The Fastest Way To Learn Music Production

Forget everything you know about learning music production; this video will change your approach forever. Over the past year, I’ve helped 100’s of producers take their tracks from amateur to professional. And I’ve taken everything I’ve learned from them and created a method for learning Music Production that will get you producing hit songs as fast as humanly possible.

This method will make learning music production easy by showing you exactly the most important steps to focus on. It will also help you breakthrough any slow progress or stagnation by identifying your weakest areas.

And most importantly, if you follow this method, you’ll be able to cut the time it takes to create professional quality music from your home studio in half. And if all that wasn’t enough, I’ve created a free 30 Day Production Action Plan you can download and follow along the way.

Let’s get into the method.

Point 1: Narrow Your Scope

Imagine for a second you’re an aspiring hip hop artist looking for a producer to make some customized beats.

Would you rather go to the guy that works with every genre? 

Or the one that focuses specifically on Hip Hop? 

The producer that works with Hip Hop all the time is gonna know the intricacies of the genre so much better than the producer that does “everything”. Which brings me to the first point of Method: Narrow Your Scope 

Choose one DAW and choose one genre.(And no, the DAW you choose doesn’t matter.) Once you improve your skills at one genre, you can consider expanding into others. But learning everything there is to know about one genre will give you more job opportunities, better practice, and make you improve way faster.

Point 2: Sharpen Your Axe

On to the second point of the method: Sharpen Your Axe. Imagine a man trying to saw down a tree with a dull saw. He works hard but he makes no progress. Then, a passer by stops and asks, “why not sharpen your saw blades?” The man replied, “I don’t have time!” 

The man continued chopping the tree, but he never makes any progress.The man who doesn’t make time to sharpen his blade won’t finish the job no matter how hard they work. So when I say sharpen your axe, I’m not talking about sanding your guitars. I’m talking about preparing yourself for your productions before you ever touch the computer. 

You do that by taking the time to watch tutorials, reading books, and immersing yourself in the craft.You should understand your most important tools.For mixing that might mean understanding how to use EQ, Compression, and Reverb. The truth is, professionals use the same tools. They just know how to use them way better. The more time you spend learning from them, the quicker you can bridge that gap.

Point 3: Practice Everyday

But just because you’ve sharpened your axe doesn’t mean the tree will get chopped.You still have to do the hard work. And the hard work comes with the next part of my method. Which is practice everyday.Let’s compare two aspiring music producers and their rate of improvement at the craft. Their names are Consistent Connor and Sporadic Sam.

Consistent Connor comes home from work everyday and produces music for an hour. After a month of consistent daily practice, his efforts even begin compounding. On the other hand, Sporadic Sam gets super excited about production on day 1 and spends the next 7 hours producing. At first, Sam is well ahead of Connor, but he only produces when he feels like it. Everytime Sporadic sam takes multiple days off his progress drops. Ultimately requiring more hours of production time to get to the same point as Connor.

After one month of practice, Connor’s abilities far surpass Sporadic Sam and his non-committal ways. Daily practice eliminates the gaps of knowledge caused by forgetting. It also makes it easy for our brains to build off of what we learned the previous days, which can compound on top of each other.

Let’s continue the scenario for 3 months. And assume both producers have practiced a total of 90 hours. After 3 months, Connor is even farther ahead of Sam. The compounding effect has started taking place for him. Though Sam is still improving and practicing, his end skill level isn’t nearly as high as Connor’s.

Point 4: Work on Weak Spots

Now we’re on to the fourth part of my method, which is to Work On Weak Spots. When I first started my production journey, I focused all of my attention on one thing: mixing. I would spend hours watching mixing tutorials. Sometimes I would re-mix my songs 20 times to pick the best one. But even with all that time and effort, I didn’t really improve. What I didn’t realize was that mixing is just one piece of the puzzle. 

So many of my students incorrectly think that amazing sounding productions come just from the tricks and the skills of the mixing engineer, and I used to too. But the truth is, amazing music productions are much more than just mixing. They use great song arrangement, music theory, melodies, sound selection, recordings, lyrics, and much more. For most producers, these extra areas of improvement are serious weak spots and huge reasons why producers stagnate and have slow growth. 

Learn how to record properly, learn music theory, learn how to make amazing melodies. Any topic related to Songwriting as a whole that you feel is weak, work on it. The skill that will have the biggest impact out of these weak spots is sound selection. If you can select good source material that supports the other parts of your song, you’re on your way to making great tracks.

Point 5: Listen to Music

Now moving right along to point 5 of my method: Listen to Music. If you’re reading this, you probably love music. That’s one of the best parts of production, you get to listen to music. Pretty awesome. But this part of the method isn’t about passively listening to the music. 

It’s about actively dissecting it.

You can use professional tracks to help guide your own music. These are commonly called reference tracks. And they can up your production skills quickly. To use reference tracks simply choose a song in the genre you’re making and listen. Listen to the way the drums are mixed. How loud are the vocals compared to the bass. What kind of chords does the song use? What’s the song arrangement like?

Instead of making music blindly, reference tracks give ourselves a final destination to shoot towards. Not only will these reference tracks help you make better music, they can also be extremely inspirational. If a kick drum sound gets you excited in a song, why not use a similar sound in your mix? Do you like a melody line from a track? Try to emulate it and make it your own in your song. Now, don’t steal a part directly from a song. 

Re-mix it. Twist it. Make it your own. 

If you combine the ideas from a bunch of different tracks and put them together, you’ll have something that’s unique and yours. 

Point 6: Finish Your Songs

On to point number 6. Point number 6 of my method is to finish your songs. I’m a huge culprit of this myself. The amount of half-baked song ideas I’ve written is enough to fill a factory.But there are a bunch of skills you’ll miss if you never finish the songs you start. 

For myself and a lot of the producers I’ve taught, it’s much easier to move on to the next shiny idea than it is to stick with a song you’ve already sunk hours into. But here’s why that’s not not a good idea. As you begin to finish more songs, you’ll get a broader view of the production process. Instead of focusing on one song part at a time, you’ll be able to focus on how the song progresses through its entirety. 

You’ll begin to hear and understand songs the way listeners perceive them and not how producers do. That’s a stark difference. As you finish more of your songs, you’ll also begin building a portfolio of music you can show potential clients, listeners, or even just grandpa bob. The point is, you’ll have something to show for the effort you’ve put in, which can be extremely rewarding itself. 

And eventually, If you keep finishing songs, they’ll sound indistinguishable from the ones you hear on the radio.

A Free Gift From Us!

To help you keep it straight, I’ve created a free 30 day action plan that you can use to fill out for your own music journey to speed up your learning. This action plan walks you through my entire method and it even includes three more production fast-track secrets I didn’t have time to cover.

Download it now!