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S3E01 – Digital Spring Cleaning

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In this episode we talk about how to stay organized for the long-term.

Just like in real-life, we often do a spring cleaning each year.

Sometimes these spring cleanings are quick organization, and sometimes stuff has been put off for so long that it requires hours and hours of work.

But at the end of all the clean-up, there’s always that sigh of relief.. knowing that your life and mind will feel so much better.

A couple things to point out:

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions..

Welcome back to the first episode of Season 3 Music Production Made Simple podcast with GratuiTous!

Don’t miss my dedicated platform to learn FL Studio!

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Transcript

S3E01 – Digital Spring Cleaning

  1. Alright, hey everyone, welcome back to season three, episode one of music production
  2. made simple. Again, this podcast is all about learning how to make beats with FL
  3. Studio. You can definitely follow along, even if you don't use FL Studio because we
  4. are mainly focusing about making beats, and what that means is melodies, custom
  5. drum loops, and yes, we need to learn the arrangement, the mixing, the mastering,
  6. but we are really focused on how to make powerful beats with our custom melodies and
  7. our custom drum loops. All right, everything from scratch around here, no pre-made
  8. drum loops, no pre-made MIDI packs.
  9. We just learn how to become real music producers, understanding truly how to
  10. play the piano, how to make our custom drum loops, and then how to make it sound
  11. good, right? So again, welcome back to season three, episode one.
  12. This title, this episode title is called Digital Spring Cleaning.
  13. For the past year and a half, I have been going through my website, it's
  14. gratuitous.com. My website is a dedicated platform to learn how to make beats with
  15. FL Studio. There is 30 beat making courses on there, and there's also books.
  16. There's this free podcast.com.
  17. And if you would visit it's gratuitous.com forward slash blog, you will see that
  18. there is now a library of so many free FL Studio tutorials.
  19. They're very in-depth, they have quick videos.
  20. That's usually my goal. Simple to the point training.
  21. We hear about spring cleaning all the time, every year, right?
  22. You go through your house or whatever, and you have to organize cleanup and
  23. kind of figure out what direction do you want to go in your life.
  24. Sometimes you acquire things and you realize I don't need this anymore.
  25. you And gotta essentially just
  26. either just get rid of it, clean it, reorganize it.
  27. And in the digital world, for us as music producers, there are
  28. a lot of files that we can acquire.
  29. And especially from me starting to do more heavy education regarding
  30. beat making, I have a lot of different folders going on over time, things get
  31. built up, especially with videos.
  32. Viz videos can be very large, especially the original recording.
  33. What I've been doing for the past year and a half is going through my website,
  34. deleting old posts, cleaning up old images, old videos.
  35. That stuff is done now. So again, welcome back to the podcast, where hopefully I
  36. can keep very consistent here.
  37. I usually try to release these every Thursday, all right.
  38. So if you would like to follow along, again, you can subscribe wherever you want to
  39. learn how to make beats with FL Studio.
  40. Okay. So, what are some things that I was doing for digital spring cleaning?
  41. Now, when it comes to a music production computer, you always have to have your auto
  42. backup in place. All right, people don't want to hear about this stuff, but it's
  43. very important because your computer is essentially your online business or
  44. essentially your online digital life.
  45. If your computer were to fail today, or your hard drive fails, how long would it
  46. take you to get back up to operating?
  47. All right, you have to understand that if something goes wrong on your computer,
  48. first of all, do you even know how to fix it?
  49. Because being a music producer, it is so important that you know
  50. how to do some do-it-yourself on the computer.
  51. Otherwise, what happens is you have to bring that computer into a shop.
  52. That's a lot of trust you're putting into a shop.
  53. Like you are essentially trusting them with your information.
  54. I would not want to hand my computer over to somebody.
  55. And computers are actually pretty basic to understand in that regard, such as, you
  56. know, we don't we only have basic components in there, such as a CPU, a motherboard,
  57. power supply, some RAM. And probably the most important one for us is that hard
  58. drive, right? There's a lot of privacy going on there, and you know, a lot of
  59. copyright that we are not wanting to share publicly.
  60. In this online world, you have to understand that you only want to share what you
  61. want people to see. You do not want to be sharing things on your hard drive that
  62. you want to keep private. And when it comes to the cloud and your own
  63. local hard drive, so these terms you have to understand the difference, and you have
  64. to understand what you're really doing.
  65. Because, like I said, digital spring cleaning.
  66. That's what I've been doing for the past year and a half.
  67. I think I ended up deleting over 200, 300 gigabytes of space, over
  68. 10,000 files. All right. So I'm not talking just like a little digital spring
  69. cleaning. When I was creating all of my courses, there was a time there where I was,
  70. I think I was releasing a course every week.
  71. And that's how I accumulated so many beat making courses.
  72. Everything from again from absolute beginner to like, let's say arrangement, safe
  73. spots, which is all about drum loops, FL Studio Mixer Workflow, learning all about
  74. like the mixer, and then there's. tons of little filler in courses all throughout
  75. there, and they're all pretty in-depth
  76. And like I said, I was super organized in such a way to be able to create really
  77. fast. But when I was going through it, it's just things get unorganized very
  78. fast, especially once things start growing like that.
  79. And for example, you guys may know that when it comes to music production, I create
  80. beat tapes. And the reason I like to do that is for one, it is amazing for
  81. practice. The art of putting together an album, that's slowly kind of going away in
  82. the industry. People are typically just releasing singles songs, like single
  83. releases, and they're kind of missing that element of how to transition from one
  84. song to the next. What order should you put the tracks on your album in?
  85. And then when it comes to the mastering, you want to kind of get all like those
  86. levels sitting right, and it just allows you to really learn the beat making,
  87. learn the mixing, learn the mastering, learn the arrangement, right?
  88. And so all my beat tapes were actually very, very organized, but my music wasn't
  89. really public. You were able to access it on like Spotify and stuff, but on my
  90. website, I always like to have those beat tapes for free because I used to have them
  91. called free beat tapes by gratuitous, and then when I wanted to release them on
  92. Spotify, and I didn't release them on there for money purposes, I just
  93. released them for convenience.
  94. But because I originally had them called Free Beats by Gratuitous, they declined
  95. them. They said we cannot have a beat tape called Free Beats because these online
  96. distribution companies are in the business of making money, right?.
  97. And so I had to change it to beat tapes by gratuitous
  98. So if you have ever seen my beat tapes where they're free beats by Gratuitous, and
  99. then you're like, Well, why is it beat tapes by gratuitous?
  100. That is the reason is because I was forced to change it if I wanted to put it onto
  101. streaming platforms so that you guys can easily listen to them.
  102. But again, on my website, they are free to download, and I finally was able to get
  103. all of them listed. If you visit it'sgratuitous.com forward slash music, all the
  104. beat tapes, all the albums are available for quick one-click download.
  105. You don't have to sign up with your email like if you would want to get into some
  106. more kind of you know beat making training.
  107. Most of my stuff you either have to sign up with your email, and that just allows me
  108. to kind of follow up with you.
  109. Again, you guys can always unsubscribe for my emails, but I try to keep things
  110. simple to the point, high quality education.
  111. Another thing I want to say quickly about the beat tapes is I released so FL Studio
  112. has many cool things built in just besides making beats, like they have a lot of
  113. cool features, such as the Z Game Editor Visualizer.
  114. This allows you kind of to do like Adobe After Effects for your beats, but you can
  115. create really cool videos based off of your song's audio.
  116. And I released all of them for my beat tapes, all of them for my albums.
  117. Now, if I ever release a new one, it's really easy just to kind of copy the
  118. template, change the colors, just change the audio, obviously, for that new release,
  119. and then that allows me to continue to keep flowing like I originally used to.
  120. again, I have nine beat tapes now.
  121. There's like 11 beats per beat tape.
  122. What I'm trying to say is it's all about having a clear mindset.
  123. So when I say this digital spring cleaning, you have to understand that if you're
  124. not organized, you have really no clear direction.
  125. When you wake up, if you go on the computer, you don't really know where you're
  126. going, right? People kind of say it's like you're spinning your wheels, like you're
  127. on the computer, you're doing things, but you're not really doing anything.
  128. And being organized and having a clear direction, that's where the spring cleaning
  129. essentially is just like in the real world.
  130. If you do spring cleaning on your home, right?
  131. You go through the attic, you go through all the boxes or your old clothes, you
  132. know, all that kind of stuff. I essentially did that for my computer.
  133. I was looking at my hard drive.
  134. I was thinking, how can I get my computer set up to the point where if something
  135. does fail, how long would it take me to get back up and running?
  136. On my computer, I have a backup system in place, and it literally takes what's
  137. called a system image backup. And if my main hard drive, because
  138. nowadays, even still to date, we're still using two hard drives on our computer.
  139. We have a solid state hard drive for that main C drive, right?
  140. That means that we're able to load our you know, Windows fast, FL Studio fast.
  141. Most plugins are now becoming VST3.
  142. serum is now VST3, which is cool, as well as silence one, just recently released
  143. VST3 as well. And what that is meaning is not really much for the user
  144. too much, but it does have to be installed into the common files
  145. folder. And what that is forcing us now to do is put those VSTs
  146. on our SSD for very, very fast loading.
  147. And what I'm just trying to say is for that solid state hard drive on the C drive,
  148. if that were to fail, I actually have a solid state hard drive just ready to pop in
  149. and restore an image, which I back up every single day, right?
  150. And it's all autopilot, and you just want to get yourself to a point where your
  151. music production computer is just running clean, you know what's going on.
  152. Remember, when it comes to all our different plugins, it's so easy to think that oh,
  153. you need this plugin or this plugin.
  154. My recommendation, like I always say, you need to have a high quality suite of
  155. plugins, but you don't need all of the plugins, you just need to have the tools that
  156. allow you to do the job. And my recommendation is the Fab filter plugins.
  157. You want to get one of those bundles and use FL Studio, and then you're gonna maybe
  158. want to pick up a couple virtual instruments, you don't need too many.
  159. Now, what I want to really also say clearly is when I really first started making
  160. beats, I used romplers a lot. I really liked Nexus, I use Nexus 2 all the
  161. time back in the day, and then I'm currently on Nexus 3, but I think it's on version
  162. like Nexus 4.5, so you don't always have to update right away because
  163. as you've probably discovered with this technology stuff, is people are releasing
  164. things so quick, and then what happens is there's so many bugs, and then eventually
  165. they get ironed out. But essentially the people who upgrade right away, you guys are
  166. kind of like the tests. You are reporting the bugs, the bugs get fixed, and then
  167. that's when I would like to upgrade.
  168. For example, Windows 11. Should you upgrade to Windows 11?
  169. I have not yet. And the reason is because, first of all, I'm on quite an old music
  170. production computer.. It was built in 2017
  171. But what I want to say is because I have purchased a solid computer at that
  172. time, it's allowed my computer to still sit today and operate
  173. very well. It allows me to create my high-quality courses and tutorials, videos,
  174. allows me to easily do these podcasts.
  175. So if you are ready to purchase a music production computer, it's
  176. wisest to purchase a very good computer at that time because it will last you
  177. longer. So back to the plugins.
  178. As a beatmaker, you need to have high-quality tools that allow you to do what you
  179. really need to do in audio. Most people really don't understand that your DOS stock
  180. plugins are fine for getting started, and even for making
  181. beats, they're fine. But when it comes to a typical DAW's built-in stock
  182. mixing plugins, they're typically usually lacking in a sense of being able to access
  183. all areas of your audio. And what I'm really mainly saying is like mid-side mode,
  184. being able to EQ the left speaker different from the right speaker, all from a
  185. single plugin. And again, that's like what like the fab filter suite of plugins
  186. would do, but it's a big jump, right?
  187. I'm not saying it's not a big jump.
  188. It is expensive, but it's just about like like I'm saying this digital spring
  189. cleaning. If you check out some of my earlier courses, my plugins were still pretty
  190. organized, and I was still very careful in the amount of plugins I would bring into
  191. my music production environment.
  192. But even in recent years, again with this digital. spring cleaning, I went through
  193. all of my plugins once again, and I was actually pretty aggressive
  194. And I said, Do you know what? These ones are going in what's called a deprecated
  195. folder. And if you're new to that word, that's heavily used in the development world
  196. of like websites and coding and applications.
  197. There's actually a couple of different types of deprecation.
  198. There's like soft deprecation, in other words, we're gonna slowly phase this out,
  199. and then there's hard deprecation, which is saying it's like this thing has been
  200. done since version three, right?
  201. So now we're on version four. That was a very old feature, it's no longer supported.
  202. Anyways, I have been essentially deprecating plugins that I no longer want to
  203. use anymore. And my reason for that is one, you don't need to have tons and tons of
  204. plugins because bugs. And the thing is, there is bugs all the time in all
  205. software. Number two is licensing.
  206. Sometimes some of these plugins that I was using, I just really didn't like the
  207. licensing that they were offering.
  208. I really don't like all these companies starting to make you install their software
  209. in order to activate, download, and stay up to date with that plugin.
  210. They kind of make you feel as if it's like, oh, you can download our software, it
  211. keeps it all up to date and everything.
  212. But in my opinion, it's just another piece of software on your computer that's
  213. always connected to the internet that could be updating whenever it wants.
  214. I don't like that. I really liked when we just got a zip file, which had the
  215. executable, which we can install, activate with our license, a simple license,
  216. right? Usually it could be like a you know, 16 character code or whatever it is, as
  217. long as we can activate that plugin easily and even offline if possible, but just
  218. being able to easily activate that plugin that was a big thing for my
  219. choice in the plugins that I was no longer wanting to use and the plugins I wanted
  220. to keep. Now, always, always, always make sure that you are keeping
  221. the executable files. If you are installing plugins, deleting
  222. the executable file because now you think the plugins are installed and you're good
  223. to go. You are going to run into problems in five to 10 years.
  224. You have to think long term, right?
  225. I've been doing this for many years.
  226. I've been educating for many years.
  227. There's a lot of new people always coming into the platform, and I always see the
  228. same things. And that's because on YouTube and in these videos, these people very
  229. often are new in their videos or they're just coming out and they just kind of do
  230. music as a hobby. I treat music production very seriously, like it's it's an online
  231. business, it's fun. And I, you know, I want to make sure that my music is high
  232. quality, it's also very easy to maintain.
  233. I know exactly where everything is.
  234. It's not super expensive. One thing also just to quickly mention is subscription
  235. plugins, any music production plugin that is forcing you to pay for a subscription.
  236. Understand that you actually do not own that plugin.
  237. And if you ever want to open up your projects again, you have to activate your
  238. subscription to open these music projects.
  239. Again, that is a business mindset selling you, and then it's new people
  240. into the industry buying these plugins and supporting this because they don't
  241. understand.. It's not like other industries
  242. Music production has been you download the plugin, executable file, you install it.
  243. For VST2, it was a DLL file. You can easily activate it.
  244. You could install it typically on however many computers you have.
  245. For example, if you have your studio set up and you also had a laptop, the workflow
  246. was just so easy. Subscription plugins, very dangerous.
  247. I would highly recommend staying away from them.
  248. If those companies offer what's called a perpetual license, in other words, you
  249. purchase it once, they have given you the right to use that version of the plugin.
  250. Maybe they will charge an upgrade fee for every major version, right?
  251. So a major version is from version one to version two, a minor update would be
  252. version one, version one point one.
  253. That's a minor update. Version 1.2, minor update.
  254. And those are typically either adding features or fixing bugs or improvements
  255. and stuff like that. Major updates typically are what they call breaking, and in
  256. other words, like sometimes like they're not compatible, and there's kind of a gray
  257. area there. Every company kind of treats those updates different.
  258. But I'm telling you, I'm speaking only from experience here.
  259. I personally went through a huge digital spring cleaning regarding my music, my
  260. plugins, my website, my computer, my files.
  261. It took a lot of time. And because I originally started with my website,
  262. beatstruggles.com. That was way back in the day.
  263. When I first started with that website, I had no idea how to run a website.
  264. I didn't really understand about images, I didn't understand about trying to keep
  265. the file sizes of those images small so that the website loads fast, what type of
  266. image format to upload, right?
  267. We have like a PNG, a JPEG. Over time, you start to learn like what are best
  268. practices for that industry. And I was dealing with the learning mistakes in
  269. my early years. And now the website is fresh, up to date, super
  270. excited. I've been able to create a lot of content.
  271. Typically, the YouTube channel is trying to encourage you to visit the website to
  272. join the platform. Like I'm saying, there's 30 courses, and in behind the scenes,
  273. which you are not able to access unless you were a member, there is so much training
  274. there for you. I have my course pathways, which breaks down the order to watch the
  275. courses. And I know that it's helped a lot of you guys out because when you reach
  276. out and you're like, oh yeah, this is so easy to follow along.
  277. There's no ads. I try to keep the videos straight to the point.
  278. And I really talk about these important things, which we've talked about in this
  279. episode, such as keeping your computer backed up, right?
  280. Make sure you always have an external hard drive or even an internal hard drive that
  281. is a backup drive. Make sure that if any of those hard drives fail, that you have an
  282. image, a system image that you can quickly pop in a different hard drive and you
  283. load that image and you are good to go.
  284. If something were to fail on my computer, like a hard drive, I could be up and
  285. running within a couple hours or at least within one day.
  286. And that's pretty good turnaround time.
  287. So you had just kind of have to think about that.
  288. Are you organized? Is your digital life organized?
  289. Have you shared links that you shouldn't have shared with people?
  290. Or if you you have shared links, it's really good to go through and kind of look
  291. like what are you sharing and what should break those links?
  292. Like, you know, don't allow those links to be active anymore.
  293. You want to go through, clean up your digital life.
  294. I'm telling you, it was not easy.
  295. And that's really the main reason why I stepped away from season two there.
  296. So welcome back to the podcast.
  297. Music production made simple. This is season three, episode one,
  298. digital spring cleaning. If you would like to learn FL Studio, I'm a recognized
  299. FL Studio trainer. I've worked with a Grammy nominated artist.
  300. And I have tons of my own music.
  301. If you would like to check it out, you can visit my music at it'sgratuitous.com
  302. forward slash music. All of those beat tapes are now free to download and check out
  303. the videos. They're really, really cool.
  304. Again, that was all within FL Studio.
  305. People don't realize that FL Studio has a lot of cool built-in tools besides
  306. just making beats. Or if you would really really like to learn FO Studio and join
  307. the platform, you just visit it'sgratuitous.com forward slash courses.
  308. I hope you guys enjoy this podcast going forward.
  309. Always feel free to reach out with any
  310. questions.com, and I'll talk to you in the
  311. next one.
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