J. Anthony Allen shows how to write a full song on piano first, then swap in synths and sound design later. This two-step method, inspired by Imogen Heap, keeps you from getting stuck tweaking sounds while you're still composing.
Okay, let's make a track. So we've covered a lot of stuff, and in this last section, let's. Let's put it to practice and let's make something. Now, there's a lot of different approaches to songwriting and creating music using these tools. And in some future classes you may take, I'm gonna go into that a lot more. But for now, I want to just kind of kick us off with one big tip. This is something that I learned from. I did learn from that. I read that the singer, songwriter, producer, I don't know what you call her, but Imogene Heap, this is something that she does that I found to be just hugely good advice. And that is when you're writing. Well, I've kind of taken it one step further than what she said, but what she said was she writes a lot of her tunes, maybe even all of her tunes on the piano. So she sits at a piano and writes music, and then after the song is written, she puts it into the program and then produces it. Okay. So even if there's no piano in that song, she uses the piano to start. So that doesn't mean you have to use piano. It means you can use guitar, you can use whatever you want. The way I interpret that, though, is what. What she's really doing there is separating sound design from composition. And that is the thing that I find to be most important. You know, you can do this however you want. But one thing that's really helped me in writing with these tools is to not get bogged down in the sound design elements while you are writing. Sometimes you do. Sometimes it's important because the sound design element plays a big role in the song, but not always. So when I'm writing a song, what I'll do a lot of the time is, is if I need, like, a synthesizer to do something, I'll just load up a piano. If I need a bass line, I'll just load up a piano. And if I need a pad, I'll just load up a piano, and then I'll write the song with all these pianos all over the place. Then once I have the song done, then I'll go through and hash out exactly how I want that sound to. To be. I'll replace the piano with a synth, and I'll, like, really dial that synth in and spend a ton of time nitpicking all the frequencies and all this stuff, right? But if I do that at the same time that I'm writing, then I just get really bogged down and I just get stuck. So separate those two things. Let's focus on writing the tune and making something, but let's worry about sound design after make sense. So I'm going to try to make something just really simple here, and we'll see where it goes. I don't know what's going to happen. I might end up with nothing interesting at all. But it's worth a shot. So keep that in mind as, like, a really strong tip for writing using these tools. Don't get bogged down in the sound design. Separate them into two different steps. Composition, songwriting, and sound design. Okay, so let's talk about where do we start?
