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Comment by yobbo | Hacker News Reader

To anyone who thinks "it is easy", try this experiment: recreate a popular song (+100M views on YT for example) in some DAW. (the songs are produced in similar DAWs.) You won't be able to recreate the vocals, but you should be able to recreate the backing track almost identically. Put the original in right ear, your version in the left ear, and iterate until switching between versions sounds identical.

Over 100s of hours, this will train you ears, and you will appreciate the production quality of today's pop music.

This just covers the production and mixing, not the writing. Catchy pop songs sound deceivingly simple, which is the point and why they are so difficult to write.

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Record producer/writer here. You're on the nose with this. Simplicity and clarity are skills, like writing essays, that are refined over many many years to make something appear effortless.

You also allude to it, but there is a staggering amount of unseen effort that also goes into the writing and arranging of the song. Listeners only experience the end product and the final arrangement. For simple melodies it seems very obvious that that's how they should have been all along, but hidden behind that apparent simplicity can be hours and hours of false starts, dead-end paths, and a constant paring-down of complexity in some cases.

It's not uncommon for me and a collaborator to write a full sketch for a song (verses, choruses, lyrics, etc) before hitting on a groove or turn of phrase in the bridge that absolutely KILLS. Quite often what happens is that we discard the entire rest of the song and build something new around this new inspiring nugget of musical gold. This will quite often turn into an entirely new song with a very different feel, message etc. It's a musical moment or hook that we would not have arrived at had we not gone through the whole process leading up to it.

I've never regretted having had to go through the preceding steps to arrive there. It's always welcomed by the collaborators in the room and it's easy for us not to get stuck in a sunk-cost fallacy because it brought us to the place we're at now.

Any chance we’ve heard your work just in daily browsing? Or mind pointing us to your work?

Would love to associate this comment’s context to the songs we hear

It's obviously Eminem.

You can use Machine Learning tools to isolate the vocals from the original song. I've done this exact thing (song recreation/transcribing) as part of taking music theory lessons.

For anyone else who would like to try this, I will share how to do it:

  1. Use one of the popular models for Source Separation. Facebook's is called "Demucs" and one of the best. Deezer's is called "Spleeter", also very good, and then there's "OpenUnmix".

There's a webservice to separate a song using Demucs here:

https://demucs.danielfrg.com/

And a great Dockerized webapp that lets you choose from several models and parameters here:

https://github.com/JeffreyCA/spleeter-web

Otherwise you can just install them locally and run them through the CLI, it's pretty easy (one command)

https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs#for-musicians

https://github.com/deezer/spleeter#quick-start

  2. Now you can take the isolated vocals, and build the rest of the song yourself

I've also found that it really helps to be able to listen to each of the parts of the song in isolation when trying to recreate them.

The drums, the bassline, the lead/synth, etc. It can be hard to distinguish notes when they all run together. You can use an EQ to try to single out instruments but it's harder.

Hope this is helpful to someone.

There's a long interview with Rick Beato and Pat Metheny. My opinion is that among "younger" jazz musicians, Metheny has a rare gift for writing catchy melodies. He can write melodies that sound like folk songs, or like the most advanced deep jazz tunes, or both at the same time, pretty much on demand.

He said nobody teaches how to do this. You can study composition and arrangement, but they won't teach you how to create a melody. I don't know if he was implying that it can't be taught. But it's certainly valuable.

I know someone who wrote tunes on speculation, and one of his melodies was chosen as the year's jingle for a major brand. It made him enough money to pay cash for a house. Of course this was many years ago.

Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us, and most of them have no idea how to explain how they learn/teach in ways that are useful to regular brains. I've met some of them, and they might as well be a different species. (Synthesesia is often part of it, I did a master class with a pianist who was basically tripping the whole time he played, listening to him describe his experience was so completely un-relatable to normal people.)

Some of those folks are also great teachers, but a lot of them just say the most completely useless advice because they can't even remember not being able to instantly play whatever they hear.

The older I get, the more I'm attuned to the limitations of talent like Metheny. It's like how there are great mathematicians, and many of them can be strong problem-solvers and do great work, but can still fall short of "genius", because - and this is my hypothesis - they're too strong at tackling fine-grained details immediately, so they don't actively seek out the kind of abstractions that would lead to a different perspective. It's like trying to explain how you walk: "it's obvious." (even though at some point you did struggle with it) When I hear synthestites talk, they are trying to explain how walking works - it's tapping into neural pathways that are wired into the subconscious, skipping over any preliminary decoding. So they often create things that sound marvelous, bring in tons of techniques, but are at their core heavily improvised with minimal "concept" - elequent baby babbles.

For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us explain our results when we get them, and highlights using structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just "sit at the keys" and get swept away.

All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm, scale or harmony.

I've struggled with the accuracy of statements like this as someone who writes a lot of music. Writing the melodies is always the easiest part (lyrics are the hardest). So how much is it brain wiring vs just practicing an order of magnitude or two more than most? I have thousands of hours spent improvising over random songs - just setting Spotify to shuffle and jamming to whatever pops up. It's fun for me, and something I generally do to procrastinate other work. I couldn't imagine someone practicing nearly as much if they didn't innately enjoy it. So it makes me wonder, is it fun because I'm good at it, or did I get good at it because I find it fun? I personally believe the latter, but it's hard to really tease apart the nature vs nurture in such a subjective art. It reminds me of comic artists trying to illustrate just how much art they have to produce to go from amateur to pro.

Note, I don't mean to imply I'm part of that small elite you mention. I'm no prodigy, it's just that I've had many musicians (in far less competitive circles) express a similar sentiment about my skills.

What I'm saying is more that when people like Metheny say "you can't teach melody writing", they mean "no one could teach me melody writing, it's just there". And then they extrapolate to say "no one can teach anyone melody writing", which is complete nonsense. I can, guaranteed, teach a regular person tons on how to learn to write better melodies. Can I teach a Metheny how to improve his melodies? Of course not! (Nor will my improvisation ever by even remotely in his ballpark...)

Because for me, they were never "just there". I learnt improvisation by listening, playing, memorizing, and analyzing over many years. It never came easy. So yeah, I know tons of the obstacles regular people will face, and lots of things that might get them unstuck.

A really fascinating interview is the film of Bill Evans talking about this. Surprising, he says it was never easy for him either. So damn, he must have worked hard.

> Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us

Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages.

Of course, this is not a proof against some people’s wiring differently, but if one could become Mozart without special wiring maybe we shouldn’t count on the idea too much.

I have read his work, and also am friends with many university and conservatory music teachers who have know some prodigies. I'm sorry... you're wrong. The world is full of thousands and thousands of musicians who had 10k hours perfect deliberate practice from age 3 with world class teachers and don't become those people. Do they become great musicians? sure! Do they become the Pat Methenies? very very rarely. Even among jazz elite, Metheny is known as special.

And there are also has many cases of people who did not have any of that perfect-practice upbringing and and have aural awareness that is on a completely different plane from regular people. I know some of them (I'm doing a Master's in Music Tech right now). I know folks who, without the proper years of deliberate practice, are able to do things I and 99.99% of musicians will never be able to do. That does not mean they will necessarily become famous or have great careers, but they can do shit that is out of this world. One of Canada's best jazz musician's recounted to me chatting after a masterclass about music cognition how he had a college student who came to him for her lesson and could remember EVERY SINGLE NOTE of Keith Jarrett's concert the night before and play it for him. That shit is not normal, it's crazy savant stuff. From what I have read, Metheny was in that category.

Music is a funny thing, deliberate perfect practice is obviously the most important thing, but there absolutely are geniuses who do not have the same brains as us, and the top 0.001% or whatever has a lot of them. Savantism occurs (relatively speaking) often in music. If you want a counter balance to Ericsson's "practice is everything" stance (and there is lots of excellent material to take from Ericsson's work), I suggest reading Oliver Sacks, "Musicophelia", about the music related clinical stories from his career as a neuroscientist.

If someone is reading this and is getting demotivated to apply yourself to any field that you like because you think you don't have the skills, please, don't. Parent isn't saying that you shouldn't try. We're usually terrible to estimate our own abilities. How many times you thought you were incapable of doing something and you end up doing it?

My own anecdotal example. I stopped playing music years ago because I thought I wasn't good, despite liking it. I started playing again because I had no games and I noticed that I should have gotten back to it sooner, despite not being music material. Not only I was able to play stuff that I liked, I learned stuff that I thoroughly enjoyed. Some music were really hard at first, but as I progressed (very) slowly through weeks, I could see my skills improving and I was very satisfied to watch it (slow as it was).

If you like it, I think you should do it, despite of others. Because it won't matter, in the end. It may take time and a lot of effort, can be painful, but it's worth it.

I think this advice by Terrence Tao translates well to other areas: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...

Thanks, you're totally right to point this out. One should no more give up music because of the geniuses out there than one should stop playing golf or basketball because becoming Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan isn't going to be just a matter of practicing hard.

Most adults overestimate how fast they should improve in the short term and really underestimate how far they can get by just practicing regularly and consistently over many years.

> I'm sorry... you're wrong.

> deliberate perfect practice is obviously the most important thing

I said that we shouldn't count too much on the idea of brain wiring. As far as I understood, the second quote above agrees with me. I didn't mean to disregard the presence of savants or other phenomena not explained by practice, deliberate or not. If my previous reply suggested so, I would like to correct it here.

No worries. I've just happened to have read about Metheny. He is a genius, no doubt about it. Even among the super elite he is considered a special case.

"Musicophelia" was really eye opening. I think it's attuned me to noticing more of the interesting differences among the (mostly amateur including myself) musicians I play with.

Where are you studying Music Tech? What was your undergraduate background? I’m curious if you found a formal tech education is as important in what today is often more an applied art compared to when these tools were so expensive and esoteric.

Is "Peak" in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell or "Good to Great" which preselects a handful of prodigies across all fields then makes broad, definitive (unscientific) conclusions based on some posthoc observations?

I haven’t read Good to Great, but have read other Malcolm Gladwell books. They are written to be sensational and popular, not scientific at all. Indeed Gladwell is the one who misrepresented 10000 hours of practice that Anders Ericsson identified as part of his research. Ericsson identifies 10000 hours as a ballpark around which proficient practicers have practiced in their career --- nothing like a prerequisite Gladwell portrayed it to be. To the contrary, Ericsson states that without deliberate practice, the number of hours of practice doesn’t matter.

Peak is nothing like Gladwell books. I recommend it to everyone interested in practice and improvement.

A good way to summarize it is: Gladwell implied that if you did 10k hours, you'd become world class, that's it! Ericsson identified that the most significant differentiator between the top performers at conservatories and the rest was how much of their lives they had spent doing rigorous practice. Those are two totally different things. To paraphrase Ericsson in a way that is meaningful for most people, he basically said "10k hours is the average we saw of our top performers" (10+ years, 3 hours a day). He in no way implies that doing that would make you world class, or that all world class performers had done it. He never says it's either necessary or sufficient - just what they observed their top subjects had done relative to their bottom ones, so if you want to get good, start there. There are people out there who are world class after playing half that, and scads and scads who aren't and have done more than double.

I took a lot longer than 10 years to do my 10k+ hours, but by now at age 47 I've done them. So have most of my musician friends. We gig around town. lol. 10k is table stakes.

Thank you for this very good summary.

No, if anything Peak was written as a response to Outliers, which grossly misrepresents Ericsson's work. Peak is his popular science version of his own work, presumably to correct that. It's a good read, and can act as a guide to his actual academic papers. But bear in mind, it is still only as good as his studies, which were done on pre-professional players and athletes, not on the super-elite geniuses.

Outliers is a complete piece of shit. No professionals take anything in that book seriously, it's cherry picked extrapolated nonsense by someone who wanted a good story and has no idea what he was talking about.

I’m not sure if you put Jacob Collier in this category, but I think his success has a lot to do with him attempting to make these higher abstractions of music more approachable.

There is something to that.

He reminds me of Eric Whitacre in a sense. Whitacre reached "genius" "prodigy" "best composer" status among amateurs and beginner musicians because he published his music with all kinds of markings on it (e.g. explicitly writing crescendi and diminuendi for every basic phrase, and notating all kinds of subtle tempo changes) that a well trained singer would already understand implicitly without need for the markings (which in my opinion as a well trained singer with his own sense of style, are annoying). The effect is to allow bad high school choirs to get to decent-sounding choral music.

This analogy is moot.

As if someone tried to justify that "it's hard to make a milshake" by saying "yeah but you couldn't make one exactly the same, at the molecule level, as this one I made earlier".

Furthermore, I presume, not even the original creator could make another track with the same sound as one of its own, if it were to start again from scratch. Akin to how it'd be almost impossible for someone to draw the exact same sketch twice.

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