r/TeamSESH

TLDR: all I make are drafts. I need help with mixing and mastering, and I’m open to advice (even if it’s harsh).

I grew up on motown, dilla, nujabes, and old kanye. I’m obsessed with sampling. I started out producing lo-fi soul and hiphop before I began dabbling in cloud rap (raider klvn, schemaposse, team sesh) and early Memphis stuff (lil grim, skinny pimp, holocaust click, etc.)

I learned to make beats by sporadically bingewatching youtube tutorials, opening a shit ton of tabs, cherry-picking whatever I felt was helpful at the time, then applying it myself.

90% of my beats are spur-of-the-moment placeholders for ideas I’d have in my head. I would tweak a beat to near completion if I was really feeling it, otherwise it would stay in the vault until I get around to revisiting it again.

As a result, everything I make is a draft. All my beats are placeholders, and rarely am I satisfied with my own final output - which is why it’s never really “final” to me. I just make shit I like, mix it until I think it sounds alright, then save it to my phone for my own personal listening, where it remains forever.

I’d go through cycles wherein I’d bump my old beats, find them cringeworthy, then never bump them again. Other times, I’d revisit those same beats, realize they were fire, then start bumping them again. The cycle never ends.

As a bedroom producer, I’ve always had this love-hate relationship with the shit I make. Only recently have I begun appreciating my craft, but I feel like I’ve hit a wall now.

After nearly a decade of producing, I’m still mad conscious about my shit. Out of the hundreds of beats I’ve made in my life, there are only a handful that I’m truly comfortable playing in public or sharing with others. Many of my friends and family know me to be a beatmaker, but I barely have anything to show for it.

I don’t intend to monetize it. I just do it for fun, and I’ve only ever done it for me and my own satisfaction. But sometimes I look at the creatives around me and can’t help but feel inferior. On the other hand, I’ve grown to appreciate my evolution as a beatmaker. But I feel like my shit has been sub-par for too long now and I need to level tf up for real.

I figured life is too short and it would suck to die without at least putting my shit out there, so i just said fuck it and started dropping tracks on Youtube and soundcloud. My goal is have something out on Spotify before the year ends, but I don’t have anything I deem worthy for that yet.

Sorry for the long ass rant, fellas.

If anyone out here is or was in a similar spot as me, I’d love to hear your thoughts and advice. And if anyone can take the time to browse thru my shit and recommend me someone who fucks with my sound/is open for commission on mixing and mastering, that would honestly mean the world to me.

I’ll drop a link to my music in the comments.

Edit: I’m a bigass fan of xavier wulf, black kray, black smurf, slim guerilla, greaf, bones, spooky black, velvetears, lil peep, lil tracy, horsehead, nedarb nagrom, teriobeats, lilwaterbed, 6dogs, doomshop, sic records, SESHOLLOWATERBOYS, GOTHBOICLIQUE, and all of that early-soundcloud era stuff.

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