Finishing my first commission

My first commission was given by a friend. He asked me to prepare four tracks for an unannounced project.

The most challenging part of this commission has been the variety of tracks. Ranging from synthwave to aggressive phonk, I had to measure with genres I barely knew (or didn’t know at all).

An incredible learning here was that those “rules” which you may apply to pop music or music in general, can be broken to match a specific genre. For example, in the phonk genre there is much more distortion than I would feel safe to apply anywhere else, and this slowed me down a lot at first. Thankfully there are tons of genre-specific resources to help achieve the desired sound.

Another thing I learned is how painfully complicated it is to match a specific sound or mix. You might know what it’s like and have a basic idea of how it’s made, but knowing and doing are by no means the same thing. I even felt frustrated at some point, but this helped me learn one more thing.

I learned that I have not been brave enough so far. I had come up only with tracks that were hard to classify in any genre, which also meant I don’t have many references for those tracks. While I tried to get references to arrangement, I avoided finding mixing references. In reality, I was actually just protecting myself because I knew how hard it would be to compare my sound to a more “experienced” one and – trust me – the difference in skills and experience is extremely obvious when you mute/unmute a professional track and your own.

Overall, this was an amazing experience. It forced me to make four tracks! Even my laziest side couldn’t compete with the motivation! And the satisfaction of knowing from the “client” that I achieved the result, pays off the hard work.

Thanks for being with me until here. Let me know if you’ve had similar experiences or you totally disagree with something I said. Let’s get wiser together!