🎛️ Music Production Talk: Follow the rules first and then break them.
Music is full of these stupid little contradictory proverbs, but this one I think is more logical than some of the others. If you look at the statement at face value it seems silly, but it falls neatly into the growth of a musician perfectly if you allow it, each phase having it's place and purpose.
When you first start out producing music (or hell, a lot of these posts I make you can likely apply to any art form), it's important to build structure for yourself. As a teacher, I see a lot of young folks coming in and 'breaking the rules' too early, never really gaining a deeper understanding of what they're doing.
That's why you need routine and structure before anything else. It's where your deeper understanding comes from. Breaking the rules as an amateur and as a professional (I use that word loosely) look completely different, but because we are making 'art', people sometimes allow themselves too many liberties too early on.
Think of rules not as your destination, but as a bridge.
Let's take mixing for example. There are tons of do's and dont's in regards to mixing philosophy. Using too much compression, too harsh of an EQ curve, not leaving enough headroom in your mix, uncontrolled distortion or saturation, mixing without purpose in general, etc. A young engineer may hear a bunch of things along these lines in the early stages. But the takeaway is not to set an absolute rulebook in place for the perfect track, but more so to understand why.
Once you know how these tools work, you understand them well enough to be able to push your own limits. Some tracks do call for an insane amount of compression, because that's the sound you're going for. Sometimes, you need a crazy-looking EQ to accomplish harmonic balance. Once you fully understand why a rule exists, that's when it's time to break it.
And that's just it. I feel like any article you read about music production is going to give you one of those two schools of thought. They're either going to give you a long list of elitist rules, or you'll get the overly liberal artsy engineer that tell you nothing is wrong and as long as it sounds good you're fine. Personally, I actually lean towards the latter, with the condition that you traverse the former first.
Because I see so many young producers subscribing to the 'no-wrong-answers' school too early, they never get the chance to experience a deeper freedom. They do not do it because their level of know-how allows them to, but rather they just rush to it blindly and never refine their technique.
But really at the end of the day, I say this because I feel it's important to point out that when you are getting these two schools of thought simultaneously, you realize that they are ideally chronological, not either or.
Follow the rules first, then break them as hard as they can be broken.
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That was a great article Harrison, I agree, when I open a DAW like FL Studio, I see a world of things that I have to keep learning, I never think that I reached the ending point of learning, I think we are just saying that we learned a thing just to show that we are in that path, but the reality is that there are always some challenges that we have to start them and test ourselves to see what we know and also in that process we will learn things.
for example think about a Music producer who produce Electronic music, then if that person wanted to start to produce an Acoustic music, he needs to know about instruments, he needs to know the sounds of each instrument and listen to many tracks in that genre, or a Classical music producer, if he wanted to start an EDM music, he needs to learn the structure of that genre, to know for example how the EQ and mastering and mix must be for each line in that genre.
and breaking the rules as you said, is when we know the rules, if someone says I break the rules without reading the rules, is like he has a guitar in his hand, and he don't know what is Pentatonic scale, but he want to break it's rule, its actually impossible, LOL, that's the way we have to look at how we produce a music.
I have to add that, I had too many faults in my way, and I always looked forward to learn more and more. and for me its a sea of knowledge that I have to learn. and I think I can never say that I finished it. :D
Thanks and very well said dude. That's exactly it. We can subscribe to the idea that music is an art and that there are no wrong answers, and I truly believe that, but it's still important to know why certain guidelines were created in the first place. Then you become knowing enough to use your better judgement and look at things differently.
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^^^^ what he said 😄