New Years Eve

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts like “I hope 2015 is the year where I get my life together”. HOPING IS NOT ENOUGH. Success takes action, unwavering desire, and sacrifice. If you want 2015 to rock, MAKE IT ROCK. You don’t have to wait around for good things to happen to you because you have the power to MAKE THEM HAPPEN.

My goal for this year was to play a set at an NYE show, and that’s what I’m doing tonight  It didn’t happen because of hope. It happened because mid-year I shifted all of my focus toward the goal. If you really want something, you’ll MAKE it happen. If you don’t, you’ll see yourself with nothing to show for a lot of hoping. We create our reality every day with our choices and the ideas we consume. Decide well. Eat well.

My goal for 2015 is to play a festival, so watch out for me because I’ve been doing pretty great with goals recently and I don’t feel like stopping. It starts with making sick mind-blowing music that anyone can FEEL. I might be the first producer/DJ at SWL to produce a full album. I am creating something that I feel will measure up to my favorite electronic albums. Every day, I will ask myself “What am I accomplishing today?”

Goals of an Up-and-Coming Music Producer

I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on my strategies of promoting myself as a musician over the years that I’ve been doing it. I’ve seen my SoundCloud, Facebook Page, Twitter, and Instagram climb up through the hundreds and my plays go up through the thousands. It’s not like I’ve made it yet, but I definitely feel like I’m at a new chapter as far as producing and promoting myself goes, so I’m gonna put some thoughts down.

In the past, my biggest mistakes were not developing a style early on enough. It’s possible to really make an amazing track in any genre, especially if you’re a good producer (Porter Robinson used to be like this), but that usually doesn’t help you maintain a following. I’ve learned that you kind of need to figure out two or three genres that really are your strength and then make stuff that kind of pulls from those two or three. Artists that are getting big right now are often pioneering sub-genre types of music or bringing underground styles into the mainstream EDM sound. Seven Lions is one example. He fuses trance elements with DUBSTEP, which sounds really freaking different and probably shouldn’t work, but it’s amazing. His experience BEFORE as a drummer in a band and his love for metal probably come into play as well.

In the past, I didn’t promote myself aggressively enough. I think that I might have underpromoted out of fear or thinking that maybe I was being annoying, but you actually are just being a producer. Promotion is part of your job. It’s part of the job for ANY musician. You should be promoting yourself in a variety of ways every day and developing new techniques to reach the people who might like your music. Recently, I’ve been using my remixes as a kind of business card. I won’t give away my deepest secrets like the details of how I do it, but basically, I send my remixes to people who already like the musician that I’ve remixed. My most popular track is my Welcome to the Black Parade Remix. I don’t know what it is, but the damn thing has 40,000 views on YouTube and probably another 4,000 on SoundCloud, and I think some people have even downloaded it and posted it on their own profiles and used it in some “let’s plays”, so I take that and send it to people who like My Chemical Romance. You’ll probably get half of those people to listen to it, and maybe a tenth of THOSE people will say something about it or share it. It’s all about starting a conversation.

What you are is a salesman. You’re selling yourself to potential fans (but hopefully not selling out). The goal is to engage with customers (they don’t know they are customers, but if you’re good, they might be buying merch and tickets later) and start a dialogue. Be able to casually hold a discussion, but keep your objective on your mind…

The strategy there is simple. 1) Make music. 2) FIND PEOPLE WHO LIKE YOUR MUSIC. 3) Send it to them. The complicated parts are within those simples steps though. haha

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Look! I’m a DJ now – #ShootingStar

“It would take far more than a human lifetime.” Thanks to Skrillex, I now know how long it would take for a rocket for travel 1000 miles from the earth. Luckily for me, it hasn’t taken a human lifetime to post my first DJ mix! Just 23 years and a few months… BUT IT IS HERE and ready to be listened to on your ride to the distant reaches of space. Each of my mixes in the future will have a theme and I’m very excited about the list of themes that I’ve got planned out ;) If you like this one, you should follow me on Soundcloud so you can be there when the next ones drop! If you’re curious about any of the song names, just check out the track list below! Track List:

1. Scheme Reprise
2. Scheme (Original Mix)
3. Try It Out Mashup*** –> Try It Out (Neon Mix) – Skrillex –> Try It Out (Put It Up Mix) – Skrillex
4. Paradise (KenNYMusix Trap Remix) – Coldplay (covered)
5. Tundra (Original Mix) – Paris & Simo, Merk & Kremont
6. Silence in the Control Room (Tommy Maverick Mashup)*** –> Control Room – Fedde Le Grand –> Silence (Acoustic Mix) – Delerium feat. Sarah McLachlan
7. Here & Now – Ummet Ozcan
8. Kangaroo – Sander Van Doorn
9. My Feelings – Jorge Montia
10. Star Guitar – The Chemical Brothers
11. Untrue – Tchami
12. Stranger – Skrillex
13. FTW – Lets Be Friends
14. Ten Feet Tall (David Guetta Remix) – Afrojack, Wrabel
15. Right Now (Sick Individuals Remix) – David Guetta, Rihanna
16. Rising Like the Sun – Qulinez, Cara Salimando
17. All Star – Smash Mouth 
18. Save My Night (Blasterjaxx Remix) – Armin Van Buuren
19. City 2 City – Zomboy
20. All Is Fair In Love And Brostep – Skrillex
21. Greatest Love of All – Whitney Houston

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Also, if you haven’t heard the Mayday mix check it out as well! It’s got a lot of trap and dubstep as well as air raid sirens… hahaha It’s pretty fun :) Track List:

1. Falling Down – Sub Focus
2. Tsunami – DVBBS & BORGEOUS (LOOKAS x HLTR$KLTR Trap Remix)
3. Exogenesis – Rogue
4. Booty Drop – LUZCID
5. Crime in the City – Griz
6. Run This – Thugli
7. Sabotage – Cyberoptics
8. Gettin Down – Kayzo & Slander
9. Air Raid – Original Sin (Official Fan Page)
10. Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger – Daft Punk (Dillon Francis Remix)
11. Recess – Skrillex Feat. Kill The Noise & Fatman Scoop 

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I need help getting my mixes into the ears of people who would enjoy it! If you know someone who would, please send them a link to this blog post or either of the mixes! If you use Twitter, please share this post to twitter with the blog title intact :) The hashtag can really help more than you know!

Live Production

I’m back and trying to put this blog to use again :) So, I’ve been producing music on the computer for about four years now, but I honestly don’t believe that I knew what I was doing until I started taking music courses at Miramar. Back in 2010, when I first started attending classes there after graduating high school, the majority of classes took place in bungalows (which are definitely my least favorite structure of all time) and their music program was seriously lacking. Because of that, I attended the school hoping to go into business, believing that knowing more about money would help me be more successful. I found the courses required for that major depressing and soulless, a discovery which led to me dropping out of college and taking a two year break from it. I dropped out in early 2011, a couple months before the Party Rock Anthem gave birth to my generation’s immense obsession with shuffling, bright colors, and raving.

In the two years that I was on break, I started going to raves thanks to an invitation to Audiotistic Festival 2011, which exposed me to experimental and developing genres of EDM. These new genres provided me with exciting new sources to draw inspiration from for my own productions. In February of 2012, I turned 21 and experienced the craziest parties and events of my life. With barely any responsibilities, I danced and partied through the first 9 months of that year, talking with people who were involved with the club scene, and learning about how DJs make their money, how these amazing events are promoted, and how MY musical style fit into all of that. I decided that being a part of this industry was something that I really wanted to do, but I wanted to find a way to do it MY WAY.

Here’s a summary of the past year:
I started working full-time in a warehouse, and while it kept me away from making as much music as I did before, being at this job has given me the money to purchase equipment and put me in the company of people who would help me and inspire me. I worked my ass off through the holiday season, working 60+ hour weeks on average. I was able to save up for the most recent 2012 iMac by January. The iMac needed an audio interface to record audio from microphones and instruments, so I bought the Alesis iO2. Then, a coworker gave me a keyboard that happened to have MIDI capabilities. I realized that my audio interface was also a MIDI interface and that I could play FL Studio’s synths on that keyboard. I finally went back to school in the spring semester of 2013. I took two music classes with professors who greatly shaped my understanding of what music IS and learned about scales, chords, keys, reading sheet music, and how to use Apple’s Logic. These new skills helped me become a better producer. During that summer, I experimented with the new techniques that I learned until the Fall Semester started. In Fall, I enrolled in a course on MIDI and a portfolio course in the recording studio. Early in the semester, I heard about FL Studio’s Performance Mode, a new feature that allows you to use FL Studio to perform live in a way that’s kind of like Ableton. It is way better for me though because I love FL Studio’s workflow and I absolutely HATE Ableton. You could put every other DAW in existence above Ableton and I’d have no problems with that ranking. haha Ironically, I chose a controller designed to be used with Ableton as my primary controller for FL Studio’s Performance Mode. Performing music live was something that became interesting to me when I discovered producers like Madeon and Bass Kleph, who perform some really cool live remixes using controllers such as the Launchpad and Maschine. I experimented with FL Studio’s Performance Mode but realized that I wanted to achieve a more live performance style where I could literally do whatever I wanted. This is where the style that I’m currently working on came from. I’ve never maxed out the CPU on the iMac, but a goal of mine is to do that by the end of the summer and hopefully put up some performances on Soundcloud and YouTube :) I’m going to find ways to incorporate DJing and Performance Mode into my sets as well. I’ve been learning how to DJ using Traktor, so I’d really love to use that, but I’ll probably use Deckadance 2 so I can keep everything inside of FL Studio audio wise :)

I guess that what I want to do could be called “Live Production” even though my ideas and goals for it are much bigger than anyone doing live production (fuck Ableton). I don’t want to be just another fist-pumping DJ and I know that electronic music is going to follow this trend when it comes to performance. People will say that I could just use Ableton, but I’m pushing the limits of this style way beyond what an Ableton user could comprehend. I’m gonna show people that FL Studio isn’t “toy software” >:)

– Tommy Maverick