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Critical listening and transcription are very useful tools to learn how stuff works. There's a lot to be learned from music you already love. Pick one of your favo tracks, listen critically to it. What is the core genre? How is it structured? What different instruments do you hear? How does it flow from part to part? How are the instruments placed in the mix? Also try transcribing (by ear) the song (or parts of it) yourself to get an intimate understanding of how things are done. This is a biggie and takes time, but it's worth it. If you haven't done it before, start with just the chords or the bass of a slow song. These are just some options, you can go as deep as you want with it, and for me personally it works a lot better than analysing sheet music, learning notation or music theory, simply because I'm pretty much a hands-on kinda person.

That's the plan!

Death metal

SoundCloud The streaming may be 128kbps, but you can make your music downloadable in 320kbps or whatever MP3 encoding level you want, or you can just upload in lossless format instead. Bandcamp You upload lossless, and people can DL the format they want. MP3s from there are downloadable as either 320kbps or VBR0. If you're concerned strictly about higher bitrate streaming (as opposed to downloading), I'll join the popular sentiment: the demand isn't there, and the difference to the ear isn't practically discernible. As bandwidth capabilities rise over time, it'll eventually happen in the same way FLAC has grown as an increasingly offered downloadable option, but the baseline standard of quality is currently phone earbuds, so it'll require a sea change of sorts in maybe 5-10 years.

I start with my brain and pen and paper mostly. That doesn't mean I start writing score from the get go, it means that I listen to the source track a few times, let that inspire me to get some ideas on what kind of style, genre, mood I want to achieve and I write those down on paper. In the next day or 2, I think about it some more and write some more stuff down. What I write down can be pretty broad, here's some stuff from a track I worked on a week ago: "vocal track. start slow with piano and vox. add strings. first part should be calm and reflective in minor key, second half should be more optimistic, higher speed in major key. use traditional verse-chorus structure. use accordeon in second half. add violin solo somewhere.". So basically it gives me a blueprint of ideas on what I want to do with the track, and in combination with the source material I can steal the melody from that and incorporate that into my blueprint. With that input I start the arrangement, usually in 1 or 2 iterations to get all the concepts and ideas down. Instruments in this phase are pretty rough usually, mostly ballpark of the kind of sounds I have in mind. Tweaking and polishing things a bit is next, that can be things like adding harmonies, fixing timings, choosing better instruments and humanising the performance. Last step for me is mixing and overall production. This is typically where my skills aren't as good and thus it takes the most time and self doubt As for your second question: I typically have a few tracks in progress most of the times (atm I count 8, yikes!). A good reason for that is that I like to collaborate with other people to get some live performances in, and that usually involves a lot of waiting for people to find time to record. I typically fill up that time with working on other/new tracks.

When i first started using a DAW i used to spend a solid month per remix/rearrangement getting everything together. I would load up an instrument, play around with it and if nothing came to mind, delete and load up something else. It's a fine way to experiment and discover new applications for the resources you have but I found that it tended to kill the spirit of what I was working on long before I finished it. To spit music out quickly it's a great idea to make a bare outline of what you want, break it down into music's three core components which are melody, harmony and rhythm, use a vst that runs light on you pc/mac and doesn't make the entire project so cumbersome that it discourages you from making simple changes. I treat most of my outlines as simple high school piano renditions of what i want and develop them from there. Usually I will also keep melodies and harmonies in separate midi tracks just for the extra layer of organization. After the outline is more or less done I develop the rest of the arrangement starting with the rhythm section and ending with the lead instruments. Keep in mind that writing (coming up with the piece of music), arranging(deciding what instruments should be used and how), and mixing(how the frequencies of everything fit together) were all once (and still are) separate skills to learn. Now the lines are blurring and everything is becoming more and more inclusive. Which is great but it means there is a lot of information that needs to be learned and you are going to be learning it all at the same time. Because of this, it's important to recognize that there are different skills that are needed depending on what phase you are at when writing a piece from start to finish. If the harmony doesn't create the proper mood for the melody, it doesn't matter how much compression you use on that cello sample that you have programmed as playing all up-bows, It's still not going to sound right. If you keep your outline as simple as possible then you can get your idea out much faster and with fewer obstacles. When artist makes an image, they don't worry about properly shadowing the reflection in the window just right when the rest of the canvas is still blank. They do a quick sketch of what it's supposed to be then spend significantly more time developing it. It's the same deal with music. Sort of went off there but hope it helps! I still remember well the frustrations i had when i first started working with a DAW but it all lead to me developing a process I can use as a base to approach anything i want to now.

Well, I would try to first stop thinking of us as "pros" and start thinking us as a community of people who live and grow together musically. OCR isn't just a showcase, the community forums are here specifically for this reason. Other than that, I can't offer too much other than platitudes about failure being the only form of success. It all boils down to: chill out. Try things. Ditch what doesn't work and keep what does. Love music.

Doing compos has made this very apparent to me. I can think that what I just made was total garbage and people will like it, or I can be like "this is the best thing I've ever made" and it doesn't do as well as I thought. As an artist it's hard to predict how other people will react, and you might like or dislike your own work for reasons that aren't apparent to anyone else but you. You also don't have to release everything you make, just write tons of music. Trent Reznor has said this has been more or less the process him and Atticus Ross have used in their film scores since they don't have the experience in that field that others do, if you have the time to make a lot of music some of it is probably going to be ok.

As someone studying composition I can totally relate to your problem. Right now we're doing this huge project, and for the last few months we've been working on it furiously. I'd work on my piece everyday for weeks, and every Monday at class we'd show it to him. Every time I'd be a bit excited and proud of the stuff I did. Coincidentally, after almost every class I'd feel like going home, cry, and just ly in my bed for the rest of my life. I didn't do such a thing, but our teacher is quite harsh and every week everyone would get quite a lot of criticism (feedback) on our compositions that we had been working on for so long and of which at least I thought was sounding quite nice but apparently didn't work at all. I'd be lying if I'd say it wasn't demotivating. And then yesterday, I presented my umptheemth version of the song, and then my teacher patted my shoulder and said: "okay, that was quite good". And now, when I compare it to my first version, it really is whole lot better. And I never would have gotten it that good without writing all that other less good versions. So, yeah. Keep writing, be prepared to be told that it doesn't work, ask how you can change it and keep repeating that process. The workshop here at OCR is a really nice place for that, but getting face to face feedback from some local composers is really helpful as well. All of the composers I've met so far are all really nice, and generally prepared to help new composers with their stuff.

Failure is not writing "bad music". Failure is not writing music at all. If you don't like something, just remember its music, music is subjective. and someone somewhere will adore it. Being a composer means writing things you won't necessarily enjoy or like... hell you might not see any merit in it at all. Having a career as a composer is about keeping someone else happy, not yourself. Sometimes that means writing something in your own style, but usually you gotta fit to your brief. Besides, sometimes a mediocre idea can turn into something incredible if you just keep at it. Never give up, never scrap an idea if you can help it. You never know what you'll end up with, or what may happen.

All of us start off pretty bad. We've all been there. I understand that evaluating your own improvement can be hard at first. Don't worry too much about people who criticize you unconstructively. I would suggest that you find a few good people on OCR who are willing to give you honest feedback, and they can help evaluate how much you are improving as you keep writing more music. Plus, you can rest easy knowing that they mean well. It's more informative than figuring things out on your own, I can tell you that. As for keeping up the motivation? Don't worry so much about the end goal. Focus on what's next. There is no real end goal. If there was, there would be a stopping point, and assuming that invites you to slow down at some point, which doesn't help you get better.

Writing bad music is actually the only way to eventually write good music. Ideas can bottle up in a queue, so even if your latest creative impulse sounds like crap you need to give it creative due diligence and do some work on it until your muse is ready to move on. Writing more frequently (short pieces every day, for example) helps because you'll cycle out of the bad stuff more often. Then as you grow this keeps happening to you but the general quality of your stuff trends upwards. So you still cycle through what you perceive is good and bad, but your now bad is actually pretty good. In other words, you'll most certainly get better, whether you think you are or not.

Erm, I wouldn't say I'm good at all, but I approach learning anything, especially art, in three basic ways: - Do it. - Do it mindfully. - Accept and acknowledge crap, and move on. Do it: You just have to sit on your ass and DO the thing you're trying to get better at. Reading 10,000 blog posts on composing isn't going to make you better; you have to compose. As a writer, I've written 5 novels in the last 2.5 years, and now I can say they're worth reading. Do it mindfully: I used to tell my students that "Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes habits. PERFECT practice makes perfect." If you're "doing it" above but you're not being mindful about ways you can get better, you're going to stay stagnant or, worse, create bad habits. If I practice my piano scales at blinding speed with errors, I get really, really good at playing them really, really poorly. This is the part where I'm also reading, learning, asking questions of experts, and then trying to apply it to what I'm working on. Accept crap: I have lots of unfinished projects, both in writing and in music, that are crap. But each one of those turds came with a golden nugget of learning (or corn, I never could figure that out). Those hunks of steaming poop don't define you as an artist, and you have to let them go and acknowledge that they taught you something that you can then apply to #1 and #2 (no pun intended) The real lesson is you gotta put in the time. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, Malcom Gladwell wrote a book called Outliers where he explores "geniuses" and how in many cases it just becomes an opportunity for a person to put in monumental amounts of time into one activity.