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It can be widely debated what the most important skill a producer could have is.
Musical ability? mixing? sound design? There's so many.
After making music for 15 years now, I've really narrowed it down to one that takes the cake and is the most important in my opinion: Sound Selection.
The samples and sounds you choose to create with end up being the song (duh). It's the bones that make the entire skeleton.
There's really nothing more important, yet some producers spend so little time improving this skill comparative to other things.
Here are a few ways you can easily improve your 'sound/sample selection'
1. Preparing and digging deeper for the highest quality sounds for your sample library. I have seen DJs spend 10 hours a week digging for new songs for their set but only 1 hour searching for new sounds to produce with. That doesn't make sense to me. Explore far and wide into the depths of forums, old sample CDs, sample old obscure records, and invest money into independent sample creators that less people use to level your sounds up. EVERYONE looks on splice, you're gonna have a hard time finding new unique sounds there.
2. Study your favorite songs from your favorite artists and copy them exact. It's an easy masterclass of how great artists HAND picked each sound in their song. Copy a song exact and this exercises your sample searching muscles and teaches you how to select more tasteful sounds. There's a famous video of Flume where he credits this technique for becoming the producer he is today.
3. Download as many DAW project files you can get your hands on. This is an extremely easy way to see how a producer placed sounds where and why in full transparency. Early on in my career, I collabed with lots of artists and would open up .ALS ableton files from them. This taught me better sound selection fast. There's really nothing better than this. So collab or download/buy lots of DAW project files.
I have been lucky enough to see project files from some big DJs, and 9/10 times it's never technical whiz in the DAW, just classy and perfect sound selection.
See ya guys next week!
-Henry
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