I have previous knowledge on music theory: scales, chords, harmony, etc….I learned to play keyboards when I was young but It’s just a couple of years that I start producing music with my Digitakt (sometimes with the Digitone). It’s my hobby but I always spend some hours during the week playing with my gears. I opted for quantity over quality to improve my skills as a musician (I created a YouTube channel where I post my jams almost weekly).
After more than two years I’m quite happy of what I learned but in the last months I feel stuck, I see (hear) no improvement on what I’m doing, it’s like I’m not learning new things, I continue doing the same music with the same mistakes.
What are you doing to improve your production skills? What are your techniques to became a better producer? Exercises? Books? Youtube tutorials?
Stuck works just fine for that meaning. I think the question is, can you be more specific about what you want to improve on? You did say “production” in your last paragraph but you also seem to be implying “electronic music making” in general.
Either way, my advice is to imitate before you innovate. Choose some songs you think you can copy and recreate them from start to finish. Try to make it sound as close as you can within reason (you’ll go crazy trying to get it exact). You will hopefully learn a lot about song structure and help develop your ear for the production side.
Also you should spend some time in a DAW mixing things down with compression and EQ and whatnot. It is difficult to get a finished sound out of your gear without developing your ear to know how to shape your sound on the gear to avoid needing it. Kind of a paradox but I think it’s a necessary step.
Maybe the phrase you’re looking for is “come to a plateau”
First, find out exactly what it is you enjoy. Then do more of it.
I’ve felt myself improve the most when playing with other musicians. Creative and technical exercises, as well as recreating and covering other people’s music have also had huge benefits.
Ehe…no
I know that something doesn’t work, but what?
As I say I practice but my music is not as good as most of the other in this forum, sometimes is poor, other times is too repetitive, sometimes is missing something, other times the sounds are thin and dull.
I agree with @Microtribe about not comparing yourself to others. But I think it’s also important to know what needs improvement in your music. It’s OK, nobody is perfect and everyone can improve. The more detailed and specific you can be about being aware of what you think needs improving your music, the more you can do to get better. Awareness is the first step.
I’m no expert, but just breaking things up and doing something different are steps. Maybe your not hyped to watch or read on mastering but you want to learn to make something on your sequencing/composing, just pick a different thing or rehearse or rework something. I started working on improving a track and learned a way to beat match in the process.
But a lot of other great things have been said already.
This is defo my approach. Same with my bands, we always recorded ourselves, every practise sessions, recording sessions, video live sessions. Watch back, learn, find areas to tighten up on. If you listened back and enjoyed it, mission complete. Everything else then didn’t matter.
You don’t notice the improvement as you’re doing it, but if you listen back to your tracks from 6months, 1year, 2years ago etc you can hear the improvement.
Then you get to the stage when you let folk listen to it and they prefer all the sloppy shit you made years ago… siigghhh
I did learn a lot from youtube, but in general i see a tutorial, and then i recreate the sounds, as close as possible, save them for further iterations, then i try to recreate it on different vst or hardware. I paractice question and answer methods, i.e alterating the answers, i make complimentary styles aswell, just to learn how its done. (Ambient is a good teacher.)
Each style has its own code, so i try to learn the parts i think which is most intresting about the genere. (House Grooves, DnB /Timing etc)
Simply put, make some diffrent genere for a while to get some additional input.
(I’m not native english).