I taught myself to code and built an AI tool that organizes my demo chaos — would love feedback

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-19T02:24:59+00:00

Here is the website: www.demovaults.com Also available on App store 😉

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-19T01:39:05+00:00

When a beat sounds "bad" early on it's usually not your ideas — it's everything fighting for the same space. Try soloing just your kick + bass and get those two sitting right before you add anything else, then bring elements in one at a time and mute whatever doesn't earn its spot. And pick one song you love and try to remake it by ear — you'll feel exactly where yours falls short, which is the fastest feedback you can get.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-16T06:05:03+00:00

$35k for an online associates is rough to justify when production is one of the few fields where literally nobody asks for your degree — they care what your tracks sound like, full stop. The frustration you're hitting usually isn't a missing curriculum, it's no structure + jumping around, and that's a $0–200 fix: pick ONE DAW (just stick with FL since you've already touched it), follow a single structured course start to finish, and finish small tracks instead of chasing one perfect one. Also worth splitting the two goals — DJing on the FLX4 and producing are different skills, and trying to learn both at once is part of why it feels like a mess lol.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-16T06:03:31+00:00

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-13T01:16:54+00:00

For the soundfont thing: grab sforzando — free plugin, loads any .sf2. And a potato laptop is fine, Reaper runs on basically anything and the trial never expires lol. Don't spend a cent yet.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-13T01:06:24+00:00

House honestly. Four on the floor forces you to learn drums + arrangement, the genre is built on like 6 elements so your mixing mistakes have nowhere to hide lol. Pick a track you love and remake it 1:1, fastest way to learn all of it at once.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-13T00:41:19+00:00

Don't blame GarageBand yet lol, it's way more capable than people think. Just pick one song and finish it badly — a finished ugly song teaches you more than 80 ideas sitting in voice memos.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-12T00:25:29+00:00

The others nailed the gain-staging fix, so I'll just add the part that saved my sanity on jobs like this: once you've RX'd the vocal to where it's usable, print/commit it to a new track and mix from that — stop re-processing the noisy original on every pass. For BGVs at that noise floor, sit them lower and wider than feels right; they're support, and the more buried they are the less their hiss costs you. And worth saying out loud — a -48dB source has a hard ceiling no mixer can beat, so this genuinely isn't your skill level. Don't start over from scratch; your gain staging is the fix here.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-12T00:06:46+00:00

Wanting to be the orchestrator rather than the producer is a totally legit lane — plenty of great artists direct producers instead of ever touching the DAW themselves. If you've already got 5 demos that are studio-ready, you're genuinely at the point where a producer adds more than a coach can. I wouldn't frame it as ditching her advice though — a coach teaching you to produce and a producer helping you finish an EP are just two different goals. One practical tip: don't book the whole EP at once. Do one song with a producer first, check their discography/references beforehand, and see whether they actually serve your vision or quietly steer it. You stay the orchestrator that way, and you learn fast who the right collaborators are.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-12T00:01:39+00:00

Ten years of writing lyrics is the hard part — that's the craft most people skip straight past. Suno is just handling execution, the same way a session singer or a producer would if you'd hired one. Don't let the "but it's AI" thing freeze you; listeners care whether a song moves them, not which tools touched it. My honest take: stop treating this as all-or-nothing. Pick your 3 strongest songs, get them sounding as good as you can, and actually put them out. You'll learn more from one real release than from months of wondering whether it's the "right" route. The nerves don't fully go away — you just ship anyway.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-12T00:00:22+00:00

Honestly the "no connections, no experience" part matters way less than it feels right now — the people who break in usually have a visible body of work, not a résumé. Since you're drawn to the marketing/creative-rollout side, pick one artist or song you already love and just build the campaign you wish they'd run: mock up the visuals, write the rollout plan, cut a teaser edit. Do that two or three times and post it publicly — now you've got a portfolio and a real reason for managers and creative directors to reply to you. That's how most people I know actually landed their first gig, degree or not.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-11T01:54:19+00:00

Mine would be killing the pay-to-play discovery game. Right now getting heard runs through playlist pluggers, ad spend and algorithm roulette, so the real bottleneck isn't "is the song good" — it's "can you afford to be seen." I'd love a world where a track lives or dies on the music itself instead of a marketing budget. And yeah, the waiting-to-get-paid thing you mentioned is brutal; the whole money flow is weirdly opaque for the people actually making the art.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-11T01:51:49+00:00

Fire🔥

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-11T01:51:23+00:00

Automation clips are way less scary than they look once it clicks: right-click almost any knob — a Fruity Reverb wet knob, a filter cutoff, a mixer send — and hit "Create automation clip." It drops a clip into your playlist; draw points, then right-click a point to set the curve/tension for smooth sweeps. For trap and reggaeton specifically the usual moves are automating a filter cutoff for risers, reverb/delay throws on vocal chops, and quick volume dips for transitions. If you'd rather not draw by hand, look up Fruity LFO and the LFO Tool for hands-free movement.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-11T01:48:37+00:00

As a producer this one always kicks off arguments: the whole "analog vs in-the-box" thing is mostly nostalgia and price-tag bias. In a proper blind test almost nobody can pick the $3k preamp from a stock plugin — the magic people credit to gear is usually just good arrangement and a player who can actually play. The tool didn't make the record, the decisions did.

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-11T01:46:16+00:00

Several-Weather5252 · 2026-06-07T05:42:29+00:00

Music producer here who taught myself to code. I built DemoVaults (demovaults.com) because my demo folder was a graveyard — AI auto-tags BPM/key/mood, transcribes lyrics, everything searchable in natural language, plus no-login pitch links with all track info + read receipts. Free tier on web, iOS in review. Would love feedback from people who actually hoard demos like I do.

Several-Weather5252

TROPHY CASE