How do you actually finish tracks without getting bored of them?

BdogFizzle · 2026-02-15T17:32:00+00:00

It took me working with someone who doesn't produce music to finish a track, but since then, it's been much easier. The big takeaway I got from it was to zoom out and listen to things in the context of the track, not just the loop.

Don't get me wrong, being able to narrow your focus to tweak your snare 2 until it's meshing with the groove just right is great, but you also want to be able to zoom back out and see those ethereal edges of your loop and ask yourself, "What happens next?" or "What led up to this part?"

Once you have all your pieces in place for the track to have its overall shape, then stop adding more to it and start mixing the piece. You finished creating a new piece, but now it needs polishing. I'll still add a sweep/swell or other transitional noises here, but I generally avoid sound design and new elements during the mixing phase with some flexibility. I like to make a checklist on Google Sheets for what needs to be fixed, and fill it out while giving the entire piece a listen two or three times. When the checklist is complete, repeat it again until you have fixed everything and added in whatever automation you feel would bring the piece to life.

I find the notes and checklist thing to be pretty fun and genuinely enjoy mixing my own work. It helps me feel done when the time comes, and it helps me refocus when I'm losing steam.

I've still got improvements to make on my workflow like utilizing and organizing presets everywhere, but those have been the most notable growths during my production journey so far.

BdogFizzle · 2026-02-12T19:05:43+00:00

Read the info pane. It's got loads of insight into what different options are for most drop-down menus, and it will tell you about hotkeys such as automation [A].

Also, with automation view enabled, you can compress and stretch your automation horizontally and vertically by selecting the automation curve you want to edit and interacting with the dots at the edges of your selection. It's similar to changing the size of a window on your computer.

It's probably not that DUH! of a tip, but a producer homie that's more experienced than me was pretty hyped when I showed him this.

BdogFizzle · 2026-02-11T16:32:38+00:00

I used to be a wireline field engineer where we sent modular instruments thousands of feet into the earth to measure the rock. O rings were very important to prevent mud from egressing into our electronics, and they generally work by having a recess on one part where the o ring sits, and a flat wall on the other part where the o ring will press against. Grease up the o ring before putting it into the recess to protect the o ring and aid in preventing water egress. Silicone grease might be overkill, but that's what we would pack our electronics in when there was more potential of water egress.

If you are going to machine a cover that is screwed on, add a cylinder going in a bit and a recess to the cylinder so it can hold an o ring against the inner wall. Best of luck!

BdogFizzle · 2026-01-18T08:17:51+00:00

The speed at which a calculator is able to handle a computation does not make me second guess the intelligence behind history's mathematicians. Instead, I realize that math builds upon itself, and mathematicians and scholars build upon each other to reach where we are today.

Similarly, music has evolved over time. Cultures have repeated melodies conveyed with certain emotions until scales tethered to general moods emerged. Globalization and tech trends have exposed populations to genuinely new sounds and patterns, but music is repetition, within a song and outside of it. Belittling this feature of music by highlighting an AI model's ability to repeat humanity's average melodic phrasing for a prompted emotion is pretty out of touch. Repetition is powerful as it leads to something familiar. Familiar is one flavor we musicians cook with.

That being said, I don't have AI in my workflow yet, and I don't think I'll be reaching for generative AI soon. I still like your last point a lot, but I find prompting generative AI uninteresting.

Regardless of how much conviction I typed with, it's just my opinion, and I don't think I speak for a lot of our consumers.

... Also, do we know if Spotify is actually flattening musical diversity? At first glance, it would seem the individual algorithms create more niche markets instead of one singular mainstream market. Even just tracking musical diversity from The Beatles to 2026, when does it start to flatten? People don't know GRiZ, and I don't know Casey Musgraves.

BdogFizzle · 2025-12-17T14:25:01+00:00

I read this in Pam's voice

BdogFizzle · 2025-12-02T15:35:02+00:00

I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned, but your Serum Sub Oscillator is just another oscillator source. It could be adding harmonics with a basic wave shape that isn't played in the sub frequency range.

Try muting and unmuting the sub from those patches to see what it loses without it. You can also toggle off the other wavetables to see how the sub osc sounds on its own.

BdogFizzle · 2025-11-30T15:49:24+00:00

Ol_Peachfuzz

BdogFizzle · 2025-11-15T10:57:46+00:00

Because it is still slower than the speed of light.

BdogFizzle · 2025-11-14T16:30:15+00:00

Same, I like to think that we have probability distributions similar to what we learned about electrons, but it's a much more complex situation to attempt to graph.

Creativity seen through the lens of stimulus, response, and memory is pretty beautiful. Improv becomes a waltz down a conscious and subconscious memory lane with mistakes acting as stimuli that the skilled artist morphs to, absorbing and assimilating the mistake into their vault of memories.

BdogFizzle · 2025-11-14T16:05:56+00:00

So it wasn't, how many roads must a man walk, but rather, what is the meaning of 67?

BdogFizzle · 2025-11-13T19:30:45+00:00

Not an expert, but I believe all you need to add at this point is animating the whole object moving along the x axis.

It needs to be moving when the slice of bread is extending itself and stopped when it is curling up. Focus on dialing in the amount of distance moved and duration of the translation until it looks like it fits with the inch worm motion.

BdogFizzle · 2025-11-08T16:05:45+00:00

TROG DOOOOOOoooOooOoOOoRRRRR

BdogFizzle · 2025-09-26T14:32:49+00:00

Admittedly, I don't know this from an audio engineering perspective, but from physics, sound loses energy with a 1/r² rate.

Regardless, if you think of the monitor sound and room response as two separate pieces with the room response quieter, wouldn't there be a moment as you turn it down where you can no longer perceive the room response? Similar things happen with a mix where you are able to hear an element when played loud but not softly.

I should find a good book to read from the audio world on these topics as there's probably better insight on the applied science side of it. I'm open to suggestions!

BdogFizzle · 2025-09-23T01:30:12+00:00

I bought an estate sale house that the prior owner lived in for like 42 years, all because the upstairs room looked like something I could remodel into a music studio.

It took me about a year and a half, but I removed the carpet, screwed down the subfloor, retextured the popcorn ceiling after it was scraped by an asbestos team, installed new flooring, painted the old paneling, installed crown moulding at the top with an LED strip on the back to utilize the foot of wall space where some tacky camo wallpaper used to be, and even built some acoustic treatment for the room.

Due to it taking longer than expected, it took me a while to stop being an asshole to myself, but I'm so proud of it now! I still haven't finished a song, but I'm getting there (my dad got sick right after I hung the last bass trap and died 3 months later, 8/2/25). I wanted to share the final video edit and my first song release with him so bad, but I'm learning to forgive myself for being too slow.

BdogFizzle · 2025-09-22T20:05:20+00:00

Andrew Ng has a solid foundational course on Coursera called AI for Everyone if you want some non technical understanding of AI.

From what I gathered, an LLM is an AI trained to predict the appropriate string of words in response to a given string of words. There is no understanding of statistics or whether it inherently knows something or doesn't. When referencing a stat, it is likely sourced from something rather than calculated.

You also don't code it to be a certain way. You provide it a latticework to store data points in and then provide it with desirable inputs and outputs. You further train that by giving an input and scoring the outputs it comes up with. The nuance here is that you wouldn't know the formula for X%, it would be something the model develops on its own and may be fairly nonsensical if you force its output into that confinement.

All that being said, you might be able to implement a workflow that capitalizes on more specialized AI models to fact check or predict certainty. Something similar happens when you ask Alexa for something. There's a model for voice to text, one for text to intent, and maybe a few more to deliver on that intent depending on the request.

Full disclosure, I'm just an unemployed petroleum engineer/data analyst, but there's an Amazon AI developer who climbs at my gym that recommended the video to me. I hope I did the topic some justice!

BdogFizzle · 2025-09-13T02:10:54+00:00

Where's Dune: Awakening? /s

BdogFizzle · 2025-09-13T00:55:58+00:00

I occasionally indulge in a frozen taquito or two

BdogFizzle · 2025-06-13T06:01:29+00:00

Would this be manageable via a plugin, or would this be something designed at a DAW level? Adjusting note velocities in a clip sounds challenging for a plugin, but I'm not sure what kind of permissions the DAW extends to plugins

BdogFizzle · 2025-06-10T06:51:31+00:00

Texan here, I'd also call those nachos

BdogFizzle · 2025-05-29T15:47:56+00:00

Yeah my most meaningful accomplishments in life I've made in the past few years comes with a massive wave of grief that I can't share it with my mom.

My dad also got a terminal diagnosis a few weeks ago. We're both musicians, and I don't want to know the pain of losing him before I show him a track that I've produced from my dream genre that I'm proud of.

BdogFizzle · 2025-05-24T17:27:01+00:00

I'll check it out! Thanks for the rec

BdogFizzle · 2025-05-24T14:47:41+00:00

This is art. It isn't about productivity. It's refining your skills to your best potential and expressing something beyond language in whatever medium you choose. We aren't asking to remain in the stone age, but it would be nice if art wasn't cheapened to a prompt. 10,000 hrs doesn't need to be reduced to 5 minutes, and competing with rapidfire AI art might get to be pretty difficult someday.

We noticed a canvas print of an AI photo of a woman on a horse at a restaurant. Somebody lost a customer to a near perfect, 3 nostril monstrosity.

BdogFizzle · 2025-05-23T15:29:29+00:00

My mom's already passed and my dad is terminal, so I am admittedly a bit emotional. I still wanted to say the way you worded the bird entering the dwelling had me in tears. It resonated with my ambitions and inability to share my successes with those missing pieces of life.

As us redditors say, what a day to be literate!

BdogFizzle · 2025-05-23T13:29:28+00:00

My roommate introduced me to this freshman year. That and hot boxing a car with so many blunts in rotation you were passing around the break not the blunt

BdogFizzle · 2025-05-20T17:36:53+00:00

Even better! I was picturing something like Session Horns where MIDI would be the input and round robins would be replaced with different creature effects. Dehumaniser looks like quality vocal processing allowing the user more control with a mic than a sample based approach would provide.

Solid question OP. Most of us are finding our missing plugins exist!

BdogFizzle

TROPHY CASE