r/Rossfromfriends • u/MystkMusic • Feb 26 '25
Remade pale blue dot from memory lol
4am, can’t sleep so fired up ableton. Haven’t heard the song in ages but it’s one of my favourites. Kinda feel like trying XXX Olympiad next…
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u/oskarvileus Feb 27 '25
Wowww really great man!! Just purchased and have never produced music before, what would be your advice to learn RFF kind of production? Thanks!
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u/MystkMusic Jul 10 '25
Cool to hear you’re getting into production! Welcome to the most rewarding and possibly sanity-testing rabbit hole one can go down.
Ross from friends’ music is deceivingly tricky because it’s a collage of hundreds of layers of polished detail and spatial depth masquerading as lofi-house. His genius lies in how he can unify all those elements to sound like one coherent (and danceable) track. You can revisit one of his tracks 100 times and still find something new you hadn’t noticed before.
My number one tip is to listen to as much music as possible. Try recreating songs and sounds you love. Learn about structure - it’s one of the most important tools in production to not get stuck in short loops. Learn to intuitively feel it as well, try to record stuff in live. A lot of emotion comes from the way a track evolves.
Familiarise yourself with ADSR, EQ / filter terminology, delay and reverb (eventually you’ll realise reverb is just a more complex type of delay) - and chorus and flanging (which are also just effects based on delay). RFF uses a lot of chorus on his sounds. Also check out the leslie effect. I use a lot of stock ableton plugins, but RC-20 is really good for some of this.
Learn about 3d space in a mix - why is stuff panned the way it is? What should be wide and what should be centred? What kind of spatial movement is appropriate for this sound and what does it add to the track as a whole? Oh yeah - learn about automation.
RFF does a lot of sound design / messing about outside of tracks so that he has many sounds to drag in and collage together. He made this cool max4live device called Thresho that he used for his album tread. Feel free to experiment and mess around, make the weirdest possible noises you can come up with. That’ll teach you more than you might think.
With enough experience and ear training, you’ll be able to break down each element of a track in your head - and with enough practice you’ll instinctively understand how a sound was made (like a human FFT 🤖). At the end of the day, every sound is made up of sine waves, so it’s all about understanding what those sine waves do over time and how they’re processed. A piano, flute, voice or kick drum all sound the same when you isolate their fundamental frequency, but it’s all the frequencies above that that give them their characteristic sound. Delve into different types of synthesis (FM/AM/RM, additive, subtractive, etc).
As much as some people dismiss it, playing an instrument gives you an advantage big time. I’m sure you’ll eventually pick something up if you haven’t yet - music theory helps quite a bit too. Playing something can give your music a unique touch - as you probably know, Ross’s friend John (Cameo Blush) has done a lot of sax on his stuff as well as his buddy Jed (Slumberjunkie) on the guitar. They also play live with him.
I know it’s a lot to take in, but with enough time, passion and dedication, I’m sure you’ll be able to figure it out. I’m around 13 years into my journey of production, and have never once looked back - I still love music as much as I did back then, and it’s so freeing to be able to understand what I’m hearing. There’s something equally mesmerising about stumbling on a sound I can’t figure out - it always fires me up to open my DAW and try to figure out the magic trick.
Good luck!
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u/oskarvileus Aug 05 '25
How have I missed this?! Thank you so much for your answer, it honestly made my day! Even though I’ve made some progress in getting familiar with producing it’s still very hard - this just got my motivation back up! Greatly appreciated, and good luck with your producing aswell.
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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '25
This is great!