A Simple Framework for Actually Listening to Music as a Producer transcript

All right, so stop me if you've heard this one. You want to work on some music. So, you open up your DAW and you go through a bunch of presets, maybe twist some knobs until you find a sound that you think is cool. >> [music] >> Maybe you add some drums. And then what? You loop it. You get eight bars of vibes with no direction, no beginning, [music] and no end. Does that sound familiar? I teach music production. I have worked with hundreds of students at every level and I can tell you that this is the number one thing that holds people [music] back.

Not talent, not gear. It's the habit of vibe chasing. >> [music] >> Opening a session, stumbling somewhere that feels good, and then having absolutely no idea where to take it. And I get it. We've all been there. It's [music] actually a sign that your ear is developing. But vibes without intentions don't become songs. They become a graveyard of eight-bar loops that we never open [music] again. So, here's what I tell every student that sits down with me.

You have to study music that already exists. You have to pull tracks apart, figure out how they work, and [music] yeah, copy them. Not to steal, though, to learn. Think about it like this. If you wanted to learn to paint, you wouldn't skip art history. You wouldn't ignore technique. You'd study the masters, you know, how they used light, [music] how they built composition, and how they mixed color. You'd copy their work so you could understand their decisions.

[music] Every great painter did this before they found their own voice. So, why is music any different? It's not. Music is no different. The producers that you admire, they didn't just open a DAW and get lucky. They studied the records that came before them. They learned the language before they started writing their own [music] sentences. Hi, my name is Jeremy. This channel is Red Means Recording and I make videos on music technology, music composition, and foxes.

When I start to run into something consistently with my students, I like to dive into it and figure out a way to talk about it better. I've done this with a bunch of subjects before, including melody and rhythm, and today I'm going to show you how to become a musical detective. Someone who listens to a track and doesn't just hear it, but actually understands it. Someone who can reverse engineer a mix, trace a sound back to its roots, and use that knowledge to build something original.

[music] Not by guessing, but by knowing. Let's get into it. Okay, so how do you even start studying music? What are you listening for? I want to give you a framework for this, and I'm going to borrow from visual art, because I think it makes ideas click in a way that pure music theory does not. When you study a painting, you can see the choices that an artist made. I want you to start hearing music in the same way, seeing the decisions inside the track.

So, for the next few minutes, just forget you're a producer. You're a painter standing in a studio, staring at someone else's canvas, and trying to figure out how they did it. A painter doesn't just see blue. They see cerulean, bright, airy, almost cold to the touch. They see ultramarine, which is dense and heavy like staring to deep water at night. Same family of color, completely different emotional weight. Your frequency spectrum works in the same way.

A high hat at 8K and a high hat at 12K are both high frequencies, but one is silk and the other is glass. One whispers, the other cuts. And you really don't learn the difference from a tutorial. You learn it by pulling up a track that you love and asking, "Why does this high hat feel bright without feeling harsh? What shade of high end did they use, and what did they choose to leave out?" That's the kind of listening that builds your ears.

Not just this sounds good, but understanding the specific tonal decisions that make it sound good. All right, now think about being a sculptor standing in front of a block of raw marble. The raw stone has a finished piece inside it, but it's buried under material that does not belong. The sculptor doesn't add marble, they remove it. Every strike of the chisel reveals a surface, an angle, or a line that was always there underneath.

That's what's happening in a great mix. When you cut 300 hertz out of a vocal, you're not destroying anything, you're uncovering clarity that was buried. When you high pass a pad, meaning you use a filter to remove everything below a certain frequency, cutting out the low end rumble, you're chipping away weight so that the mid-range texture can actually breathe. But here's the thing, you can't learn that from a chart that says cut here and boost there.

You learn it by studying how the tracks that you admire are carved. Put on a song with a vocal that sits in the mix perfectly to you. Ask yourself, what's not there? What frequencies did somebody chisel away to make that vocal so present and clear? That's the sculptor's eye, and you build it by studying finished work. All right, last one, and this might be my favorite. Pull up any Renaissance painting with a landscape, a road stretching into the distance, mountains fading into haze.

That sense of depth isn't real. It's constructed. Painters use a vanishing point, a single spot on the horizon where all the perspective lines converge to trick your eye into feeling three dimensions on a flat canvas. Reverb and delay do the same thing for your ears. A dry signal, meaning a sound completely raw with zero effects on it, is right in your face, flat on the canvas. Add a short room reverb and that sound [music] steps back a few feet.

Push it into a long hall reverb with some pre-delay, that's a small gap of silence before the reverb kicks in, and suddenly it's the far end of a cathedral. You haven't changed the note, you've changed where it lives in space. Delay works the same way. Each echo a little smaller, a little further away, pulling your listener's ear deeper into the track. And this is again something that you could really only understand by listening to real music.

Listen to how a track puts its lead vocal up close and dry while the synth pads sit in the back sort of awash in reverb. Listen to how much reverb's on the vocal. Is it dark? Where does it sit in the mix compared to the other aspects of the mix? When you listen to a track that has these decisions, you have to keep in mind that none of this is by accident. Someone made that deliberate decision about depth, about what's foreground and what's background.

When you start hearing those spatial choices made in the music that you study, you start to understand how a track creates a sense of space and movement. [music] So, here's the bigger point behind all this. These art parallels aren't just clever comparison. They're a way of training yourself to hear with intention. Because the real thing holding producers back isn't the fact that they can't mix, it's that they don't understand how a track moves, why certain sounds were chosen, how those parts fit together, and what gives a song in a particular genre a sense of flow and direction.

You don't figure that out by watching tutorials, I say, on a channel about tutorializing music. You figure it out by sitting with the tracks that you admire, pulling them apart, and asking, "What did they do here and why?" That's the musical detective at work. >> [music] >> And these visual frameworks, That's my dog. And these visual frameworks, color, sculpture, and perspective, they give you a vocabulary for noticing things that you used to just feel.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking because I've heard it multiple times from students. You just told me to copy other people's music. Isn't that just stealing? No, and I really need you to hear this because I think that this fear is one of the single biggest things that keeps people from growing. They think that studying existing music is giving up their originality. It's the opposite. Studying [music] existing music is how you build the vocabulary that makes originality possible.

Think about language. You didn't invent English or whatever language that you speak. You learned it. Word by word, [music] sentence by sentence, by listening to other people speak. You copied pronunciation, grammar, phrases. At some point you had enough vocabulary to say things that nobody else had said before in a voice that was entirely your own. That wasn't theft. That was learning. Genres work in the exact same way.

When you study a genre, you're not stealing somebody's song. You're learning the vocabulary, the chord progressions, the rhythmic patterns, the sound design, the production choices, that lets you eventually say something new. And this isn't just my theory, it's how every great artist in history actually developed. All right, let's talk The Beatles. Before they wrote >> What? My turn for attention. My turn. I don't care about The Beatles. >> Yeah, I don't either.

But they're an important Oh, thanks. They're important. They're important to talking about this. >> Before they wrote a single original hit, they spent years in Hamburg, Germany playing cover after cover, hundreds of songs that weren't theirs. >> [music] >> Rock and roll, Motown, skiffle, which was this scrappy, stripped-down British folk style that mixed the banjo and washboard with pop melodies, show tunes, everything.

Night after night, they were absorbing the DNA of songwriting through other people's work. By the time they started writing their own material, they weren't copying any one artist. They had internalized so many different influences that what came out was something the world had never heard before, but it was built on everything they'd studied. >> David Bowie. >> Nobody would call David Bowie a copycat, right? The man reinvented himself like every few years.

But if you look at what he was actually doing, he was a relentless student. He pulled from German electronic music, American soul, avant-garde theater, Japanese fashion, things that had no business being in the same room together. He didn't just copy one source, he synthesized dozens of them, and the collision of all those influences is what made him sound like nobody else. And it's not just music. Picasso, the guy that shattered every rule in painting, spent his early years mastering classical realism.

He could draw and paint with technical precision that rivaled the old masters. He earned the right to break the rules by first proving he understood them. Cubism wasn't born from ignorance, it was born from deep disciplined study [music] of everything that came before it. There's a saying that I come back to all the time. If you copy one person, you're a thief. If you copy 20, you're an innovator. [music] One source makes you a knockoff, but when you study broadly, when you pull from 10, 20, 50 different artists and genres and eras, [music] those influences start to overlap in ways that are unique to you.

And, by the way, you as an individual are unique. You're not going to be able to completely just copy somebody, even if you copy their chord progressions and their melody, you still need to get all the production stuff, too. So, don't worry. Don't think you're going to completely copy anybody, even if you set out to try to. Your specific combination of inputs makes an output that nobody else could make. That's That's on you.

You do that. So, if you've been avoiding studying other artists because you're worried about losing your originality, please just let that go. You're not protecting your voice by keeping it empty. You're starving [music] it. Feed it everything that you can, and trust that what comes out the other side will be yours. I'm realizing that this is kind of a bad metaphor cuz it implies digestion and then what comes out the other side.

I'm not going to edit it out. I just I just realized that's kind of kind of gross. Trump trump trump trump trump. >> [music] >> All right. So, we've talked about why you need to study music. We've talked about how to listen. Now, I'm going to give you the actual tool. I call it the Sonic DNA audit. It's simple. Pick a track, any track, any genre, and you scan it for four things: rhythm, texture, harmony, and arrangement.

Those four markers are the DNA of any piece of music. They're what make a boom bap track sound different from a UK garage track, even if for some reason they were at the same tempo. The first three tell you what the sounds are and how they feel. The fourth, arrangement, tells you how the track moves. All of them are really important, but that last one, arrangement, I think a lot of producers forget to study. >> [music] >> All right.

So, rhythm. Rhythm is the skeleton. >> [music] >> It's the first thing that your body responds to before your brain even gets involved. When you're auditing a track for rhythm, don't just tap along with the beat. Go deeper. Where does the kick actually land? Like, right on the grid, like perfectly quantized? Or is it a little bit ahead or behind the beat, making it feel a little bit more exciting or a little more laid-back?

Is the snare dead center on beats two and four, or is it drag like just behind to give things sort of more of a relaxed feel? What What hi-hats? Are they like mechanical and precise? Do they breathe like with little velocity changes? Meaning that some hits are louder than others and some are softer. Does the hi-hat open and close? Are there ghost notes from the snare? If so, what beats are they on? Are there any other percussion types that you might be able to hear like tambourines or shakers?

All right, now zoom out from the drums. How does the rhythm of the whole track flow? Where do the phrases land? And by phrases, I mean the musical sentences. Just like a sentence in a book has a beginning, middle, and end, a musical phrase is a chunk of melody or rhythm that feels like one complete thought, usually two, four, or eight bars long. When one phrase ends, the next begins, you often feel a little breath, like a reset, or like a little bit of tension before it lets go on the downbeat of the next phrase.

I have a whole video about this. I'll put a link to it in the description. So, pay attention [music] to that. When does the energy build and when does it pull back? Is the verse sparse and the chorus dense, or the other way around? If the track doesn't have a verse and chorus, how is it using the elements of rhythm, texture, harmony, and the other things to [music] make contrast per section? I actually have a whole theory about contrast as the main driver of arrangement that I do need to do a video series on.

So, think of this as a tiny primer to that. >> [music] >> All right, next up is texture or timbre or timber, however you say it. Timber, I always thought it was weird calling it timber. But yeah, we're calling it texture in this video. It's the surface of the sound, the thing that makes you feel something before you can even name it. First off, putting a name to a sound can really, really help. Even if you don't know what that sound is, just being able to say, "There's this weird flippity-floppity thing." Congratulations, you have pulled it out of the mix and isolated it, and now you can start revolving your little uh consciousness around it to learn more about it.

Naming things is a great way to put them into their own little section while you're dissecting a mix. So, don't be afraid to kind of give things names even if you don't know exactly what they are. So, listen to how these sounds are treated, not just what they are. Is the bass clean and sub-heavy or is it fuzzy and saturated like almost breaking apart on the edges? Are the synths polished and digital or warm and slightly detuned like they're coming through, you know, old tape?

Does the vocal sit crisp and up front or is it buried under layers of processing that make it feel more like a texture than a solo voice? This is where genre identity lives. A lo-fi hip-hop beat and a pop production can use the same chord progression, but the textures tell you immediately what world you're in. When you study a track's texture, you're learning the aesthetic vocabulary of that genre, the specific sonic fingerprints that signal to a listener what kind of music this is and how it's supposed to feel. >> [music] >> All right, next up is harmony.

Harmony is emotional architecture. It tells the listener whether to feel tension, release, uh melancholy, triumph often without them even realizing why. When you audit a track for harmony, start with the basics. What key is it in? Meaning, what's the root note and what scale mode does it use? Is it major? Is it minor? Is it Dorian? I have a video about scale modes. I'll put it in the video description. Major keys tend to feel brights and open and confident.

Minor keys tend to feel darker, moodier, and more emotional. Then, look at the chord progression. That's the sequence of chords that the song cycles through, the repeating pattern underneath the melody. How many chords are there and how often do they change? Are there borrowed chords, chords pulled from a different key that give a sudden moment of surprise or color? Like a note that you didn't expect that makes your ears perk up.

Does the melody stay inside the scale or does it reach outside it to create tension? When does the harmony resolve, meaning when does it land on a chord that feels like home, like the tension has been released? And when does it deliberately leave you hanging, just waiting for a moment that hasn't arrived yet? Pay attention to how harmony drives the story of the track. A verse might just sit on like two chords, leaving things feeling unresolved and restless.

You feel like you're waiting for something. Then the chorus opens up to like four or five chords, and you feel like you've actually arrived somewhere. That shift from tension to release, from resolved to unresolved, that is not an accident. That's a composer understanding how chords move from one moment to another to create a journey for the listener, even if the listener can't name what's happening. Music is wild. It just It can do that. >> [music] >> All right, arrangement.

This is a big one. Arrangement is the map of the song. It's how a track moves through time, and it's the marker that ties the other three things together. Most producers who get stuck in an eight-bar loop don't have an rhythm or harmony problem, they have an arrangement problem. They don't know what's going to happen next because they've never actually studied how finished songs move from one section to another. So, here's what to listen for.

Pick a track and chart its journey. What does the intro give you of the arrangement, and what does it hold back? When the verse starts, what's present and what's been stripped away? And I know I'm using verse-chorus-verse stuff right here a lot, which obviously is only one type of music. If you're studying electronic music, all this applies still. If you're looking at a DJ mix, what do the first 16 bars give you that the next 16 bars don't have, or vice versa?

It's the same thing. How does the track signal that the chorus or the drop is coming? [music] Is it a drum fill, like a rising filter sweep, or is there a new element that's sort of sneaking up through the mix four bars early? Transitions are where the craft lives. They're the hinges between sections, and most beginning producers skip right over them cuz they're hyper-focused on the sections themselves. Then ask deeper questions.

What enters and what exits between the verse and the chorus? It's almost never everything at once. Great composers add and subtract elements in layers, so the listener feels momentum without being hit over the head. Does the second verse do the exact same thing, or does it add something to keep you interested? What about the bridge? That's the section that usually appears once late in the song and breaks away from the verse-chorus pattern to give you something different.

A change of scenery before the final stretch. How does it break the pattern that the rest of the song has set up? And why does that create a sense of release or tension? Pay attention to the role of empty space. Some of the most powerful moments in music is when something in the arrangement just stops. A bass drops out for like two bars and all of a sudden the arrangement has this big hole that your ears are scrambling to fill.

A vocal can go silent right before the chorus and the feeling of anticipation is physical. Arrangement isn't just about what's playing, it's about what's not playing and why. So, here's a practical exercise. Take a track that you want to study and make a simple map on a piece of paper. You can do this in Ableton with blank MIDI clips if you want as well. Intro, verse, pre-chorus, that short build-up section right before the chorus that creates anticipation, bridge, outro.

And under each one, list what instruments and elements are present. [music] Then look at the map as a whole. You'll start to see the shape of the song, how it builds, where it breathes, and how it creates a sense of forward motion. That shape is the arrangement. And once you can see it in other people's work, you can start building it into your own. So, rhythm, texture, harmony, and arrangement. Four markers, that's your audit.

Every time you sit down to study a track, run it through those four lenses. And if you're having a specific issue with something with your music, like, "Oh, I I just don't know how these drums are supposed to work." >> [music] >> then you audit specifically for that. You audit specifically for those hinges, the transitional elements, you audit specifically for the way that a bass sits against a kick in a particular genre.

You don't have to do all four of these all the time, but if you really want to like own a piece of music, meaning really understand how it works, then applying all four of these lenses [music] to an audit will really, really be useful. You will start noticing patterns, things that define a genre, things that define a producer, and then things that break the rules in interesting ways. Over time, those observations become instincts.

You don't have to think about them anymore. You stop staring at an eight-bar loop and wondering what comes next because you have a library in your head of real studied examples that tell you, "This is how this moves forward." Okay, let's bring it all together. Maybe you came into this video just making random beats, but [music] now you have a blueprint. You know that this is like vibe chasing is a dead end. Not because your instincts were wrong, but because your instincts without context have nowhere to go.

You now know that studying existing music is not stealing. It's the same process that every great artist in history has used to find their voice. You have a way to listen through color, through sculpture, through perspective, EQ, mix, and space. That turns passive hearing into active understanding. Hi puppy. And you have a tool, the Sonic DNA audit, that lets you crack open any track and extract the decisions that make it work.

That's your musical GPS, not a set of rules, a way of navigating. Now, here's your homework, and I mean that literally. I want you to do this before you open your DAW again. Find a song that you hate. I'm serious, not a song that you love. That's too easy. Find one that you would normally skip in like two seconds. A genre that you don't touch. An artist that you would never listen to on purpose. And then sit with it.

Run the full Sonic DNA audit. Scan it for rhythm. Where does the groove sit and what makes it move? Scan it for texture. What are the surfaces of the sounds and how do they create a world? Scan it for harmony. What is the emotional architecture and how do the chords carry you forward? And then finally, scan it for arrangement. How does the track travel from one section to another? What enters? What exits? And where does it breathe?

Somewhere in that track, the one that you thought had nothing to offer you, there's at least one technique, one decision that you have never tried. Find it, pull it out, bring it into your world, and sculpt it into something that fits your sound. And that's the whole game. That's how you stop making random beats and start building music with a foundation under it. I've given you the blueprints, the tools are on the table, and now it's your turn to build.

Thanks for watching and have a wonderful day. >> [music] >> Hey again, thank you so much for watching. If you found this video useful, give it a thumbs up. If you like this kind of stuff, feel free to subscribe. And if you want to support the channel more, check out the link to the Patreon where we have rewards like monthly challenges on the Discord and DJ mixes. [music] Happy music making and again, have a wonderful day.