How I used Product Management skills to produce my latest original song ‘One Giant Leap’
My first Single of 2021 ‘One Giant Leap’ dropped last month. It was the first one in another regard — this is my first song that’s streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc. — places where you can share your music only via a distributor or a recording label.
It’s the first time that I was convinced that I could invest money in a distribution service and thus be more professional as an artist.
The recording was good, but what made the difference was the technical aspects of production, which follow the songwriting and recording phases.
These made the song much fuller and compatible across multiple audio devices. Each layer of sound had its space, all the instruments gelled nicely with each other, the volume level was not too loud and thankfully, there were no false notes!
I have been making original music since 2011. So what did I do differently this time?
I decided to follow a process that I have been refining for years now, learning from my mistakes and setbacks as a producer.
I also decided to have an expert’s resources which pointed me in the right direction.
I planned to receive early feedback from some of my listeners — friends who I could trust to get constructive critical feedback from — and was open to working on the suggestions even if I personally felt my track was ready for publishing.
I decided to take breaks, box my time, trust the process, and recharge myself.
I allowed my ears to recover whenever I felt my hearing was getting too biased in favour of the perceived urgency of execution.
Put simply, I applied my Product skills to ensure that my outcome accelerates my journey as a musician — the goal that I have been trying to achieve for the past 6 years.
Not to mention, while the Single is out now, I am reaching out and receiving extremely encouraging and constructive feedback from people, many of who are discovering my work as a musician for the very first time.
And of course, I have access to the analytics side of things, and I am tracking them closely to derive valuable insights.
Now comes the meaty bit: The details!
A. Timeline of development: I decided to keep it simple and more relaxed when I was in the concept stage, and to speed up with deadlines when I was nearing the publishing steps. The timeline turned out to be this way:
Total(excluding distribution time): 14 weeks 3 days
- Concept [2 weeks]: I was playing with the idea of making a track that could be enjoyed in isolation but could also tease a story behind it. I would research for inspiration but didn’t want to limit myself to what was already out there. In two weekends, the idea of making something that could build a sense of outer space journey came to mind, and I decided to stick with it.
- Planning [1 week]: I realised that after a certain point if I don’t see the finish line, the project would end up being stale. So I decided on some rough timelines for songwriting, composition, tactical research, recording, mixing, and mastering — only for self-motivation and to enjoy myself.
- Composition and Songwriting [5 weeks]: Work priorities took over during this period and most of my weekends (I work on 1st, 3rd, and 5th Saturdays) were getting used up in me recovering for the next week. Since composition comes naturally to me, I decided to speed it up. On the weekends that I had for working on this project, I gave large chunks of break-free periods to compose, recycle, undo and redo. Songwriting happened in parallel as I was laying out tracks as I composed, instead of doing it separately. By the end of the 5th week, I liked what I had made.
- Break Period #1 [2 weeks]: This is something I hate doing, especially when I have a promising tune and have the momentum. But over the years, the silly mistakes that I have made, have taught me to force this period in the process. This way I can allow myself the freedom of listening to the tune on different occasions, at a different time of day, a different day of the week, etc. — and make changes. I ended up changing the original tune by 30% based on my notes from these two weeks.
- Recording + Tactical Research [1 week]: Since I had already done some of the recording, I was mostly left with some hygiene work to fine-tune things a little, and trim out the basic mistakes from the tracks. I did some research to find the right resources that I’d need for mixing and mastering my track.
- Break Period #2 [1 week]: I was mostly playing the raw recording on different audio devices ( I have 6 different types of speakers and I also used my TV’s sound output) to feel good about myself (😛). It was fun but I also realised: At some of the loudest parts of the recording, the audio level was cracking the output and disrupting the listening. I made notes.
- Mixing [2 weeks]: I usually make my biggest mistakes during this phase, primarily because of the lack of formal sound processing/engineering knowledge. So, I decided to pull up the research material from earlier. I found The Band Guide channel to be super useful — the reasoning behind performing a particular technical step (the WHYs) was explained in very simple words that made sense to me. It was awesome. This phase also tired me out badly, so I spent some hours in the “Valley of Despair”. However, by the end of it, the mix was super-enticing, the beauty was showing, and most importantly, my concept was surfacing well. It was ready for mastering. This is when I also shared the song with my friends who listened to it and gave important feedback. I realised from their suggestions, how far I could go with the song if I improved certain things.
- Mastering [3 days]: I hate mastering. I would skip this step many times. But by now, The Band Guide’s the Band Guy had convinced me to not give up! I diligently followed his mastering tutorials and quickly finished the steps. For the first time, I used a reference track to ensure that the volume, loudness levels of my song were not going haywire — this is important especially if — 1. you want the auto-play algorithms of streaming platforms to work in your song’s favour and 2. you want your song to comfortably fit into playlists. But a problem crept up into my master track: something was making my track muddy by the end — it sounded utterly unpleasant! It took me a full day to figure out the root cause — the gain levels were all wrong. I had to export the song multiple times to figure this out. Thankfully, it took me only 3 minutes to fix the issue.
My mastered track was a marvel when I played it on my speakers — I was overcome with emotions and shed a drop of tear. This is when I decided that it’s time to take my music to the next level and publish it on Spotify.
Some technical notes which I took during Mixing and Mastering:
B. Choosing the Music Distribution Service Provider (DSP) and designing the Artwork: I did some research and asked a couple of my producer friends. That’s how I finalised Distrokid as my DSP. I designed the artwork using Canva.
During this time, I was really having fun while the song was playing on loop in the background.
I paid up Distrokid, set up the profile, uploaded the song, and rest just fell in place— in a week my song was made available on all major platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Instagram, TikTok etc. I am expecting the song to be available on Tidal very soon.
I also got verified artist profiles (this was super easy for Spotify and Apple Music, but took time and eligibility-criteria reviewing before it happened for YouTube. I am still waiting for verification on Amazon Music). Distrokid’s systems took care of everything.
Distrokid’s AI bot Dave analysed my song and had this to say:
In closing, I’d say that all the processes and activities that I undertook above led me to an outcome that exceeded my expectations, plus I learned a lot. Most importantly, I had fun doing this, and I know that I will simply reuse the above process to finish my upcoming songs.
I cannot wait to try out the above with a group of musicians. I am sure teamwork will bring new challenges but with even better learnings and outcomes!
You can stream ‘One Giant Leap’ below. Add it to your libraries if you like☺️
This post has been published on www.productschool.com communities.
