My equipment has been upgraded a few times, and I’ve purchased quite a few plugins, but they’ve mostly been sitting idle gathering dust. It happened to be a weekend break, giving me some free time to go back to my computer and make some music. Over the past few days, I opened up my long-dusted Ableton and started writing two small demos. Although I haven’t finished them and feel like I just gave up halfway.

I had a long chat with a friend today, and afterwards, I happened to hear a piece of music that moved me deeply. All of this coming together became the catalyst for writing this article. Through this, I would like to share some personal reflections on music creation.

A year and a half ago, I vaguely felt I had hit a bottleneck. But just like how humanity in The Three-Body Problem still made significant strides forward before finally halting due to the Sophons’ lockdown on fundamental physics, my creative level might have stagnated a long time ago. However, because I have been continuously studying and working hard in other fields, coupled with the modern music creation workflow of highly integrated sampling and sequencer presets, the things I was missing had always been glossed over. Only now have I finally realized what those ignored elements actually were.

For the field of music I am studying, whether it’s sound design, drum arrangement, or even mixing and mastering, they are all like bricks stacked on top of each other when building a skyscraper. These elements determine how tall the building can be. But the foundation of this building is always your composition and melody. This is precisely why we call electronic dance music “music” rather than functional sound design.

A long time ago, I watched some clips of Giuseppe Ottaviani’s masterclass. There was one sentence I remembered, but I didn’t truly take it to heart. Only now have Giuseppe Ottaviani’s words truly resonated with me: “Melody is Everything.”

When I first encountered this statement, I actually felt a bit defensive. The world of music is so vast; for instance, genres like Industrial Techno and Noisecore have neither tonality nor melody. We shouldn’t judge whether they have merit solely based on the absence of melody and harmony.

However, discussing broad principles without context is irrational. Just as I had mistaken the context of my discussion on “whether melody is important” back then. “Whether it exists” and “how important it is” are two entirely different matters.

For songs that don’t require a melody, you shouldn’t judge them using old rules. It’s like you are building a skyscraper, while they are building a ship that can float on water without a foundation. The principles of shipbuilding cannot be fully applied to architecture, and the things we are familiar with cannot be blindly applied to everything.

Giuseppe Ottaviani is famous for Trance, and the phrase “melody is everything” is the essence he summarized from over twenty years of his music creation career. It took me until my third year of composing to finally understand this. I also realized that over-relying on musical intuition and luck, hoping to write better works based solely on these, is the very reason why my creative desire has dried up and I keep hitting walls.

I still remember one day three years ago when I wrote a song called “Seventeen Forever”. At that time, I only knew how to use FL Studio’s piano roll. I had a piano at home, and back then I would just play it, constantly trial-and-erroring, and recording the phrases that felt right. What I was doing then was purely sculpting harmony and melody. That song wasn’t backed by music theory; it was simple but sincere. Even though I can now write things several times more complex, listening to it still brings me back to that rainy night, sitting in front of the piano, and recalling what I was thinking and feeling. The melody of that song carries my memories and emotions across time and space, continuously conveying to me the mindset my seventeen-year-old self had when facing the future.

Now, when I look back at the majority of my music creation process, I usually arranged the drums first, then wrote the harmony, and saved the melody for last. Many people have given me feedback that my music “lacks a center.” I think this is exactly the reason. I was forcing something into existence out of thin air without a real creative motif. It’s like leaving the foundation as the very last step of building a house—the order is completely wrong. Ultimately, almost all of these projects ended up as folders sealed away in my computer, never to see the light of day again.

For the minority of my works where I didn’t put the cart before the horse, I can remember their creation process incredibly clearly. Tracks like The Other Shore, looking back at that entire EP, Stay Under the Tide, Sinking Light, Meteoroid, Everlasting Summer, and so on. These works all started with melody and harmony before anything else. When I further arranged the music based on these melodies, it flowed seamlessly in one go. There were no back-and-forth revisions or starting over, no attempts to transpose, change the BPM, or alter the rhythm patterns. They were finished quickly, and even the mixing process became easier (because there were no messy changes that destroyed the preparatory work).

The opposite example is Awakening. Although it’s a milestone in my personal Progressive Trance journey, I treat it as a cautionary tale. The reason is that this track falls into the category I mentioned earlier: “the melody was written last.” After I finished the demo and listened to my producer friend’s feedback, his first sentence was, “It lacks melodic quality.” Ultimately, it was only after I introduced vocals and arranged around them that AVA finally extended an olive branch to me.

Adapting the length and rhythm of a third-party vocal to fit Awakening at such a late stage not only cost me a massive amount of time and energy, but it also relied heavily on luck. It is entirely foreseeable that if I hadn’t found the right vocal, Awakening would have become yet another stillborn project. I can responsibly say that the final version of Awakening and the first demo draft are practically two different songs. Although the general structure and sound design remained the same, the listening experience is worlds apart. Currently, I am fairly satisfied with the final product, and it was the first time I stepped out of my comfort zone to apply the vocal mixing techniques I learned into an actual project. I just hope I won’t take long detours like this ever again.

In short, the things I had failed to realize might be because I took too big of a step forward and forgot to summarize my experiences. Looking back now, it’s quite amusing to see that the answer has been waving at me right from where I first started.

I don’t know if there are others like me who have been coasting for a long time on the inertia of musical intuition before realizing that learning music theory is extremely important. To quote something a friend said to me today: “The works of top-tier labels have incredibly sophisticated harmonies.” The track I mentioned at the beginning of this article that moved me so deeply stuck in my memory precisely because of its outstanding melody and harmony.

Whether it’s to get signed by a label or to shake off the “lucky” label I’ve given myself, I need to drill down to the foundation of music creation: harmony, melody, and rhythm. I need to solve the problem of “inspiration shattering at the slightest touch” right from the source. I know that learning music theory won’t be a once-and-for-all fix, and my ideas will still dry up when they’re meant to, but at least it won’t happen as quickly as it does now, where I can’t squeeze anything out without external stimuli.

This article might seem a bit laughable to some friends—“So there actually are people who learn arrangement first and composition later”—but this is my true experience. Debts always have to be paid, and the things you skipped over will eventually have to be picked back up. Whether this adds a bit of amusement to your post-meal downtime, or serves as a shared experience for friends in the same situation as me, I hope you can find something useful to take away from this text.

That is all.

*Note: This article in no way invalidates my past efforts. I believe that learning sound design, mixing, and mastering are indispensable steps to becoming an all-in-one producer and mixing engineer. Although there is a chronological order to learning them, there is no hierarchy of importance. Sound science and music theory are equally important, and both require time to study and absorb.