Everyone has to start somewhere, with something, when they start making music. Me too. When I began fiddling around with this, I had no idea what would happen down the line. I just had a...feeling that I could make something. So, one day, I played around on GarageBand, which is an easy, user-friendly DAW with lots of templates, loops, and a fairly simple GUI. I put in a few notes that I had created on Google’s Bach Google Doodle, and that’s how it started.
What is music production?
Doing this – just experimenting with a Google Doodle, is how my music journey started.
Years after I first started using a DAW, I finally understood that making music on a DAW is one way of making music, and is called music production. Music production. This is a no-brainer for experienced people. But if you are literally starting from nothing, tabula rasa, you don’t even know what you don’t know. You don’t know where you fit in. I had to figure it out and had partners who helped me to understand what I eventually became. I was confused for a long time, and I assume there are other people who are in the position in which I had found myself.
If, during these years of wandering in the desert, someone asked me “What do you do?”, I could not give them an answer.
I had always thought that “production” meant the industrial production of consumer goods or materials. But, no. People who do this, are called music producers. They are different from singer-songwriters, or artists, though they made also take those roles. In the music industry, there are many different professions, roles and jobs – it’s an industry, same as manufacturing, service provision, or resource extraction – for example Mining, in which I’ve worked most of my life. But the output, or products of this industry are music recordings in the form of audio files.
the Artist
An artist, by definition in the music industry, is the person who is the songwriter and who 1) creates, 2) produces, and 3) owns the music recording or song. Ownership is where the buck stops. It means ownership of all the rights to the music recording. The artist creates, or is responsible for, the three elements that, together, make up a song: Words + Melody + Chorus. That’s the legal definition.
The artist can be responsible for the whole process from writing to publishing, or they may have a publisher who does the admin. for them. Someone can do as little as add one chord or one word to a song, and if those are in the final recording, they are co-owner and have rights to the song. I learned this by studying the most recent editions of music law handbooks, and I can recommend these because I could actually understand most of what I read and they were very useful:
Making an asset
The music recording that is produced is the so-called asset. The artist and songwriter owns the asset, unless they sign away their rights, for whatever reason. Being signed on to a record label or a publisher is a two-edged sword: on the plus side, the label or publisher professionally manages the entire production process, including publishing, registration, and promotion, leaving the artist free to compose. On the minus side, they get a cut of the income from the song, and they may own the rights to the song in perpetuity. This can become a problem. A case in point is that in 2025, Taylor Swift bought back the rights to her catalogue of her first six albums from the publisher.
A recording can be made in a real or virtual (DAW) studio (then the artist is a studio or recording artist), or from a stage performance (a performing artist) – how it gets made is immaterial except for when it comes to the copyrights. It is also immaterial whether the asset is a song performed with lyrics or an instrumental, or which genre it is in. An asset is an asset. The asset is what makes the money.
Other people who contribute to the production of an asset, whether in a contractor role or not, can be responsible for one thing or more: another songwriter (or co-writer), a performing artist, a lyricist, a top-liner, a session musician, a producer, a sound engineer, etc. The artist, though, is the primary roleplayer.
I thought, when I started out, that when people referred to the term “artist”, that they meant a visual artist, like a painter. Now I understand that in the music industry, artist refers to the creator or the music, however and with whoever they create it.
A small beginning
The first song that I, the future artist known as Cōdae, made, is called Look at the Sky. At that time, I still had a stunning amount of learning to do. I did not know what, as a potential artist and music producer, I was responsible for, in terms of components, processes, standards and outcomes. I cannot tell you how difficult it was to actually make (produce) it. I didn’t have a grasp of the technicalities. I did not know my wavs from my mp3s from my MIDIs. I was just playing, in other words, learning through trial and error, with a couple of audio clips. It gave me headaches and sleepless nights.
As “The Reverend Eli Jenkins” exclaims in Dylan Thomas’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood:
“Bach! Bach! I’m a Martyr to Music!”
– Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood
(You have to say it in a Welsh accent.) I completed the first version of this first song, on May 20, 2020, and, 14 shudderingly awful versions later, saved the final version on Feb. 19, 2021. The mixed and mastered recording was finished on Apr. 1, 2021 – almost a year after I started working on it.
Why did it take so long?
The Bach Google Doodle
I think it was a slow process because of how it began. On May 19, 2019, Google published a Doodle to celebrate J.S. Bach. It was a tiny little app that allowed anyone to type notes into 2 bars on a score sheet, for which their AI engine would create a counterpoint melody in the style of Bach. It’s still there, and you can still do it, today, using Google Chrome. (Don’t tell me you aren’t tempted!)
Millions of people put in their notes and uploaded them to the A.I. database. This was in 2019, and the start of what now is a normal thing, machine learning and A.I. I uploaded my experiments on the Google Doodle as well, when I discovered it a year after its launch. And so I found out that (ah-ah!!) this is how you can create music electronically – with a MIDI file and a DAW! (Not by playing my ancient piano and trying to record it on a cheap ‘n’ nasty mic. Do you know that piano keys do make an audible *clack* noise when you play?! Awful. I knew nothing about cleaning up audio files.)
The same SEQUENCE – a bit more work
Here is that very MIDI file: Those basic notes I you can hear again after the Intro, in the first Verse section of Look at the Sky. Amazing, isn’t it, what an A.I. can do?
But, alas, one Bach Google Doodle MIDI file does not a song make. I had to add all the other instruments, and the rest of the score for all the parts. And I had to rewrite it to fit it to a beat, and I’m afraid the Bach-like counterpoint sounded quite…off-key at times. And all that took the better part of a year.
However, I am 100% certain that there is nothing out there that sounds like this, because nobody but me could have created this particular song from that particular little MIDI file!
The long road of music proDuction
I kept going, song after song, year after year. It has been the same as learning to do a new job. Very little of what I had known in my former career was applicable to music production, other than perhaps project management and bookkeeping. But here’s the thing, if I hadn’t tried, I would not have discovered how fulfilling it is to create music.