You want to get better, so you ask for feedback on Discord,
in a forum, or from anyone who you can get to listen.
But a lot of times the feedback you get is "Sounds good. Nice job" which is less than helpful.
So when you aren't getting good feedback from others how do you give good feedback to yourself?
There's a passage in the introduction to Alan Belkin's book Musical Composition
where he says "most unsatisfactory musical composition shows one of two
kinds of defects, which I call bumps and holes."
"Holes", or as I prefer to call them "gaps", are those moments where you're a little let down.
Maybe the chord changes start to get repetitive,
or it felt like things were building to a peak but they just never got there.
Overall a gap is when things are disappointing or even just a bit boring.
"Bumps" are the opposite.
These are the moments where a sudden dissonance
feels completely out of place or a key change is unconvincing.
Bumps are the moments that disrupt the flow of the music and pull us out of the moment.
When you're listening back to your own work try to listen for the gaps and the bumps.
Let the music play and without stopping just put in a marker or jot down the times where
you feel like something is lacking, it's boring, or a change feels out of place or is too sudden.
I'll explain how this framework of gaps and bumps can help us get better at giving feedback to each
other, but first let's listen to this track I wrote a long time ago and I'll point out some,
not all but some, of the places where I feel gaps and bumps.
All right so the first bump for me is like the entire mix but let's move on from that.
Now that we've found the spots where we felt a gap or a bump we
can go through them one by one and identify them.
But before we try to just jump in and fix it the first thing we should do is figure out why.
Why did that feel like a bump? Why did that feel like a gap?
So for example right here in the beginning
there's a slight gap for me there.
I think that that downbeat needs to be a little bit stronger when we swell into it.
Let's jump up to this next one.
So there's a bit of a gap there for me with the percussion.
I can tell that I'm just using a loop and it's just kind of not changing,
even though everything else has changed.
The drums are kind of still going with the previous groove,
so that's a bit of a gap, a little disappointing.
You can see in the waveform that's a bit of a bump.
There's a mix issue there where
the violas or something in the strings is just out of place too much.
It needs to come down a bit.
Here I got a bump from those trumpets. They just kind of came out of nowhere a little bit for me.
Here I got bumped by that reverb which is just so artificial sounding
and just has this ridiculously long tail, like I don't know what's going on there.
All right so we've identified where the gaps and bumps are and I figured out "Is it a gap?
Is it a bump?" and kind of what's giving me that feeling.
Then you can go through and actually come up with the fixes.
Now this track is really old. I don't think I have the session anymore so I'm not going
to actually rewrite it, but I'll just offer some of the things I would do.
So this first gap where I wanted a stronger hit,
probably just a big pow in the percussion would do it for me.
I just need a little more oomph on the bottom.
All right, here I was saying I was getting kind of a gap because of the
repetitiveness of that percussion groove, so I would actually go through and try to
make it fit the change in character that we're having in this little section here.
That's mostly a mix issue to fix that bump. Just bring that down.
Again you can see it in the waveform, so
we just bring that down a bit, we won't get bumped anymore.
Here I was getting bumped by those trumpets, so I think there's a couple solutions.
One could be to introduce the trumpets earlier in the piece so that we know that's part of our
palette, or maybe just a little lead-in to get them to come in so they kind of
introduce themselves instead of just being all just kind of loud and in our face.
So something to pick up will just make it feel
like "oh yeah these trumpets are part of the ensemble, they're joining the crew."
I think that would help a lot.
This one was a mix, this one was about the reverb. Both these last two were
about the reverb so again that would be going through with the mix trying to fix the reverb.
It can be really hard to develop this skill with your own music so I actually recommend you
practice this with other people's music because that way you have some distance and perspective.
The thing is, your favorite music probably isn't going to have a lot of gaps and bumps.
That's how it got to be in the game or movie or album where you're listening to it.
All those gaps and bumps were ironed out before it got to you!
This is where those feedback channels are actually useful,
because people posting to those channels are usually students, hobbyists, or just generally
people who are looking for feedback because they know their music isn't quite there yet.
Use these tracks that people are posting as your material for practicing gaps and bumps.
You don't have to write an essay and respond with "here's everything wrong with your piece."
Please don't do that.
But not only are you practicing this skill,
which you'll eventually be able to transfer over to your own work, you're also going to be able
to find one or two pieces of actual constructive feedback that you can share with the other person.
So if everyone got good at this ideally those feedback
channels will actually become pretty useful places after all.
Now usually this is the part where I tell you all the reasons you need to watch the
next video, but this time I'm gonna let the robots decide because for some reason
they think that this video right here is something you are really going to enjoy.
And if it is maybe you can give the algorithm some feedback.
Thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next one!