5 ultimate practice routines for music producers
By the end of this post you will have 5 very practical practice routines you can follow to achieve amazing outcomes - and even use to finish entire songs without realizing it!
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Why Don’t Producers Practice?
Guitarists practice scales, woodwind players practice breath control, and most musicians spend a lot of time honing their technique…
Yet producers often feel like every session needs to result in a finished track.
This leads to overwhelm, frustration, and feelings of failure. And it’s just madness when you stop to think about it for more than 2 seconds!
So if you take a page from literally any other musicians book and spend more time with curious, deliberate practice, it can help you finish better music, be more in control, and have better mental health around your music development.
Let’s get into it!
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5 Life-Changing Practice Routines For Producers
As you practice any of these, set a timer for 15 minutes to 1 hour, and drill it over and over.
We don’t aim to get it “right” - we aim to be curious, and observe the results, making note of what we like or don’t like.
This will help you familiarize yourself with different outcomes based on what you do.
This is how you develop your skills, deepen your emotional connection to music, and become an in-control producer.
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1. Songwriting Practice:
Exercise Part 1: Pick a chord progression - like F G Am G - and write it in 10 different ways. Change voicings. Change rhythms. Break it up. Explore.
Exercise Part 2: After you’ve written 10 different variations, take one of your favorites and write 10 different melodies on it.
Save your favorites as a MIDI file to use later if you write something awesome.
By doing this, you’ll develop a deeper understanding and emotional connection with the notes you choose.
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2. Sound Selection Practice:
Exercise: Take one of your favorite chord progressions and melody sketches from the last exercise, and put it into 5 different sound palettes.
Pick sounds with intention based on a reference…
Or set yourself totally free and be weird with it.
Observe the results, and save your favorite.
This helps you understand how sound selection impacts the emotional tone of your music.
An advanced version of this is to try to hit specific emotions - how could you make the sketch more sad or happy, only with your sounds?
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3. Drum & Energy Practice:
Exercise Part 1: Take one of your favorite loops from the previous exercise and create 5 different drum patterns for it.
Focus on hearing what happens to the energy when you change the hi-hat pattern vs the snare pattern vs the kick pattern.
Exercise Part 2: To take this exercise to the next level, take your favorite drum pattern and explore 5 different drum sounds for it.
What happens when you choose a tight hi-hat vs a loose hi-hat? A big fat snare vs a tight clap? A stompy kick vs a tight EDM kick?
This helps you connect with how your decisions with drum patterns effect the energy, groove and momentum of any piece of music.
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4. Creative Samples & Ear Candy Practice:
Exercise: Take your favorite drum loop from the previous exercise and add different creative samples to it. I recommend a tool like Splice for this.
Explore things like sweeps, impacts, sub drops, beeps or boops, vocal phrases, ambience, weird tonal hits… anything that can be dragged in to create new ear candy!
Go nuts, and just observe the changes.
Once you’ve got your loop filled up with interesting sounds, duplicate the whole loop and start eliminating sounds until you are left with the “minimal” version.
What is the difference?
Which feels more natural or complementary to what you composed?
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5. Engineering Practice:
Exercise: Take your favorite version of the loop you made in the previous exercise and play with mixing the elements in 3 different ways using your key tools:
Volume, EQ, compression, reverb, delay, saturation, and any creative processing plugins.
I suggest making one version that is very “gentle” and feels “close,” one version that feels very “processed” and “pushed” to the extreme, and one version that is just pure all-out creative with all kinds of weird processing to make your concept unrecognizable!
By experimenting like this, you’ll familiarize yourself with different outcomes based on your mixing decisions in a safe way.
You’ll connect with how mixing can be fun, and is an art like any other!
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Did You Notice What Just Happened?
If you’ve been following along, you might notice that following these practice routines has not only improved your fundamental skills and deepened your emotional connection with music - but it’s “tricked” you into building an entire, developed track concept!
Who knew that we could “practice” our way to greatness?… Well, I guess ask any master and they’d tell you. 😉
Now you can use our other fundamentals to finish this concept if you choose - like using reference tracks to map an arrangement for it.