About Damien King Expertise Being a professional music artist covering most electronic/dance genres, Damien can cover a wide range of queries, from musical questions such as explaining various subgenres and their differences, to technical help such as timestretching, beatmatching and compression/dynamics.
Experience Damien has been a professional music artist under the alias 'Digital Slave' (previously known as SephXI) for several years now and has produced a wide range of music, from cutting-edge house to euphoric happy hardcore.
Publications Melomag, Gods Of Music, Rainsford Magazine
How difficult, in your own mind, is it to make a song-- in particular, a song you believe is good, and, on average, how long does it take you to make that song?
Answer Hey Mike,
sounds like someone is interested in making their own songs! :)
Making songs up is a LOT harder than people think it is. People assume that making a track on a computer is very easy, yet it's usually a lot more difficult than say a rock band writing a song.
The amount of time it takes to write a song varies massively, depending on what software and/or hardware you use, the experience you have, and the complexity of the song. It's safe to say that during the first year *minimum* of songwriting, most stuff written will sound quite bad. I've been doing it myself for around four years now and only just really been making nightclub/commercial quality songs within the past six-eight months.
There are always exceptions - I've written some songs within a day that people think are fantastic - but in general, a very good song takes a couple of months work on and off. It's definitely not something you can go into and expect to make great sounding stuff straight away, it takes an awful lot of patience and there's a surprising amount of theory that needs to be learnt, such as understanding learning about music modes and compression.
Of course, once you've written a great song, there's no feeling like it. I suggest if you want a "quick fix" to see what making a song is like, downloading a copy of something like eJay which gives you a lot of premade sounds and melodies that you can put together. If you enjoy that and want to move on to being more creative with your own melodies, then FL Studio (www.fruityloops.com) is by far the best starting point you can find.
