 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. Now if you've followed our channel for a while, we do a lot of music tutorials. We do piano, we do ear training, we do theory, we do composing, bass and whatnot. However, off late we've started focusing a lot on music production. And I've been fortunate enough to be part of the music technology field for many years, but I've had no real training. It's just been exposure with sound engineer friends who obviously are extremely skilled. They've gone through the degrees and the courses to do what they do with their craft. And I've also figured out a lot of things along the way because it needs to be done. Because if you're a musician playing a gig and it sounds bad, there's a lot of feedback on stage. The amp is rumbling. You can't hear things pretty well and you feel that the guy doing sound is a bit slow or unskilled. It's always a kind of an itchy feeling you get to do that yourself and get acquainted. So my exposure to sound has always been in this more street smart kind of way. I've not had any training. And even with our YouTube channel, we do our lessons. But at the end of the day, we have to shoot a video. As you see, we have audio. We wanna make the audio to sound as good as possible. We want the video and the audio to come together in the best way possible. So there is a lot of technology which we use to back our work. And that's what I wanted to talk about. And we use a lot of technology to back our work. Now in this video, I'm not gonna talk about the technicalities of music production. We are going to be doing a lot more and we have done a few. In this video, it's just to convey to all of you music producers out there. Maybe you've done a course in a school or you're doing a course or you'd like to learn mixing, mastering. But take it from me. These 10 skills which I'm going to convey to you over this lecture are going to equip you for the long run as a musician. And you probably need to know these things before you do all the other technical stuff like which plugin to get or which VST to find out there or which MIDI keyboard to buy. It's not so much about the hardware and the software and the gear. It's more about what's going on in your head or what your head needs to know in order to produce music well. So here are 10 necessary things you need to know as a music producer. Let's get cracking. First of all, music theory is supremely crucial. And I find a lot of students, including music students who don't know production, who think that music theory is just staff notation. Oh, I have to do all these grade exams, learn reading, writing, piano, treble clef, bass clef. Absolute nonsense. That is not music theory. Music theory is knowing your chords, knowing your scales, knowing your intervals, being able to count time, being able to subdivide the beat, understanding accents, learning key signatures, learning scales, learning modes, learning ragas, and not just learning it from a textbook way. Now the problem with production, especially a lot of people who do production in schools, I find that they learn all the technicality in a nice real world way. You know, they have a laptop, they produce, they do their adjustments with equalization, compression, effects and whatnot. But then at the end of the day, the source, the first thing going into the software is music. So the music has to be taken care of first of all. So you need to have a grounding over the core essentials of music. You need to know if there's a song playing on seven by eight meter, or maybe this one. You need to know that it's not one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. It's actually one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five. It's a five by eight song, the Mission Impossible theme. You might have heard that, right? So your music theory is not necessarily notation, even though that is very helpful. Reading notation, sight singing, working with rhythms, reading rhythms as we call it, reading choral music. These are all very important skills. Don't get me wrong. But actually, music theory at the bare minimum is know how to feel and count time, learn subdivisions, learn your chords and scales, and not just learn it. Be fast at it. So for that, you need to practice what you learn. You shouldn't just mug it up or watch videos or read books, you know? You have to, for example, you need to know if there's an A-flat in there, it's major six. There's two, two, F, that's a major six. And F is a major six with respect to A-flat. Also, A-flat is a minor third with respect to F. Also, A-flat major has four flats, namely B-flat, E-flat, A-flat, D-flat. Also, the chords of A-flat major are A-flat major, B-flat minor, C-minor, D-flat major, E-flat major, F-minor, G-dim, A-flat, which is the repeat. So all of these things need to be learned, you know, the core essentials of theory. You can't really make music, you can't arrange, you can't produce, you can't compose if you don't know your theory. So get acquainted with theory. So point number two is extremely important. It's having the ability to perform a song as a one-person band on one polyphonic instrument. By polyphonic instrument, I mean guitar or piano or banjo or mandolin or something like that, and vocals. So if you are composing a song and if it has lyrics, if it has a structure, verse, chorus, bridge and whatnot, we tend to then allow or hope that sometimes that production and all the loops that we use in our logic prose and Ableton lives of the world, that is going to make us the song. Sorry, it is you, your guitar, your chords, your melody, which is making the song. The software or the DAW is just there to embellish what you have already composed. So a great challenge would be for you yourself to perform the song and not just play it on the piano and sing. You should also convey that, do a small, simple cell phone recording, send it to your loved ones, your friends, your family or your mentors, and see what they have to say about it. And if there is a tick mark given that, oh, this is a nice song. I like this structure. It's also gonna end up being a lot more easy for you to produce it because you won't need to make any structural changes which end up being the most annoying and the most tricky things to do in a song. Oh, I wanna cut that chorus into two. I want to remove the bridge. I want a new bridge. Why have all that hassle? Don't get into the software until it already sounds good. And it should be, as I say, gig-worthy. And I have a lot of sort of musician colleagues in my city where most of them have actually told me we need to gig this song. We need to play this song over and over, get the pulse of the audience, get the feedback from peers, friends, and loved ones, and then go to the studio, record, produce, and take it to town. You could also do it the other way. You know, produce it and then perform it. A lot of people also do that. But it should just be a nice song. It should be something you can just perform on a guitar, a piano, and sing it for sure. So that's point number two. So if you're getting into production, arrangement, recording, editing, mixing, mastering, or any field in music technology, you need to know the workings of the actual instrument you're dealing with. So if you're recording a drum kit, for example, you have to know the parts of the drum kit, the kick, the snare, and the way you can play the snare. You can play the snare either with the side, sidestick, or the rim shot, as they call it. In the middle of the snare, you can play the snare with brushes. You can play it with hot rods. You can play it with actual sticks. Your kick drum will have different beaters. So there's so many components. There's also the tuning of the kit. You tune the toms very tastefully to serve the song in a lot of cases. It doesn't have to be in the scale of the song. That's weird sometimes. Some technicians do tune their drums to the scale of the song, but generally you just tune it to taste. And you need to know that the drums need to be tuned. How to fix ring in the drums, resonance, random. You need to have a kit to help you manage your drum tech. And then of course, you use your mics accordingly. You realize, oh, the drums have so many parts. I need to mic it this way. I need this kind of mic for this kind of instrument. And it's the same with everything. For example, a guitar, the way I record guitar would be a person is playing the guitar. And whenever a person plays the guitar, I think the guitar always sounds best from the perspective of the person playing the instrument. It's the same with the drums. It's the same with tabla, anything. So just put a mic on top of their head or next to their ears, which don't annoy them, you know. So things like that. And when you're recording an instrument like a vocal, you need to know the challenges of maybe a male vocalist and a female vocalist. You need to know when they are tired, when you can't just treat them as robots, so to speak. However, that might happen in the future. Also, understand the ranges of your instruments. Violence, yes, they go high, but not too high. You don't want them to screech like a hyena. Also, violence cannot go low for that. You need the cello, you need the string quartet, you need the family of instruments. So every instrument down to the smallest shaker or the triangle, if ever you're recording it or using a loop on your computer, you need to know the workings of that instrument. And a great way to do that, the best way to do that is go for local concerts or gigs in your city and watch how people play these instruments. Don't be stuck just in a laptop trying to do things. It won't really happen. Moving forward to point number four. This might annoy some of you, but it's very, very important. Learn how to sing, okay? So a lot of times when we produce music, the quickest way, because there is no filter between the brain and your vocal chords, so to speak. So if I have an idea or if someone else is conveying an idea, that guy will say, can you just play? Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, you know? So he's singing it for me or I'm singing it for them or that group of musicians. And once the thought comes to me, I can then focus on my work. And I can also suggest another idea and say, do you like this? I'm like, do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Now obviously you should have the ability to match this, but the basic requirement is to be able to pitch something. Okay, as a producer, you may be the best guy using Logic Pro or Cubase or Pro Tools, but if you don't know how to sing, sorry, you're not gonna survive much. Or you'll only have your own, maybe your own niche, so to speak. So it's always good if you're new to this field, learn how to sing, make a conscious effort and it's a free instrument. Come on, you don't have to pay for servicing. There's no upgrade. It is what it is. You're born with a voice. It's a gift, so to speak. So deal with it. Get used to singing. Go for a singing class somewhere along the way. Nathaniel School offers vocal classes too, by the way. So do check us out. The fifth necessary thing you need to do as a music producer is knowledge of street smart tech. So I don't mean when the software opens, you know exactly what to do. You know all the shortcuts, you've done one 101 or you've done one operator level certification. So what? What if your software cannot even open? What if there's a bug? How are you gonna fix that? What if your audio interface is crackling? What if there's a sample rate mismatch? There are many things. What if your speaker is picking up some random electrical interference? Or what if there's a problem with your guitar pickup, which is now sending some random radio which is playing from your neighbor, which is coming into the pickup and then getting recorded? How do you fix those problems, you know? So you have to take care of all your, the geeky stuff, the electrical stuff out there is very important. Also acoustically, you have to be aware if anything is ringing in your room. It could just be you have to go to your guitar and just put a cloth around it or mute your snare to stop the resonance from the snare buzz which happens on the snare wires. So I would say street smart tech, you know? Just having little things like adapters to help you, you know, if you have to plug and change something really fast, just having a few things at your disposal, the smallest of things can save your recording. Simple adapter, a simple power cable, a replacement for something. Anything which helps you focus on your craft is what I mean by street smart tech. And street smart tech is not just the door you have from a software perspective. It's also knowing all the plugins that you have, you need to make a note of it. And you have to see whether the latest version of those plugins or those virtual instruments are going to work with your current operating system. Maybe you haven't upgraded your operating system or maybe you should not upgrade your operating system. You should wait a bit longer before you do so. So this is what I mean by street smart tech. It's all my advice for street smart tech is again to go for concerts, observe what sound engineers do from a live perspective. I've learned the most about sound. Probably all that I've ever learned about sound has come by observing and sort of assisting live technicians, live sound engineers. I have a lot of friends who I've made over the years who mix music live. I don't have too many mixers who produce, unfortunately. I would like to meet some of them too. But it's more of the live guys. So the live guys will show you how to solve real problems. You're getting a shock on stage. How do you figure that out? That needs a lot of street smart tech. And along with street smart tech, you need to know a few other things. Learn Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and document your work. These things are as important. Get a productivity software. Maybe use a timer to help you be more productive. So all of these things can help you. You can also get some devices to just help you produce music faster, help you with shortcuts, help you with some macros, so to speak. So whatever works for you, make a proper plan and invest in street smart tech so that you focus primarily on your craft. You're spending maximum time making music rather than fixing problems making music. Then fixing problems and then making music. That won't inspire you a lot. And then a very, very important thing. You need to listen to a lot of music. And when I say a lot of styles and genres, it doesn't have to be the music which you are going to produce. It can be anything. For example, you may not like Taylor Swift, but you could still listen to her production. You can still listen to her songwriting, her song structure, the way she develops, breaks, drops, buildups in the music, the instruments used, what is the role of each instrument? Every artist which has reached our years over time has done something right along the way. Otherwise they would have never reached you. So you have to respect all musicians and make playlists on Spotify or ask your friends, ask your family members, what are you folks listening to? And try to diversify your music listening repertoire or your library. Back in the day, there was something nice which used to happen, come to think of it, where you had to go to a store, like we had Planet M in India, and you go there and you have to sort of save up money to buy a two-sided CD or two discs to listen to music or maybe a DVD. It used to cost a lot of money in India back then, but all of that has stopped. So what I tend to think is you tend to value music less, you tend to search for music less even though there is everything out there, but you're searching for something which is free, pretty much free, right? Spotify, come on, that subscription is almost nothing. YouTube is free. So you're not motivated to find music. You're not thinking of music as an investment, you're not spending on it. So you're not tending to value it as much as what we used to do, maybe 90s to the early 2000s, and then of course the iPhone and Torrents and all of that came into play and pretty much they didn't kill the music industry, but it definitely changed the way we consume music. So now you need to ask your well-wishers, you need to ask your musician peers, what do you folks listen to? Tell me a metal band, even though you haven't heard heavy metal, understand what it's about and consume the music. You have to listen to everything. Being a producer needs your years to also acknowledge the genre, and if you acknowledge the genre, you'll know what instruments are used, what are the settings they use to get that instrument to pop out in the mix, so to speak. So listen to a lot of music and take it from me. The music I tend to produce the best is generally music I would never listen to just to sit down and lounge on a sofa. I'm not gonna listen to that. For instance, I like listening to heavy metal a lot, but I don't produce it that often. I produce folk music and fusion music a lot more, which I rarely listen to for some reason. So that's the point I'm trying to make, you know? So you never know what you will produce very well. You may even hate that genre, but go for it and be open to working with different environments. And then a very important point, it's something I tend to tell myself very often as well as a human in general. You need to improve your general communication skills and be open to work. So one way to do that is to find musicians, go to concerts and talk to them and tell them, this is what I do. Build up a profile, build up a portfolio, and just it should just have a list of things you have done in life so far as a musician. Maybe you've got a few awards, certificates, you've performed a few shows, you've jammed with a few interesting people. So put that out there in a profile and start talking to people and be very open for work. Don't just say, I'm only gonna do blues music for life. That won't work. If you want to become a music producer, you have to be equipped with working with many people. Also as a producer, you need to understand them more as people than as skill set humans. They possess some skills. You know those skills very well and you can get work out of them. Well, what if they are in a bad mood? What if they are not giving you their 100% in the recording? Is it because of something physical or something emotional? So you have to figure that out. So you need to know your talent. You need to know your colleagues, your musician friends as people. So you can tell when is the right day to get them for a recording? When is the right day to give them a phone call? What is the right time? Or you just have to soldier through the process if you have a deadline, you know? So you have to communicate well to musicians. Tell them what we need to do. Put the project also out. Put the deadline of the project. Having a deadline for any task is always good. Even if you're doing it personally, tell yourself, see by March end, this has to be out there or by May the 13th, it's a release and have a plan. So moving on, right? So the eighth point would be optimize your workflow. So not all of us have, let's say, a good 16 hours to produce music in a day. If you're like me, I'm a teacher. I also do a lot of admin work in the school, which is Nathaniel School of Music. I also gig, I do this and that. So even just being a musician, there are a lot of subfields we get into. So you need to see how much of time you can and should dedicate to the field of production and try to optimize your workflow. So whenever I produce music, I always give myself an hour. I literally have a timer, a 60 minute timer, where I tell myself, after 60 minutes, I need to go out to the garden or need to take a walk or I just need to stop this work because mental fatigue is one thing, but there's also physical fatigue. It can hurt your ear drum. So if you're mixing a song or if you're producing a song and if you're not in the zone and if you're not aggressive about the process, I know I'm using harsh words, but I'm telling you this so that you can protect your hearing and also get way more work done in that one hour than not. And the thing about it is, if you do four hours of lukewarm work, A, it is inefficient because you're doing 25% of what you could do, right? The other problem is quality takes a hit. You may think if we work fast, quality is going to suffer. It won't suffer if you are intense about your work. So when you're doing your production work and if you actually have that hour from 5 to 6 a.m. or 7 to 8 p.m. before your dinner, what you need to do is you need to push yourself. You need to get it done and have a hard stop. You don't overdo it as well because remember, it's a physical and a mental activity. After about an hour, in my case, it takes a mental toll. So I can't listen properly anymore. Everything either sounds damn good or everything sounds like crap. It sounds awful. You don't want to bother after an hour. You want to probably take a break, maybe practice an instrument or just sleep or watch TV, get back the next morning and then go at it again. But again with energy, with aggression, with intensity. And use a few tools to help you optimize your workflow. Maybe you want to plan some hardware which helps you mix faster or do all your recording work faster rather than type those long key commands and shortcuts and whatnot. So invest in things. If you feel, oh, I'm getting fast with my software, you need to make your, the time taken to do certain things. Value, measure that time, you know. And also another way to optimize your workflow are things like what distracts you. In a lot of cases, Instagram, the phone or someone in your house might distract you, whoever it may be. So you need to kind of figure out when to shut off and just do that no matter what. It could also be the environment you're in. Maybe in your studio, that is the best place to work. But it should not be the place to do everything because then you won't value the studio. So what I tend to do, I do my other work somewhere else and then in the studio, I just do hardcore music production or music composition or aggressive music making. But with a lot of passion, I guess the word aggression should be changed to passion, which I don't want to change because I like aggression and intensity. I like that sports person's mentality a bit when I'm producing music, even though it's not really a sport. So we have two more things you need to focus on which are very important for me. The next one is music history. You need to know the past, you need to know the present and you also probably need to predict the future. So the past is so important because if you're listening to, let's say an Ed Sheeran or you're listening to Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga or A.R.A. Mann, I'm sure all of them would be linked to some artist which they all adore and love. And if you haven't heard that artist, there's something fundamentally wrong with you, I guess. So what if all four of them heard, well, die hard Beatles fans and all of them say that if the Beatles were not there, man, we would not be making music. And if you have not heard Beatles, well, you have to follow that roadmap. You have to follow that tree of life, so to speak, in music. Go to the Beatles, digest, dive into their music and continue to enjoy Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Lady Gaga. There's no harm in continuing to listen to them but don't forget where they came from. So music history can teach you a lot. It can also teach you the actual history or the situation going on in that part of the world in that era. For example, blues music didn't come through with a lot of fun and party. It happened through a lot of trials and tribulations. People were working in mines and fields in the hot sun and composing music with their voice. They didn't have instruments and they wanted to protect their art. They wanted to protect their art by playing some ridiculously tough music which ended up being bebop and jazz and ragtime, which us piano players love, of course, and so on. So history makes a lot of things happen. There's also the Renaissance period which made a lot of people a lot more creative. So what happened to start of the Renaissance period was very important. When did the first street theater thing happen and at which point did they say that music is useful and then when did that become Broadway and then when did John Coltrane play a Broadway song on the saxophone and that became the greatest jazz thing ever done. So it all happens because of certain historic reasons. So study your history. Also know what was going into the minds of those composers back then. For all you know, Mozart may have made a lot of songs and so did Bach. But they might have been pushed by a few organizations. Bach was definitely pushed by his church to compose music for the Sunday Mass and every week you would imagine him to not imagine, every week he actually made new music for each Mass which is unheard of today and Mozart was kind of paraded by his royal ruler to kind of make some awesome unheard of music. He was kind of a prize to showcase to all his rich people who would come to banquet and whatnot and to have a celebration. So Mozart had to constantly produce new music to even have the chance to live in that particular palace. You must have seen the movie Amadeus which shows a bit of this stuff. So definitely study your history. It's a very important thing and it can change the way you think about life as a musician. It's not necessarily about you. It's about this entire great art form and the evolution of our great art form just like every other thing on planet Earth which has evolved over probably a few billion years. So let's move forward to the last point which I think is something we all ask ourselves. How do you find inspiration? Because as a producer, you're not an engine. You're not a machine. You can't just sit and make songs. You have to find inspiration. So the thing I'd like to tell about that is look at multiple environments where you can potentially make music and respect all those environments. So for example, if you're in a party with friends, something might happen. You might actually come up with a riff. You might think of a bass riff. You're in a party. What do you do? Do you leave the party? Well, that'll be impolite. So you have to figure out a way to maybe go to the restroom or go to that balcony or the garden and sing that idea, capture that idea immediately and tell yourself tomorrow morning, I'm gonna finish that off. I'm gonna finish out that song. You could be in a car. You could be waiting for a flight or you just need to accept music and allow it to come to you and probably realize that music at the end of the day needs to come to you. You are not really making the music. It's just the air molecules which do their thing and create this incredible art form. So in simple words, I would just say, be in the zone, chill out, don't be too pressured and don't be too tortured by, oh, I have to produce a song. It has to be damn good. No, wait for it to come to you and when it comes to you, accept it. But to wait for it to come to you, you need to be there. You shouldn't take a long vacation, I guess. You should try to produce. You should try to create. You should try to practice. Practicing is also very important. As you try, as you get things wired into your brain, as you are in the zone, so to speak, and as you are respecting your environment, trust me, music will come to you and then it just organically comes out there no matter what. It just has to happen and that's where the production software, the DAW, the knowledge of mixing, mastering and music technology and all the gear that we use to help us, microphones, cables and audio interfaces and the like will all help you take your creations not only to the next level, but bring it to the final stage and create hopefully a timeless listen, a timeless product for countless of people over multiple generations across human civilization. Right, guys? So hope you found this talk about music production and what you need to dive in and what you need to get into the field useful and we'll be doing a lot more lessons on the subject. So don't forget to leave your suggestions in the comment. We'll be happy to consider them. We've already got a few and in the description, we've put together a playlist where all of our tech stuff is listed. Do consider checking that out and don't forget to hit that subscribe and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications. This year and hopefully following years are promising to have a lot of stuff focused on music production, not losing sight of what this channel also does which is theory, ear training and composing and whatnot. So do stay tuned. Don't forget to hit that button. Now would be a great time. Cheers and catch you in the next video.