Producers, Have You Made An Instrumental Remake Yet?

Producers, have you made an instrumental remake yet?

If you're not familiar with instrumental remakes, they're basically similar to karaoke audio, where one takes the challenge to recreate the instrumental of a commercial track with accuracy and precision—very common in the urban and pop music realm. However, there's a group dispute whether these works help music producers develop music originality or not. From my perceptive, the outcome of doing instrumental remakes produces more benefits than harm. Others will argue that it destroys a beat maker's ability to create true original material. I argue, that it does not. What they're not seeing are the benefits and ultimately the purpose for it. Let's talk about this.

The Process:
The process in remaking an instrumental is indeed a lot of work. First you have to find the tempo and key by ear, then listen closely to the timbre and textures of each instrument/sound element, then you have to find the melodies/chords, then you have to arrange all of it to match the structure of the original song, and finally mix accordingly to how it originally sounds like. I mean, yeah it's a lot, but I enjoy it so much because I'm able to learn and take some production techniques from various styles to create my own unique sound. 

Ultimately it's a great exercise that trains your listening and analysis skills, which, by the way, is a significant skill that all music producers should obtain. Imagine yourself in room of industry professionals discussing the fine details of a commercial hit song, and not being able to contribute because you're not hearing what they're able to hear. Creating instrumental remakes is all about dissecting each element in a song (vocals, keys, guitars, bass, and so on); the more you listen, the more you will find. You see, most don't always catch everything in the first listen. In fact, I challenge you to break down an entire hit song with five replays. You might say, "Well let me just choose a song I know with simple beats, melodies, and arrangements." That's fine, but I promise you that when you listen to it again the next day, you'll be surprised by how much you didn't catch in the first five tries.

I encourage young music producers to try an instrumental remake of their favorite song. And if you have some time please check out some of mine. Good luck! 
SoundCloud - Instrumental Remakes

HOME STUDIO TOUR 2014 | Oscar Oceguera

I'm back! So check this out...I decided to give you guys a tour of my home studio setup. Not only is this my first time doing a room tour, but it's also my first vlog ever. I may or may not sound like a zombie, so bare with me. If you have any questions related to my home production studio, please leave a comment below and I'll get back to you. Thanks!

HOME STUDIO TOUR 2014 | Oscar Oceguera

FL Studio's New 64 Bit Beta Feature. This is BIG.

What's the big deal you may be asking...

"FINALLY!" No more getting held back by the 4GB cap in the 32 bit software realm. This is our break, our time to use our full potential." says music producer J-rum.

Has your production been held back by how much memory you can use and the amount of vsts/plugins you can load? Well let me tell you why this is big news to some producers and beat makers.

FL Studio has always made 64-bit plugins compatible with the software, but this new 64 bit beta is now allowing us to navigate in 64 bit operation. If you have been held back by how much memory and vst plugins you can actually use in large projects, but can't find why, it's because the older FL Studio versions could only max out at 4GB. Despite how powerful your computer performs, you would be disappointed to find out that it was still not enough, for whatever reason. Well now with this new feature added to Image-Line's latest version FL Studio 11, we can access up to 512GB of memory. This is huge for users like me who like to run a load of third party plugins (Komplete 9 Ultimate) into our everyday beat production sessions. There will no longer be a limit to our creativity. And even if you don't use many plugins all at once, know that you have 512GB of memory incase you'd like to try it out some day. Well that's my exciting news of the day, I hope this new feature works well for your music production workflow. Till next time!


Download link - http://www.image-line.com/documents/news.php?entry_id=1404861754 

Welcome!

What’s up everyone! Welcome to my first blog cite where I’ll be helping you on all things contemporary music production inside of FL Studio. My name is Oscar Oceguera, but some know me as Big-O Beatz—my start-up name as a young beat maker. I’m sure most on here have a cool name—if not better than mine—or are at least in the progress of coming up with one. Unfortunately I had to abandon the name “Big-O Beatz” for the sole purpose that it wasn't as original as I thought it was, so I go by my full name now—for better or worst. Hmm now that I’m thinking about it, this would make a great blog one day; I’ll call it “The Art of Naming A Music Brand” After all, we are trying to make ourselves a brand right?

Okay, back to the introduction. I have close to 5 years married to this music game, and we’re still going strong. I've adapted to various genres and styles throughout the years (Hip-Hop, Rap, Raggeaton, R&B, Electronic/Dance, and Pop). No matter what your genre is, I can provide helpful advice to you. We will cover things like song structure/form, workflow & organization, current audio editing trends, new software features, mixing, mastering, and everything in between.  My goal for starting this blog cite is to help new FL Studio users and professionals take the next step to creating commercial ready productions that many top companies and labels are looking for. There is a growing market for us, but they’re demanding some top-notch quality work. Stick around for more information on this later. 

Check out my music on SoundCloud!

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