regularly. It’s easy, with digital audio workstations, to reset and try as many times as necessary to get the best take for the song.

With great production, even the simplest ideas can sound incredible. Think of simple pop songs—it’s often the stellar production that makes them great.

6. To Develop A Marketable Skill

Sure, music production isn't the highest-value skill you could learn (there’s a reason I started this list with “intrinsic value”). But it’s still undoubtedly a marketable skill.

I’ve never made a living by producing music exclusively (rather, I'll touch on production as part of a marketable skill stack).

However, there are people out earning the majority of their income from producing.

With that written, I have earned some extra cash (and had a lot of fun) by producing music for myself and others.

I believe that the trick to earn a living with your art (in this case, music production) in the modern world, is to develop universal skills around the art itself. More specifically, I mean:

• Marketing: creating a message that is attention-grabbing, relevant, and valuable for a specific person.
• Sales/storytelling: a process for making people aware of their problems and presenting a solution to those problems.
• Audience building/distribution: putting yourself out there in the real world and online to gain followers who resonate with you and your music.

Unless you're the best of the best, earning a full-time income from one specialized creative skill/art is going to be difficult. This has been exacerbated by the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools.

Affordable subscriptions to royalty-free libraries are great for general content producers. They're not so great for the music producers racing to the bottom to sell their music.

Side note: that's also why I wouldn't recommend freelancing on most low-price online marketplaces—it's that same race-to-the-bottom approach that pays little and attracts clients who want the world for pennies.

On top of that, artificial intelligence can now produce music from written prompts. That technology is only going to be refined over time.

Sorry if this sounds doom-and-gloom, but it's the truth (as much as it goes against my optimist sensibilities).

The point is that I invite you to learn music production as an art, first and foremost. And beyond that, as a part of a skill stack, (as part of your arsenal of marketable skills you can make a living with).

People still connect and work with people. We can make it work with the right additional skills. 

7. Because It Is A Great Introduction To Other Fields In Audio

I’ve been working, to some extent, in the creative fields for nearly a decade. Music production was the spark that started it all.

It got me to quit my civil engineering job (I designed wooden floors, walls and trusses for residential and commercial buildings) to return to college for a Recording Arts certificate.

I knew that music production would be less “safe” as a career, but that I could always return to engineering if need be.

Well, it turns out that there’s not a huge market for producing experimental music. However, the good news is that there are plenty of options to string together a meaningful and diverse career with skills in audio.

From self-education, making connections, and going through the college system, I’ve earned an income from many different roles in the audio engineering space. Here are but a few:

1. Post-production
2. Sound Design
3. VO Recording
4. ADR
5. Scoring
6. Live Sound
7. Location Sound
8. Broadcast Sound
9. Mixing/Mastering Records
10. Recording Records

I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of audio engineers with more experience and have been able to teach many engineers with less experience.

There’s a lot to learn, but I’ve distilled it down to 3 of the most important things:

1. Signal flow: how analog, digital and virtual signals flow from inputs to outputs (and everywhere between). This is essential for everything and a necessary skill for troubleshooting.
2. Organization: the proper organization of your physical and digital assets will make your work easy. Disorganization will make your work a living hell. This is especially true when freelancing for clients and collaborating with others.
3. Relationships: your relationships with clients and collaborators are paramount to your success. Be a good person to work with. Reputations precede people and the world is a lot smaller than you might think.

Recap

So my personal top 7 reasons to learn music production are:

1. For its deep intrinsic value
2. To share your music with the world
3. To capture memories
4. To give yourself a more holistic understanding of music
5. To compose beyond your abilities as a musician
6. To develop a marketable skill (as part of your skill stack)
7. As an introduction to other fields in audio

What are your reasons for learning music production (and producing music)? I'd love to know.

That's it for this one.

Until next week,

-Art