Music Production Tips: Change It Up!

Talent alone is definitely not enough in this day in age to make it out there in the music business.  Everyone with a computer is now able to do something with little effort and the competition is vast.    We will be compiling a list of things that will help you make better quality music, as well as get your music heard by more people.   Talent never hurts but it's surely not the only thing that it takes to get your message out to the world. (forward from our Become A Music Producer section of the site)

This Entries Tip: Change it up!

Our attention works in funny ways We tend to get used to certain sounds and environments. You enjoy the silence on a construction site when the machines take a break for a moment. This same silence may be eating away at you on a quiet day at home until you trip over the cord to your cable service launching your t.v. into a roaring static box! Stepping outside of hip hop for a moment..let's learn about a band called The Pixies(key contributors to a style we would get to know well as Alternative Rock who began a technique they called LOUD quiet LOUD! Here is two examples...

quiet loud quiet:

loud quiet loud:

Nirvana's front man Kurt Cobain was a huge fan of The Pixies. He decided it would be funny to rip off their style and ironically he made one of the most popular rock songs of all time... the technique is most definitley at play here..check it out.

What do you notice about the chorus and verses? Definitley a sonic difference in quiet and loudness. This applies not only to delivery of vocals but instrumentation aswell. Notice the same technique applied a little differently here on Vic Mensas U Mad...

The beat is hyping up and calming down throughout but during the very beginning of the chorus it drops to a less busy section only to bring in the chaos and "loudness" for the second half of the chorus..this is literally the reason you "get hype" listening to this song.

The :change it up" method is actually slowly becoming a major part of successful artists songs. It doesn't necessarily have to be a change within the sonic volumes but it also can be a change in the overall feel of the track. Music is constantly morphing, transforming and growing..when everyone masters the techniques that are popular and uself others step it up to another level as to stand out. A new trend that has rap sounding "deeper" and more "artistic" is the complete change up of pace or instrumentation near the songs end or halfway mark. This takes major steps away from hip hops roots which were based on repetitions and loops coming from the era of vintage sampling and DJing.
For instance 50 Cent's In The Club is a great record produced by Dr. Dre. As a producer I can tell you that even though the layering and technique into making it may have been phenominal due to Dr. Dre's wizardry and practices. The main notation and melody isn't crazy intricate.

The instrumentals main attention grabber are the strings which follows a simple riff DA DA...DUH DUH..DA DA..DER DER..DUH DUH ..DA DA..the strings are going higher and lower...getting exciting and then more menacing..this is the loud quiet loud technique at play...but..the song doesn't change up much save for the cinematic string section at the beggining of fiftys second verse.(Ironically one of Dre's rules is to produce like every song is a scene in a movie) it's a fairly straight forward song set up.

Compare everything that happens after the last chorus of these two songs:

In Yeezy and Jay-Z's "N*ggaz in Paris" around the 3:01 mark their is a drastic change and reprise. Moments like this were not to prevalent in hip hop as much as say...rock before K.west started doing it on mega hits.
We also see more songs changing up the pace by artists like Drake and Lil Wayne..
For instance one of these songs is way more straightfoward than the other if listened to in their entirety.

Times are always changing and attention spans are getting shorter..you want a hit record? CHANGE THAT ISH UP!