Produce Music

Feeling inspired by the new day, you grab a bagel, gulp down some orange juice, find an empty room in the library, and fire up your DAW. You’re greeted by the signature Ableton Live interface, and staring at the laptop screen, you ponder what project to work on. There are three or four that kind of excite you, but none quite feel right for the moment…

No, you’re not going to work on something old. There are a dozen melodies and bass lines and drum sequences floating around your head from the last few weeks, so you open a fresh project and start banging out the ideas, as fast as you can.

First comes a chord progression that has a real summery groove to it—you pick a preset synthesiser that has approximately makes the right tropical house noise and play away on your keyboard. There’ll be time to get the sound just right later, but for now, you just need to get down the musical ideas. With that philosophy, you quickly pick a few choice drum kits and lay out a reasonable beat, and hmm… it’s already starting to sound decent.

Onto the next thing. You open up a fresh track and play out a syncopated bass line that’s a touch jazzy, and thinking of that, you’re reminded of this cool way to play with a high-pass filter that gives the thing a bit of a sparkle… there’s a melody or two that could sit on top of this, and you quickly sketch out a few lines that could go well. You’re not satisfied with any of them, but there’s no time to waste!

Back to your roots for this next one. You rip a sample off a slick indie band that you’ve recently found, loop it a couple times, and start doing your thing with it, transforming it and overlaying a set of drums until it has that classic French house sound going. Awesome.

There’s a few other small snippets that you get down, and before you know it, you have a half-dozen song ideas laid out. It turns out that you were really bored in the hospital, and you feel a strange pressure relieved inside of you, as if you suddenly no longer had to keep track of a bunch of things in your mind, lest you forget…

You crack your knuckles, ready to keep going, but then see a redhead tapping at the door. Oh, you know this girl, and you like the look on her face. Hurriedly, you pack up your gear, inviting her in.