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-- break / build-up
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quote:

Originally posted by Looney4Clooney Breakdowns are governed by the rest of the track. If you aren't writing the headlining track of a set, the type of tracks everyone cans and a breakdown will accentuate the main drop. well I guess you need to think about why you are doing a breakdown. There is really no point in having something that is filler, a big breakdown then more filler.

Sadly many producers, and a lot of DJs, seem to think that every track should be a peak-time mega anthem. "Structure is more or less set in stone"...

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Sadly many producers, and a lot of DJs, seem to think that every track should be a peak-time mega anthem. "Structure is more or less set in stone"...

Are you trying to troll? If you don't produce, what are you doing here anyways?

Discussing what makes an interesting breakdown.

quote:

Originally posted by Beatflux If you don't produce, what are you doing here anyways?

A better question is, what are you doing here if you are so challenged by a point of view that you have to resort to asinine territorial conjecture?

wutt does that mean

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Right, because only uplifting trance has snare rolls, rhythmless interludes and introduces big melodies in breakdowns.

no, but it is the typical genre that so many people here hate for usually having "a "big dramatic mid-track breakdown" thing". You've also called the style "music for the emotionally pre-pubescent" in the past, so excuse me for delving a little bit into the subtext behind what you said.

In other words, I am exactly right and your complaints have got nothing to do with the validity of what I said and everything to do with perceived slights on your personal taste. Trust me, almost every genre has big, predictable breakdowns: drum 'n bass and dubstep are packed full of them, progressive house has loads, big room mainstream house frequently resorts to them, tech house is far from guilt-free. The only real difference is what happens at the end: in trance and progressive you get a snare roll and a melodic crescendo, in dubstep/drum 'n bass the melody cuts out and stupid filthy bass comes in, in tech house there's a big white noise wash and the beat resets. Notably, you didn't give the slightest fuck when I criticised all those other genres before (even though I didn't actually name trance at all), because they don't feature in your tastes.

So yes, actually, I was being very generalised and it's only your fragile little ego that assumes otherwise. Based on the information given in the OP there is nothing specified about what music the OP is trying to make, whether it's a particular type of trance or something else, and my advice deals with what I genuinely believe to be irritating and over-used techniques in a wide variety of popular genres. And I am well within my rights to give my opinion on this matter, and anyone is free to heed or ignore it as they see fit. But then, I'd expect two guys who don't go to clubs and don't DJ to question the input of someone who does both. Because the opinions of clubbers and DJs is never relevant to producers, is it?

djs opinions on production are valid for obvious reasons. In a way , and this is not always a good thing but more worthwhile than a producer. I suppose that is how the world works. Editors publish books, not writers. Producers/directors greenlight mockups without knowing a thing about music. If a focus group comprising of people that know nothing about music say they thought the music wasn't hanz zimmer enough and was weird, well their opinion means more than a bunch of phds who are right but irrelevent. Life is unfair.

djs are musical idiots but they are essential to the whole machine. Dance music without a club or sweaty jock rapist gym guys lifting lead is pointless music.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J In other words, I am exactly right and your complaints have got nothing to do with the validity of what I said and everything to do with perceived slights on your personal taste.

actually it just had everything to do with your initial advice being barely helpful at best, and your defensive attack towards beatflux when he made a valid comment about it.

this doesn't really have much to do with my ego, in fact you're the one who vehemently refuses to acknowledge your advice is anything less than brilliant. I wouldn't have even said anything if you didn't react to beatflux's post the way you did. but, whatever, this argument is getting kind of dumb.

creativity knows no bounds, no ones is going to teach you it, maybe some enabling techniques the fuck do i know, anyway, the op seems to be struggling with producing in general and not just the breakdown. you have to take babysteps and learn how to build blocks before you make that lego striphouse with the lego babes dancing, you know what i mean, or was i the only one with the fuked up childhood? start small, learn synth properties and effects.

quote:

Originally posted by Kysora actually it just had everything to do with your initial advice being barely helpful at best, and your defensive attack towards beatflux when he made a valid comment about it. this doesn't really have much to do with my ego, in fact you're the one who vehemently refuses to acknowledge your advice is anything less than brilliant. I wouldn't have even said anything if you didn't react to beatflux's post the way you did. but, whatever, this argument is getting kind of dumb.

Beatflux's post was the worst thing I've ever read on these forums, and I am not even exaggerating. I have actually been remarkably restrained in my reaction, if only because I'd probably get banned by the trigger happy sheriffs of this province if I gave him both barrels like I would have in MD or anywhere else. If you think it was valid then I have absolutely no interest in your opinions on anything else, ever, thanks.

That trigger happy sheriff is nowhere to be found and probably doesn't even have any bullets unfortunately.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Beatflux's post was the worst thing I've ever read on these forums, and I am not even exaggerating. I have actually been remarkably restrained in my reaction, if only because I'd probably get banned by the trigger happy sheriffs of this province if I gave him both barrels like I would have in MD or anywhere else. If you think it was valid then I have absolutely no interest in your opinions on anything else, ever, thanks.

Are you mad about the structure comment?

I just don't see why he thinks it's absurd that any advice relating to being original and unique is bad advice for someone who can't make anything at all. you kind of need to be able to do the usual before breaking into the unusual.

quote:

Originally posted by Kysora I just don't see why he thinks it's absurd that any advice relating to being original and unique is bad advice for someone who can't make anything at all. you kind of need to be able to do the usual before breaking into the unusual.

Look, I understand the concept of "You have to know the rules before you can break them", even though there are artists like Autechre who freely admit that when they were starting out they didn't have a clue what was right or wrong and never bothered to learn, and you can neither argue with the artistic quality of their work nor their success as a result. But there's a difference between learning "the rules" and encouraging unoriginal and formulaic thinking early on in the learning process. Being creative and original is a skill in itself, it doesn't just happen once you've learned the basics, it needs to be developed right from the start.

I'm a published author, and I did three years of creative writing while at university. We learned all "the rules" of story-writing: beginning, middle and ending, complicating actions, resolutions, controlling ideas, narrative casuality, character-driven storytelling etc. etc. etc. But at no point were we praised or rewarded for turning in unoriginal or derivative work.

What I want to emphasise right away is that it isn't hugely creative and original to put together a track that doesn't build up to a breakdown where the main hook is introduced and where everyone is expected to thrust their arms exultantly towards heaven, only to clench them into a synchronised fist pump of triumph (or moronic dubstep skank, depending on your genre of choice) when the never-ending build-up finally terminates in inevitable full power beat boshery. That isn't following the rules, any more than putting a tear-jerking scene where an imminently doomed character shows pictures of the Wife & Kids to the protagonist in the shitty fan-fic novel you're writing is "following the rules". You're not necessarily being avant garde or totally out-there by avoiding these clich�s. There are hundreds of successful dance records that don't use them (and thousands of simply good or outright great records).

The first half of Beatflux's response predicates on our different musical world-views. You and him read "I can't make an interesting breakdown" and assume the OP is trying to make a standard uplifting trance set piece. I read the same statement and assume the OP is trying not to do that. There's absolutely no information provided in the OP about what music he likes, what his music sounds like and what his current breakdowns sound like. To say I'm being unhelpful or telling him to produce music he won't like is just pure projection, plain and simple. So shut the fuck up about it.

As for the second half, that is such a stupid statement I don't even know where to begin. It's not just his advice to a newbie either. It's not just "Don't worry about structure until you've got writing/production down" (even though that's still fucking stupid advice, not just for the reasoning posited above, but also because structure and form and dynamics and all that shit is a huge part of what makes music work). This is his fucking ideology on music. "Of all of the great dance songs I've listened to, 99% have an extremely predictable structure." I don't know if this guy has just heard a laughably small amount of music or whether it's in his tastes to be scared and turned off by anything that doesn't follow one of two or three basic paradigms, but this is unforgivable fuckwittery.

The fact you completely ignored it and just focused on the first part of what he says suggests to me that you think pretty much the same too. At least based on your comment "the breakdown is the most important part of a track" you always unerringly set out to make the big dramatic mid-track breakdown track, the same fucking cut and pasted template that clogs up Beatport, a mind-numbing, sanity dissolving archive of audio clones, like some musical equivalent of an unsolvable magic eye picture puzzle where you gaze into a repetitive pattern of identical images until your eyes glaze over and your brain seeps out of your nostrils. Well I'm here to tell you that when someone talks about a musical "idea", they don't just mean coming up with a different melody to go into your comically tumescent mid-track unicorn gang-bang. They mean try coming up with a different fucking journey, a track which has a different destination, a different focal point, melodies and riffs and atmospherics and peaks and valleys that go somewhere you haven't been before, that serve different purposes and all come together in ways that you haven't heard eighteen thousand times before on a Saturday night. Anyone who believes that "structure is more or less set in stone" has no right to ever, ever describe themselves as creative and should probably sell their keyboards and their speakers and donate their over-expensive laptop to a children's charity, especially if they have the temerity to top it off by including a quote about modern music lacking good ideas.

That make it any easier to understand why I think his post is absurd?

wheres the cowbell?

every break needs at least 5 layers of cowbells

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J That make it any easier to understand why I think his post is absurd?

I think you're completely misunderstanding me when I suggest it's useless to say what you said to someone new to producing. I didn't read his post and assume he's going for a standard uplifting breakdown, I'm not trying to tell OP to copy Blueman and Arctic Moon over and over again until his skill set is only good for making cheap knock-offs of other people's ideas. I'm not trying to extinguish a creative drive by directing it towards imitation and repetition. And I am not projecting my opinions on you unfairly, so quit acting like a fucking victim already.

If you don't produce, I don't expect you to be able to relate to this, but it's the single most frustrating thing in the fucking world, having goals, ideas and a creative drive that you can't do anything with. Writing is a different story, just because you don't have the grandiloquence and whatever other knowledge is necessary to be a successful, published author doesn't mean you can't have the creativity and originality to think of an interesting, original story. Music isn't the same, at all, especially EDM production. Creative and original thinking might be a separate skill set, but it's completely unnecessary to try and nurture it until you can at least present a complete idea, as rudimentary or shoddy as it might be. OP is clearly stating that he can't do that yet.

You're encouraging originality, which isn't a bad thing at all. Don't misunderstand me, and stop fucking attacking me personally as if you think I'm just a sheep who can't think for myself or attempt anything remotely original or creative. You're not any more enlightened than I am, so fuck off with the superiority complex. The problem lies in the fact that I could probably tell OP to write a breakdown with a I-IV-V-I progression, a simple melody with 4 notes, 2 measures each, a riff comprised of that overused dotted 8th note up-down-up-down uplifting pattern thing, that starts out quiet and builds to a wall of sound before bringing the beat back in, preferably with white noise, filter cutoffs and maybe a snare roll to top it off. That's as simple, predictable and formulaic as it gets, and OP would probably not be able to do it. If he could, he wouldn't be here. His problem is a purely technical one, and you're approaching it as if its a creative issue. Music production is a little more complicated and involved than writing, there's a ton of work that needs to be done completely separate from anything that remotely resembles a creative outlet before you can actually take someone on a "journey" that's one-of-a-kind. Nurture your creative soul all you want but it's not going to help you one bit when it comes to actually making something in your DAW that you're happy with.

Your advice is good, but it assumes OP is at a level he clearly isn't at yet. If he can't even make a complete breakdown, there's advice that will be more readily helpful to him than anything you've said so far. I'm not being too unreasonable by suggesting that, considering I'm speaking from experience. And as far as I can tell, you aren't.

quote:

Originally posted by Kysora If you don't produce, I don't expect you to be able to relate to this, but it's the single most frustrating thing in the fucking world, having goals, ideas and a creative drive that you can't do anything with.

I can completely and utterly relate, actually. But the funny thing is I never found issues of structure or arrangement that difficult. Writing and producing are the same across your whole track - if you can't write a good melodic part in your breakdown or find the right sounds for it, you probably can't do that in any part of your music. Again, it's not like there are totally different rules for the breakdown. If someone tells me they specifically have a problem with breakdowns, to me that's one of two things: either a basic struggle with understanding form and structure or a mistaken belief that there's some correct method to producing a breakdown that they haven't figured out. So my post attempted to tackle both of those problems. If you're going to use a breakdown, you have to be very clear on what the point of the breakdown is and what purpose it serves in the track, otherwise it will sound contrived.

Agreed.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I can completely and utterly relate, actually. But the funny thing is I never found issues of structure or arrangement that difficult. Writing and producing are the same across your whole track - if you can't write a good melodic part in your breakdown or find the right sounds for it, you probably can't do that in any part of your music. Again, it's not like there are totally different rules for the breakdown. If someone tells me they specifically have a problem with breakdowns, to me that's one of two things: either a basic struggle with understanding form and structure or a mistaken belief that there's some correct method to producing a breakdown that they haven't figured out. So my post attempted to tackle both of those problems. If you're going to use a breakdown, you have to be very clear on what the point of the breakdown is and what purpose it serves in the track, otherwise it will sound contrived.

The thing is, you're starting with a prejudice over him by projecting intentions you cannot deduce in anyway.
Your advice on being original is appreciable, but totally inappropriate in the context.

quote:

Originally posted by TranceElevation The thing is, you're starting with a prejudice over him by projecting intentions you cannot deduce in anyway. Your advice on being original is appreciable, but totally inappropriate in the context.

It's more appropriate advice than this thread deserves.

hi guyz

i come here to troll, but im going to be straight-up about it.

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