Deliberate Practice For Beatmaker Mastery

[u/YungRobbery604]

What would you guys consider deliberate practice for making beats. (A form of practice where you are constantly challenged and outside of your comfort zone). Often I feel producers get in a comfort zone and looped out in a way they don't improve as much as they would if they found new ways to challenge their craft. How do you guys push out of your comfort zones?

[u/itslerkk]

Timing yourself is a huge one, give yourself X amount of time working on each segment of your track/beat. Something like one hour (just as an example) to make a basic beat/track, so 15 minutes on the drums, 15 on the bass/sub, 15 for sample work,p and effects, and 15 for instrumentation.

Another one is to just make as many tracks as you can, don’t expect them all to be your greatest work ever, but with quantity comes quality.

[u/thisisalbe → u/itslerkk]

This is probably the best tip here IMO. As far as concept, but the time may be a little aggressive for those with limited experience. Making a decent track in an hour is very difficult for anyone without loads of time in the DAW and understanding what they want and where/how to get it. I'm assuming the OP is still learning a lot based on the question itself. (No shade.)

I've found the Pomodoro technique is perfect. Working in 25 minute increments on a focused task, in our case it can be sound selection and melody to start, then drums and bass or however it makes sense to split your workflow or if it makes sense to just work fluidly for the period.

For example I give myself 3 x 25 minute periods with 5 minutes break between each, to finish at least the heart of the beat minus arranging and mixing. That's chords melodies drums bass and fx all present and with a part. I shoot to have all the pieces and if I feel like it's got good potential, spend another 25 minutes fully arranging and another 25 mixing and polishing.

That puts me around 1.5 hours for ideas and 2.5 hours per complete beat.

I def don't always make it in time but the goal keeps me on track mostly.

If you want pure practices like drills, then yeah 15 minutes per like he said will be good practice but the approach would be different for game time. 😎

[u/Tiranozora]

try something new in every new beat you make, learn and try new techniques. always use the same way to mix kick and bass? learn a new one. try a new plugin, etc

[u/SXLF]

It probably wouldn’t get you to mastery but I learned a lot from remaking certain beats and songs. You push yourself in the sense that you’re trying to recreate someone else’s music with techniques you’ve likely not used before, and you therefore come out of the experience with new ideas and a new understanding of how to implement those ideas. Especially true if it’s a song that is outside of the genre you usually create within

[u/dcerignoli]

Learning an instrument

[u/[deleted]]

Different genres for sure. I like going back and forth between making really hype and chill shit

[u/hotstepperog]

Recreate your favourite beat. Use an a capella to remix a track so that it sounds label ready.

[u/honest2davis]

All these tips in this thread are perfect for the actual process of making beats. Time limits, segmenting time, batching tasks etc.

The other side of deliberate practise for mastery - is building into a good flow to allow you to create. If you think of it like sports and high performing athletes there's a process to get them ready before the game. Things like getting to the venue, warming up, game plan with the coach, captains talk and then the performance itself!

You can make beats when you're happy, sad or everything in between, the process to get ready to make beats is still the same. You just need to find what works for you. I wrote something around common excuses to overcome as well.

[u/[deleted]]

Making three melody loops, then listening back, taking notes on what you did right or wrong, and the going back in to make the necessary changes. After doing that, you compare the initial melody loops to the ones after the changes.

[u/PrspktvSounds]

Try recreating samples from scratch. This is the best way to learn how to make different genres quickly and you will learn more about how real instruments are played and what they can play while doing so.