Dubspot

Over the last couple of years, Matt Shadetek (music producer, Dubspot instructor, and Dutty Artz co-founder) has written extensively music production with a series of “creative survival strategies” on our blog. Writing for our blog as well as on his own sites mattshadetek.com and duttyartz.com, Shadetek’s articles are decidedly dedicated to pulling back the curtain and being more transparent about creativity, sharing practical, educational, and helpful advice. In this blog post, we’ve chronologically listed all of his articles — providing you an excerpt and a link the full pieces.

Matt Shadetek is an Electronic Music Instructor and designer of Dubspot’s new six level Logic Pro Producer Certificate Program online and in NYC. As a producer, Shadetek has been making beats for over 10 years, making a name for himself as half of Team Shadetek, and releasing records on the seminal British electronic labels Warp Records, Tigerbeat6, Jahmek The World, and Sound-Ink.

His underground hit “Brooklyn Anthem” spawned a YouTube dance craze among Brooklyn’s teen dancehall dancers who call it the “Craziest Riddim.” He is currently working with the Dutty Artz family, which he co-founded with DJ Rupture.

PRODUCTION SPEED DATING

The idea that I’m going to talk about for this first article is Production Speed Dating.  This is an approach that my good friend, and level 99 music production wizard, Timeblind taught me when we were both living in Berlin a few years ago.  It is designed to avoid a specific pitfall, which is the polishing, mixing, and arranging of ideas that are just not that good to start with.  It is a way to give yourself options and choices in the production process, and avoid wasting time on songs that you are going to end up not finishing (gasp! I know, shocking, but this happens to all of us, even level 99 music wizards).

The basic methodology is this: suppose you and I are making music, and we have an eight hour production session planned, from 11AM – 7PM, with an hour break for lunch.  For the first part of the session what we are going to do is sketches.  Sketches may have various levels of completeness but the idea is that it’s a short loop, 16 or 32 bars, that contains the main musical ideas of a track like a beat, bass line, and melody. [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE]

SALVAGE

In this article, I’m going to talk about what you can do with some of the ideas that don’t make the first round of cuts, along with some of the un-finished tracks you have on your hard drive.  Often when we work on stuff we’ll get to a certain point, get stuck and start grinding our gears, spending a bunch of time fiddling with an idea that isn’t going anywhere.  This is exactly what speed dating is designed to avoid: that energy and time wasting, un-fun process, where you get so unhappy with the fact that something is not progressing that you give up.  Very often that experience of having gotten stuck and wasted several hours on an idea will create a negative feeling toward that project, so you don’t want to return to it the next day…  Better to start fresh and move on to greener pastures, with the hope that this won’t happen again.  While carried to excess this will lead to never finishing anything, in moderation this is basically a useful impulse.  The reason you got stuck on something is that it had some problem that was preventing you from progressing with it.  Putting it aside and starting something new is not a bad thing.

The flip side to that coin though is that the thing that made you sit and grind your gears on it while getting nowhere was that there was something in there you really liked.  It was that something that kept you going even as you started to realize that you were not moving forward.  The key here is training yourself to be able to recognize that inspiring element, identify any problems it may have, solve them and build it into something good.  One of my personal favorite beats that I’ve made, called Reign, which I recorded grime MC Skepta on for my Team Shadetek project’s “Pale Fire” album is an example of this. [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE]

DIGITAL ECONOMICS: SAMPLES

Continuing from my first two articles on the theme of producing efficiently, in this piece I’m going to talk about setting up your digital work environment.  Since people started getting carpal tunnel syndrome from sitting at computers, attention to physical ergonomics (chairs, desks etc) has gone way up.  I’m not going to talk about that here.  Suffice it to say that if you can get everything cabled up all the time, within reasonable reach from where you sit, and are not in pain after working for a few hours, you are doing well.  Instead, I’m going to talk about how to get the most out of your digital work environment.

I use Logic, and teach it here at Dubspot, so I will use a few examples from the program, but will also try to keep this as open-ended and general as possible so you can apply it to whatever programs you work with.  In electronic music production, one of the main things that we spend a lot of time thinking about and working on are sounds: getting your sounds organized and under control can be a great way to improve your productivity.

One area where I have struggled in the past is with drum samples.  I have a lot of them.  When I’m starting a track its usually morning, I’ve just drank a big cup of super strong coffee, and I’m ready to GO: I am NOT in painstaking crafting mode.  I want to get the basics up quick so I can get into whatever part of the track I feel excited about.  I absolutely do not want to start looking through my library of a million kick drums to find the perfect one.  What I’ve done to deal with this is I’ve created a map in the EXS24, the built in Logic sampler, with 128 pre-selected kicks that I know I like. [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE]

DIGITAL ERGONOMICS: SYNTHESIZERS

I was talking to a student of mine recently who was saying that he has all these great synth plug-ins.  He sits, and clicks through sounds, and finds a lot of great stuff that’s not EXACTLY what he’s looking for.  And then, when he thinks of a use for one later, he can’t find it, because he can’t remember what it was called.

Pretty much every library of synth sounds you will come across will have a different browsing system, layout, and naming convention.  A lot of them opt for silly ass names like ‘Photon Blast’ or ‘Sunrise on Titan’ (these are actual ES2 preset names in Logic).  I understand they’re trying to make them sound cool, and make keyboard guys with ponytails want to play them, but for me they tell me exactly nothing, besides the fact that the guy who made them loves science fiction.  I love science fiction too, but I also want to find useful synth sounds quickly.  As a result, what I will do if I get a new synth or am feeling bored is go through the banks, find presets I like, maybe tweak them a bit to bring them more in line with my use, or not, and then save them as Logic channel strip settings in one of my folders, before giving them a name that I will understand when it’s time to use them.  If you don’t use Logic, substitute whatever preset-saving system your software of choice uses. [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE]

THE CRITIC INSIDE

The concept of becoming frightened to be wrong is something that I think holds back many people upon entering creative disciplines, as well as those of us who have been doing this for a while. One of the concepts of the Speed Dating methodology is to temporarily silence the inner critic, and simply create by separating the creating and editing stages into different work sessions. In beat-making the time and thought-consuming work of arranging and mixing is similar to the process of revision or editing in writing. This is an important part of the process and one I would argue is critical in defining one’s artistic identity. However, this process of editing, revising and discarding ideas can conflict with the free and uncensored expression of ideas that are necessary to be creative. [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE]

SELF-SIMILARITY

The concept is self-similarity.  Basically, making tracks that sound like each other, and developing a ’sound’ as a producer and artist – meaning that someone could hear a new track and guess that it was you by the style and sonics.

An example of someone who has utilized this concept throughout their career is the grime MC and producer Wiley.  He’s one of my favorite artists from the grime scene both behind the mic and on the buttons.  His productions are bold and unique, and so is his MC personality.  He’s an artist with an outsized persona and a great deal of both personal and stylistic courage. [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE]

ZEN CALLIGRAPHY AND THE ART OF MUSIC PRODUCTION

The goal of learning anything well is to be able to do it easily and without constant thought and struggle.

In sports they call this ‘muscle memory’. You train until the correct action becomes a reflex. The goal of music training is the same. By learning and internalizing the rules we can make the right gesture the first time. My personal study of Zen has given me a great appreciation for the beauty in a single gesture. It’s something I strive for in my own production.

I often teach my students that when they find themselves struggling and unhappy with a project to save, stop and work on something else. Often what is causing you to struggle is a serious problem that you are too close to see. While a painter is painting they repeatedly step back and view the painting from across the room. We need to emulate this practice as composers and often time is the distance that’s required. I was talking with J. Period, a hiphop DJ I met recently and he mentioned a quote from Quincy Jones: “music is one of the few disciplines that simultaneously use the right and left sides of our brain.” [READ FULL ARTICLE HERE]

Logic Pro Tutorial :: Playing Melodies with Vocal Samples

Matt Shadetek shows you how to manipulate, re-pitch, and process vocal samples using Logic Pro 9’s ESX24 Sampler and Pitch Correction plug-in in this tutorial. Utilizing one of the vocal samples that comes with Logic, Shadetek slices each individual note of the sample, converts them into a sampler instrument. Shadetek delves into the ESX24 Instrument Editor, in order to re-pitch the vocal samples and make them playable across the keyboard. He then utilizes Logic’s Pitch Correction plug-in (similar to Antares Auto-tune), which he uses to refine the pitch of the re-pitched notes. At the end of the tutorial, you should have a strong grasp of how to take a sample and play your own melody with it in Logic’s EXS24 sampler.

Logic Pro Producer Certificate Program

132 hours of hands-on instruction in NYC | 60-80 hours of high quality videos ONLINE

NYC classes start the week of July 20th & ONLINE classes start the week of August 7th