TyDi’s Call to New Producers: Learn Music Theory

Genre defying. Clever. Intriguing. Powerful. These are some of the adjectives Australian song writer, music producer, and DJ TyDi uses to describe the songs that grabbed his attention when he first fell in love with EDM. These are the adjectives that producers should still strive to be recognized as.

Unfortunately, there is a crippling mundanity infecting music producers in the dance music industry today and TyDi takes to social media his feelings, or worries rather, for the future of EDM, claiming that if a change is not made, the demise of dance music is imminent.

In his rant, his very passionate rant, TyDi urges producers to stop leaning towards creating “dumbed-down”, simplified, and similar sounds. These loud and amplified songs will make the big money for now, will be played in the big clubs for now, but will not be remembered a year from now, TyDi claims.

“I can’t bare listening to ‘EDM’ charts anymore because the innovation is gone, where are the new ideas?”

And who can blame him? In a musical world that has been saturated by the long buildups and big drops, the songs that stand out most to me, the songs that I remember down the line, are the innovative and unique songs that exude true musical talent.

Many songs are beginning to sound like an imitation of another, and DJ/Producers like TyDi are noticing that the audience is slowly getting bored of this continuing trend. People are always looking for the next big thing in music, and if the audience isn’t kept interested, waiting in anticipation for where this EDM train will take them, they will slowly start to disembark.

In order to prevent this trend of imitated music to continue being produced, TyDi directs his message towards the new, up-and-coming music producers. His main piece of advice: Learn music theory. 

With modern technology, we are at that time period where your average person with a laptop thinks he or she can be a producer. But dance music isn’t just throwing sampled beats together.

“We must stop teaching people that it’s okay to just get a sample pack and make an entire song out of the same loops that everyone else is using…Songwriting is about constructing a piece of music from start to finish, something that actually has a musical element to it – not just a kick drum with a loud bendy sound  distorting over the top.”

TyDi encourages new producers to learn anything and everything they can about music theory and production, not just in terms of electronic music, but to “know the difference between key signatures, chord changes, thirds, fifths, jazz chords, dissonance, etc.”  In turn, knowing such theory and techniques will make for more unique and memorable electronic dance songs.

“I promise you it’s soo much more fulfilling than just throwing samples together. I don’t want to see music with soul turn into music that’s just painfully mundane, cold and overdone.”

Above all, TyDi seems to yearn for memorable music, music made with soul that evokes feeling, music that people can not only get down to in a club, but also fall in love with and keep on their minds for days, months, years to come.

“You have to know the rules of music… if we keep telling people that making dance music is as easy as ‘making a fat beat’ with a few random sounds then this whole EDM scene will fall like a tower of lego. I want the listeners to value not just songs, but the music theory that causes them to make you feel the way the way they do.”