7 Ways to Immediately Make Better Music

How many times have we just listened to a song we say, so what was that about? The production does not match the vocal. If you sound like Yeet, I'ma just go listen to Yeet. We just simply don't believe you. One more time. Then we do it one more time. One more time. Spin. it rock, spin it one more time. Hit me, baby, one more time. And so it turned out to not be a real jetpack. Welcome back to another episode of the One More Time Podcast. Today, Henry, we are going to divulge. Divulge? Is that too big of a word for you? Call me off guard. We're going to discuss the seven most common points of feedback that you and I have given during eight months of reviewing music from our uh live streams. Yep. So we listen to our community's music, as a lot of you guys know, and we caught ourselves kind of giving a lot of the same points over and over. So I think this is a good opportunity to kind of put them in one place. And if you guys have all these boxes checked that we're gonna discuss right now, you're in a good place.

Yeah, because at first, when I caught myself sounding a little bit like a broken record, I was like, damn, am I just like not good at giving feedback, like original feedback to our community's, you know, music. But then I was like, oh. Well, that too. Well, okay, fuck you. But no, you and I talked about it, and it's like, no, I mean, honestly, just up and coming artists, that there are common themes. Like there, there are a lot of the, you know, same, I guess, concerns that you and I have had when listening to some of our people's music. So we're gonna kick things off. Number one, believability. This is a big one. Okay, so what we mean by that is literally when you are delivering your vocals, right? We just simply don't believe you. Yeah, right. So typically it's a it's a confidence thing, right? And emotion, perhaps, like lack of emotion. And it sounds like you're just so focused on maybe like getting the lyric right or something that you're overthinking it, and then it's coming across as like it's like a bad actor. I don't know, I hate to say that, but it's like it's literally as if you're reading a line from a script.

And I think they are reading lines off of an iPhone, yeah. No, I think that actually is literally the case sometimes. And uh memorizing your lines in advance helps a lot because you're able to focus on the delivery, on the believability, on the emotion, instead of worrying about what word comes next that's already just kind of ingrained in your mind. You can really get into the tone and the confidence and the believability when you have that. Um, and then number two for me, I think, is just practice. I think a lot of it is gonna come down to making a fuck ton of music, you know. what I mean, and for me, number three is do more takes. True, like try it again. Yeah. I think something you talk about a lot is like, was that the best take? Yeah. And if the answer is like, uh, then no, it's no, let's try it again, right? And I get it, studio time can be expensive, right? But it if you're up against the clock, like you're never gonna get the best version of the song out, right? So maybe thinking about the clock that's already bad.

You're already fucked. Um, all right, moving on to number two mastering, just basic basic mastering. So, what what do we really mean by that? So we make it a point to keep our speaker volume consistent every live review. We don't turn our speaker up or down. We're playing every file at the same level, so we can tell when we've listened to three songs, and if your song comes on and it's way quieter than another song, we immediately notice. And that's exactly the same that people are gonna notice if you're on a playlist with other artists and your song is quieter. It's just it's this thing that we've come to over time where loudness, it's called the loudness wars, where people perceive louder music as better, and it and we we're losing dynamics with it, but it is just kind of the way of the world now. And you need to be able to compete with other music if you're gonna be played on the radio on a playlist with big artists. So you don't need an expensive mastering engineer. I think most of y'all could go out there and learn it.

If you're operating in a DAW, you could maybe get one plug-in, even stock plugins, watch some YouTube videos, figure out how to get your track up to a level where it is not gonna sound weak next to the competition. Yeah, there's so many technology platforms. I'm pretty sure DistroKid, shout out to our sponsors, DistroKid. I'm pretty sure they have some like mix and master platform within their Mixia. Shout out Mixia. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you can do it, you know you can do it like that, you know what I mean? And the AI mastering is like really good these days. Like for someone who gets paid to do this stuff, I'm not gonna lie. Like some of that shit's really good. I don't know if it's beating a human ear that can adapt to each song individually and have their own personal tastes, but it's gonna beat your song being too quiet every time. Yeah, and I'm just wondering if artists don't do that whole playlist trick, right? Where you take a Drake song, you put yours right next to it, play them both with the volume consistent on whatever like device you're listening on. Referencing, you gotta reference.

Yeah. Reference songs that are in your area in your genre. I know people don't like the word genre, but whatever songs that are big that you could see yourself on a playlist with, make sure that if a DJ were to play them back to back, there's not a like loss of energy, essentially. Is that even does it does genre even matter for mastering? It feels like so many genres. It's like genre matters less and less every day. Well, that too, but I just mean in general for mastering, it just seems like No, there are different loudness levels. No, EDM is mastered the loudest. Okay. Of every genre. Okay, wow. Hip-hop's pretty loud, like bass heavy stuff. Yeah. Gets pretty loud. Acoustic music is not gonna be as loud as a fucking hard style. No, it makes sense. You know what I mean? So there's some little shit there. All right. Number three. Uh one speed is what we wrote. So basically, not enough peaks and valleys. So we talked with Troy Taylor recently, legendary RB producer, about this concept. And it really made sense when we started to think about these like seven most common points of feedback that we had. Is that like too many artists when we listen to your songs, it's just very much like as if you're on cruise control going down a road at the exact same speed the whole time.

And that's just not realistic as far as like human conversation and like human interactions. Like we as humans like when there's peaks and what you're talking about, and then we like when there's valleys and shit gets kind of a little bit low. And we like when it gets a little bit drawn out. And we like when it gets really You know what I mean? So it's like dynamics. Yeah, dynamics of the song. So I think that that's one thing we noticed when we were, you know, coming up with these points is that like too many of our community, um, it might be like a a really dope one speed. That's the thing. Yeah, I think of Tyrell from our first song battle that we had recently, who made it pretty far. His one speed was dope. Like, don't confuse this with our first point. He sounds confident, he can rap, but he's not deviating from this one speed enough for us to like stay interested. Yeah, the first song was like, damn, that was dope. He can really rap. And he moved on. And the second song, we were like, damn, that was like kind of the same. It was dope, but it's still that one speed kind of thing. So I was a huge Tyrell fan at the beginning.

And then I pointed that out to you. And even without you pointing it out, it was more like, oh fuck, like this is a little bit too much of the same speed. Yeah. And it and it didn't keep it interesting enough, and it was like, oh man, like I'm I'm kind of sick of this at this point. You know what I mean? And a listener can get really like we have terrible attention spans. And if it's one speed, one, one, you know, kind of cadence, one flow, one volume, one, you know, tone, like it's gonna get old Yeah. This could be a flow switch, this could be just your tone. You could whisper, you could shout, you could, you know. There's a million ways to achieve that. But it is it's gotta have some level of peaks and valleys, I think is the best way to put it. Absolutely. All right, number four. This is a big one. Just no concept. Oh man. Just yeah. We'll say, like, how many times have we just listened to a song? We say, So, what was that about? What were we supposed to feel? What is the title mean? No clue what just happened. There were so many random bars. Once again, maybe some quotables, maybe some cool bars.

Sure. Like you were punching in some, you know, dope, dope stuff. But like what actually was this supposed to do? Yeah, we need a concept, and it doesn't have to be groundbreaking, and it can be just a fucking love song. It can be a concept that's even been done before. Like there's gonna be enough natural differences by it just being you and you writing it. So don't be afraid to like try something super left field that's a weird concept no one's ever tried, or a tried and true concept that's worked a million times, but don't have no concept because we you just leave us confused a lot of the time. Yeah, sometimes our our community gives me shit because like everyone does think that I need this like super deep, you know, meaningful concept. And like the concept might be like getting fucked up. Like literally, it could be as basic as that. I don't want to like overcomplicate things, but like if part of the song is about getting fucked up, but then you somehow switch to like some love story, you got me all sorts of fucking confused at this point. You know what I mean?

So it's like, let's let's be a little bit more precise with the emotion that we're trying to get out of the song, right? Like, you know, how are the how are the listeners supposed to feel? And then, yeah, if you can wrap in like the majority of the lyrics into an overarching like story that you're telling, or just overarching concept, right? Where every every line is intentional, right? I feel like we're just filling shit up with fluff sometimes, and it you can really tell. Yeah, it's gonna get the listeners deeper into the story, more ingrained, more attached, and it's just gonna be more memorable too. When their song was about something, we'll be like, oh, remember that song about fucking getting fucked up or whatever it was, you know what I mean? And the feeling side of it, right? Because honestly, like almost fuck the like lyrical concept, but if you're achieving some like emotion, whether that's sonically, you're achieving it, or whether that's like vocal tone, you're achieving it, or or whatever. Like my favorite songs, if I'm being honest, like I can attach a feeling to it. Well, there's a quote.

I think that it's about people when you talk to people, but I think it super applies to music. It's that you won't remember what someone said to you, but you'll remember how they made you feel. Damn. You might not remember. I think that's super I've always loved that quote. I don't think I've ever heard it apply. Have you is that been applied to music, or is that just like life? But it's super applies to music, It's the most applicable to music? I might not remember a single lyric of your song, but if it made me feel a type of way, that's what people remember. People remember feelings, absolutely. So, yeah, music's all about feelings, bro. I hope you guys are enjoying the conversation. I want to take a quick moment to tell you about our pals at DistroKid. You can't get your music onto streaming platforms without a distributor, and DistroKid is an excellent choice to handle that for you. For the ridiculously low price of $23, you can upload unlimited music for an entire year that is less than two dollars a month. I tripped on two dollars walking down the street earlier. They have countless features to help you out on your musical journey. One of my favorites is splits. Instead of my collaborators hitting me up all the time saying, Where's my fing money?

I can input everyone's percentage when I upload the music, and DistroKid will handle it. I've personally used DistroKid for many years and can genuinely recommend them as a great tool to get your music out into the world. And if you sign up at omtdistro.com, you'll get 30% off an already insanely low price. This is absolute peanuts for unlimited uploads yearly. We wish you the best with your creating. Let's get back to it. Number five, the production does not match the vocals. This is this is a fun one. Or like the music video makes no sense with yeah, shit not lining up. Uh it kind of goes back to that cohesion thing about like concept, but this is more focused on like the music side of it. You might have this like fucking merry-go-round type beat, and then like some dark, deep, scary vocal. And I think we talked about this when we were preparing for like the you know points that we were gonna talk about. It's like sometimes that can work. Sometimes people pull it off, absolutely, and it's super dope. And it is a risk. And shout out to those risk takers and take risks. We encourage taking risks.

For sure. But acknowledge when they don't work. Because like that, the the you know, the nature of a risk is that it's not gonna work out sometimes. High risk, high reward, exactly. And high risk of failing. Be prepared to fail, and it's fine because you're gonna strike gold eventually, For sure. but you gotta know when shit is just making no sense. We had like, there was like a happy go-lucky song. This guy was like telling a story about feeling good on a Friday or something, and there was this dark video, he was in his bedroom and shit was flashing. And I was like, you weren't an insane asylum? I was like, Why are you taking a stroll on the sidewalk? Yeah, in this video? So it could come in all different ways. It really boils down to picturing your song as a world. And everything in this world works together, you know, from the cover art to the video to the production to the vocals. Everything needs to like invoke this feeling. Cause if we start feeling one way and then now this is kind of making us feel another way, now we're not really feeling either way fully. We're just kind of confused, and we're not all the way locked in in any direction.

And confusion just leads, it doesn't really actually make us, it doesn't have to be explicitly confused, but just we are gonna be prevented from attaching to the thing. Yes, right. And so that's not good. We can't have that as artists, right? Start pulling me down this street, and now you start pulling me down this street. I'm not all the way down either street. Exactly. I mean, yep, yeah, for sure. No, and I think world building's so underrated, man. Um, I don't think I think if you look at the biggest artists, the most successful artists, they're the best at it. Yeah, they're just top-notch, top-tier story storytellers and world builders. And right to you know, independent artists' credit, those guys have a team of people around them making sure like that it's all doing that. They have a marketing team that's gonna match, they have a production team, they have songwriters that's making sure it all happens. So, like, we have empathy for you guys that are having to wear all these hats to make that work, but I think the more you think about it, the better the result will be. Yeah, the you know, the biggest example of like lack of world building, I think, from one of one of our live reviews was the artist's cover art was just literally him by like his front door.

It was just a picture of him by his front door with like a Philadelphia Eagles like thing on the wall, and I don't even remember what the song was about. Clearly, nothing to do with that. We don't remember, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so for me, I was like, Yo, did you just take a picture, like a random picture out of your camera roll? He said that he literally did, and he was like, Yeah, and I was like, Bro, we gotta do better, y'all. Yeah, we gotta do fucking better than that. Cause that that doesn't require some multi-million dollar budget. I don't want to hear those excuses in this sense sense, right? Because I do have empathy. This is hard. Yeah. But if we at least like challenge ourselves to think about it, right? And to like every single thing that we're doing, like there's intention behind it, there's purpose. Like, why are we doing it? Let's not, let's not just like, you know, fucking throw darts at the wall and hope we hit a bullseye with our eyes closed. You know what I mean? Like, let's let's try and get this right as best we can, knowing that like we're gonna fail, we're gonna have, you know, misses, we're gonna take risks and they're not gonna work out. But let's at least like think this through a little bit more if we're taking it seriously. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So it's more than a song, it's a world. Start thinking of your songs as worlds. Absolutely. Number six, this is this is one you were you were definitely big on. Lack of moments. I love moments. What do you mean by that? Love moments. You do love them, but like moments, baby. Just give like a few different, you know, just like yeah, examples of what you could mean by that. You don't have to give me like specific songs or just like what what could an artist take as a moment? High level, I'm just looking for like thing, little things to happen in your song that don't necessarily happen like every chorus or every verse has that just like one-offs, just times where the beat drops out, or the sound effect comes in, or this one word at the end of a line, you stacked it a hundred times to emphasize it, or something just happens where and it takes a lot of extra work. I think people are very like formulaic.

They get too formulaic sometimes. Are they lazy? This is the hook, this this is I paste the hook over and now. I'm done. Like, what if you did one harmony on this one line on the second hook or something that like is just memorable? Little one-off kind of fun, like oh, like where because when we're reviewing music and those happen, we always look at each other and we're like, uh, you know, that we have those, we have a moment now because we're reacting to your moment in your song. Like, oh shit, did you hear that? Or like little just memorable. I like to call them moments. I think a beat, I think a beat drop is literally the easiest thing you can do. Just stop the music for a second to give some emphasis on. a hard bar. Yeah, it's so easy. That's like just the most basic example. the most basic version, but it's still effective. It's so effective because we're like, yo, remember that beat dropped? Like that was fire, you know? Like, same thing with you said, like, stack something a hundred times. Like, if you just sonically are achieving something different with the recording, then we're gonna also remember that. So it doesn't have to be like earth shattering, you know what I mean?

Maybe like a harmonica comes in for two bars. I don't like I don't know what your song is gonna be. You love throwing random instruments into songs, sure. If to just have a moment, I think you suggested one of our community members use like a xylophone and like some track. I'm pretty sure it's that rock band, yeah. And you're like, yo, wouldn't it be dope? If you had like a weird one, like a fucking triangle come in and in verse three. Maybe not a triangle, maybe though. You said some crazy outlandish shit like that. I don't know. Yeah, you've done it. All right, last one, last one. So number seven, it's just sounds too cookie cutter, safe. Just we've heard it before. You sound uh this is these are the type of songs where the chat immediately is like sounds like Travis Scott, sounds like Trippie Redd, sounds like whatever, you know. Like, like if there, if people are immediately comparing you to an artist, it's probably not a good sign. If people are comparing you to like six different artists, maybe that's cool because you have elements of big artists, but if you so clearly sound like, oh, cool, like this guy obviously likes Yeet, you know, then that's probably not a good sign. Yeah, I mean, for me, it kind of goes back to the moments thing where it's like we need to be able to identify you.

Like, who the fuck was this artist? You you need to pique my interest enough for me to go want to dive into the catalog, like, oh shit. I've never heard something like this before. Like, there was this unique thing that happened, you know, throughout the record that I need to go find more of this. You know what I mean? And so whether that's like your vocal tone, whether that's you know, the production, you know, beat selection choices, right? Whether that's uh ad libs, for example, right? Like, whether that's I don't know, like just there's so many, you know, a fucking tag in the intro or like some sort of thing that happens in the outro, whatever, like just some sort of unique identifier for us to be like, oh shit, like I remember that artist, you know. what I mean, because dude, we listen to hundreds of songs at this point, thousands, maybe, and it's like well, we're gonna remember ones that have these like unique identifiers that don't feel as cookie cutter and as like shit. Fuck the comparisons. It's more like if I just feel like I've heard that a hundred times and I can't even name the artist, but it's like if you sound like yeet, I'ma just go listen to Yeet. Why wouldn't I?

Why would I listen to you? It's a better version, probably. You need to make me want to have to listen to you in order to achieve that feeling. If the only way I'm gonna get the this feeling that your music conveys is by listening to you. Absolutely. So, yeah, this is just you know, our seven most common points of feedback that we've given during the live stream reviews. And so, shout out to everyone who submitted because we do have like, don't get me wrong, we have these bits of feedback, but we could probably give like seven points of feedback that's for like positive as far as like, oh, these are the things that our community is doing right, because we've had some fire submissions come through. Like some of my favorite artists we've literally discovered doing these. It's so awesome. Yeah, it's amazing. So like please keep submitting. We're gonna try and get regular with like a time and a schedule. We haven't been great about it. I'm gonna be honest. Join our Discord. It'll be at the link in our it'll be at the link in the bio and the link in this description. Yes. Join the Discord. We have a share music channel. People are constantly submitting music, not only just during the live streams, but like during the week. And our whole community is tab in it.

Like we have people doing our review jobs like for us in the in the chat. It's amazing. So come in, review someone else's song, and then throw your song in there. Get it reviewed. We're all learning together. We're networking. We're coming up with content ideas. We're shooting the shit, talking about random shit. It's a great time in there, man. Hell yeah. Yeah. One more time, Discord going up 2024. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.