Dan Freeman – Director, BKDigiCon (The Brooklyn Digital Conservatory
One of the most important aspects of being a music producer is deep listening. Great musical production are thought through and work at very detailed and profound levels. Here are two exercises that have profoundly helped me to improve my listening skills as a producer.
1. LEVELS OF LISTENING
When I was in my 20’s and a newly arrived bassist in NYC searching for gigs, I took a job playing music for 1-3 year old children at a local daycare. A couple of times a week, I’d bring a guitar and some percussion instruments and perform for these little ones. It wasn’t exactly the gigging I thought I’d be doing when I had come to the city, but in retrospect, it taught me some pretty important things about performance and the human relationship to music.
One of the most fascinating things things about presenting music to toddlers is the realization that human beings are hardwired to listen to music, feel music and even dance to it. These tiny beings, who could barely speak, would pay attention to music, try to sing to it, repeat words and when they felt a beat, they would pop out of their little chairs and begin dancing to it. I don’t think I met a 2 year-old who didn’t respond to music and with my small sample of small people, I had to conclude that we humans are built to listen to and respond to music in a way that is just as innate as spoken language.
If pretty much all humans can listen to or feel music (I believe that so much music is “heard” through the body, not simply the ears, but that’s the topic of another article), what differentiates a music producer from almost everyone around them? I would say that its the intensity of the ability to listen which is trained both through practice and education (formal or informal). The ability to listen – to the music that you’re producing, but also to the music of other producer/musicians is profoundly important, but so is deeply listening to a client in order to figure out their artistic vision for a project.
In 2022, I created the chart above for a presentation at Berklee College of Music. It represents different levels of listening and I believe that a producer should be able to listen on all these levels and a well-executed piece of production excels on every one of these tiers. Just check out this track for an example from one of my production heroes, the great Quincy Jones. The top level of the inverted triangle represents the level at which most human beings, such as my 1-3 year old students, can appreciate and listen to music. As we descend down the inverted triangle, it requires more experience and training to listen at that level, and therefore fewer people can do it. Also, as a listener, deeper levels require you to focus on small snippets of a recording rather than a full track.
Basically, recognizing words, melody and rhythm are possible for most people. To pick out instruments from a recording requires at least some elementary education in music. To identify chords, melody and rhythm and play them back on an instrument requires much greater skill and we are entering the realm of the musician. Producers can also listening deeply and identify different types of audio effects, brands of instruments and microphones. Deep sound designers can identify the starting wave forms of many sounds. The deepest level of listening, however, is focusing on the silence in a production since it is truly as important as the notes.
As I said early, it’s important for a piece of recorded music to work on all of these levels and for producer/artists to at least give thought to all,
2. A PRACTICAL EXERCISE TO IMPROVE PRODUCTION LISTENING:
One of the best listening exercises that I was ever given is a very simple one. It’s free and is easy to do on any DAW. I’m going to demonstrate it on Ableton Live.
STEP 1: Place the track in a DAW and be sure that its BPM is synced with the DAW’s global tempo and the bar lines match up. In Ableton Live this is called ‘warping’ and click here for instructions on how to do it.
STEP 2: Once the track is aligned, mark the form of the track. In Ableton Live, I use locators and a MIDI track above it with differently colored clips. See the image below for how I begin to analyze the form of Dua Lipa’s ‘Don’t Start Now.’
STEP 3: Create a very simple chart with 3 columns and a bunch of rows. Label the rows: “SECTION,” “ELEMENTS OBSERVED” and “WHAT I CAN TAKE FROM THIS” See the example chart below and download a PDF example here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d8DHHjo4ZcKexKReyHTs-nS7IC8Coqbu/view?usp=sharing
STEP 4: Listen to each section (i.e. the intro) 3-5 times. Fill out the chart (see example below). Try and list everything you hear and any ideas that you would take from the particular section
