i wish i had fellow electronic music producer-friends

djdizzy

djdizzy

Active Member
Joined
Jun 7, 2012
Location
Atlanta, GA
you know how they say that some of the best stuff comes from friendly competition?
example (skip this if you think it's TL,DR): being friends with someone who does the same thing as you but is slightly better is really the best way to step up your fame. point being, one of my best friends when i was younger was amazing at basketball, everyone thought this kid was NBA-bound. i was always into basketball as a kid too n we hung out all the time. my basketball game had sort of plateaued, where i felt like i reached a threshold and didn't get any better just stayed the same basically. then he move into town and we became best friends, played a lot of one-on-one. he ended up having to move again but by the time he moved, i had became amazing and we would tie a lot of the time. the friendly competition made my step up my game to a whole new level i never thought i'd be at, in fact he was the only kid around that could beat me whereas before playing with him all the time i'd say i was just average among the rest of the b-ball playing kids.

it reminds me of an interview i saw with dj krust where he echo'ed the same sort of thing. how roni size, reprazent, etc, they all had a sort of friendly competition going between them and it made them all step up their game. they fed off each other's creativity and they all benefited from it in the long run. he looked back and said that friendly competition environment was what really pushed him to bang out all those tracks he's known for.

i really wish i had that, friend or friends who are producers too. they don't even necessarily have to be dnb, any electronic music or hip-hop would be fine because they're all close enough. all my friends are into EDM but none of them are into music production so there's no way to "talk shop." anyone else here wish they had friends to be able to "talk shop" and had friends in a close enough or better skill level to where you had that sort of "friendly competition" that makes you step up your game but at the same time supportive to the other's work? i'm just bummed i wish i had a friend that didn't go blank, zone out, or look at me like i'm speaking a foreign language whenever i talk music. having forums like this available are nice, otherwise i'd have absolutely nowhere at all to talk music production, but it's different ya know? anyone else know what i mean or agree?

thanks for listening to my mini-rant :P
 
get out of here we dont want friends... haha jk welcome! Yeah bro me too its really hard to find and know peeps who actually produce and love what you do too. a 50/50 work of pure awesomeness!

I know a few but not much!
 
My feels are completely identical to yours man. A friend IRL who did music production would be a godsend

Also, I love that DJ Krust interview :gslayer:
 
Raptor's Den - you're right! now that i think about it, friends would interrupt workflow. fuck that! i'm gonna go hermit on these bitches.

this forum serves as a huge collective of knowledge but also motivation because so many of you guys are so damn good at what you do.

i do this for the love of music but i think one of the main motivating factors is feedback from other people and that feedback has a stronger impact when it's IRL. we're social creatures and that's a factor that drives us all to various degrees i think. but having said that, on here you get all kinds of styles and people you'd never get to meet or hear their music. so there's definitely benefits to both, it'd be nice to have both for sure.

sultanare - yeah, that DJ Krust interview is a really good one. he seems like a really knowledgeable guy, preaching his philosophy about music and making a lot of great points. here's the link to the DJ Krust interview for anyone who hasn't seen it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TluNW5WwP4
 
I kind of understand where you are coming from with this.....

I have several friends who produce (a couple of them are in a group with myself called Dead Noise System). However.....and I really don't want to blow my own trumpet here.....out of all of us, I am the best of the bunch when it comes to sound design. Which may sound arrogant, but to me it's a curse! whenever they are stuck with what sort of sound needs fitting somewhere, they come to me, and I hate that kind of pressure lol! I wish some of them were better than me for the exact reasons you mention. That being said, some of them are much better at structuring tracks than me, and they are top notch at drum work so I guess we all counter balance each other really!

To be honest I think the only reason I am better at sound design is because I have spent so long here in this forum, learning all the tricks of the trade!
 
Mr Fletch,

Very true, I could see how that could really weigh you down. Any situation where you're alot better than someone at something, you'd probably become the "go-to" person everytime unfortunately. It's cool that they're better at structuring tracks and drums, that gives you the opportunity to learn what makes their structures/drums sound so good and adapt a new workflow with some of those ideas. I could definitely see why someone would harass you all the time about sound design. I'm familiar with your songs and it's a goal of mine to try to reach that level of skills with sound design, your stuff sounds immaculate
 
I actually sat down with a non-producing friend, just for fun, and thought it fun to mix something together after a couple of beers (Also really helps on the creativity, lol). While the mix wasn't polished at all, we got some pretty good (And hilarious, lol) stuff together. I guess the problem was, I had started thinking in patterns, while my friend was all "wtf, dunnolol, let's put this here, it looks (!?) good". Some of it might sound like a flat shite, I either polished it, or added to it, and eventually, we ended up with some pretty dope stuff. Unfortunately, I don't know which HDD i saved our mix in. Could be fun to polish it a little. Basically, we did remixes of BBCs "talking animals", "sittin' on the toilet" and the "i like turtles" kid.

The key to breaking through my own boundaries was to really "just" think of out the pattern. And really, I've started getting more into EQing and dynamics as of lately. Some of the stuff I found too "cluttered" or just plain dull, has been really improved just by EQing and compressing. Especially as of lately, when I experiemented with gabberkicks. They sound decent enough (Nothing close to much of the commercial stuff), but the real problem is mixing them in to the rest of of the song. Here, my EQing really has helped compared to just "redesigning" the sound.

But I totally agree. I also think someone else's contribution makes you think in new ways, since you will have to complement and adapt to their changes in the mix.
 
It makes me think what it would be like being a successful and experienced producer.
Having constant inquiries about your methods and techniques by randies who want to be just like you.
I see it in soundcloud and forums all the time and imagine how much that would suck. But then again, having fellow experienced artists as mates or contacts would be preeeeettty sweet.
 
I wish i had a producer friends also and maybe someone to dj with too? Every Friday me and a friend do dnb dj set but i can see his heart is not in it and does not take it seriously like i do.

Would be nice to have a friend that shares the same vision as me and wants to be more than just a bedroom dj/producer
 
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