It's a vicious loop…

You're watching one tutorial after the other, and an hour later you still haven't made any music.

Then you finally open your DAW, try to build the bass sound you've been hearing in your head, and it's painfully obvious you're lacking a few fundamental sound design skills.

That's usually when we tell ourselves "I really need to practice sound design." Or mixing. Or arrangement.

But we don't.

Part of it is that nobody really shows you how to practice these skills.

Part of it is that practice sounds like the music lessons you were forced to take as a kid, which is the opposite of why you started making electronic music.

So here's a different way to do it.

Today, a new challenge starts inside the Prolific Producer Collective.

The brief: go out into the world (or just into your kitchen), collect field recordings with nothing but your phone, and turn them into a drum kit you can use in your tracks.

It's one of my favorite ways to practice sound design. Some of my favorite drum layers came from recordings I took in an abandoned warehouse in Berlin.

Here's what the next few weeks could look like for you.

You take your phone into the kitchen and hit record.

Your running dishwasher becomes a perc loop. The fridge door becomes a kick drum. Two knives clinking together become a hi-hat.

Nobody is precious about a recording of their dishwasher. So you experiment.

You pitch it down two octaves, saturate it until it breaks, reverse it, chop it up, and let intuition and curiosity guide you.

You'd never be that bold with the track you've been working on for three months.

But that's exactly the kind of practice that builds skills you can use intuitively when you're working on a real track.

A week later, you look at a folder full of sounds nobody else has. The original layers your synthetic drums have been missing.

Then people in the community start sharing their first drum kits. Some of them let others use their samples in their own tracks.

At the end of the month, you wrap it up together with the coach who designed the challenge.

Nobody wins, because nobody's competing. Everyone just comes out of it a better producer.

And next month, there's a new one. Composition, arrangement, sound design, mixing, mastering, release and promo.

What would twelve of these do to your skills a year from now?

You can join today and start with everyone else:

https://www.skool.com/pickyourself/about

Your music matters. Make it count.
Philip

PS: These challenges are included in all plans. They're designed to be fun and help you become a more capable and confident producer from month to month. Combine that with the four weekly calls you can attend on the Premium plan and you'll make more progress each month than in every previous year.