How long do you spend on a track??

[ForWerd]

I find myself piling on the tracks, then taking away. Sometimes my main melody that I start with doesn't even make it in the track

[Dayl]

Like most of these BS artists that say they write in a track in 20mins, I'll have the idea down, melody, basic structure and beat then come back another time and spend anything from a few hours to a month or so of revisiting.. it doesn't matter.

Mr Luger himself has admitted that he puts his idea down in 10-20 min and comes back later to finish over the course of apprx 4 hours.

[Keyflo]

I spent a week on this one track i am working on now! I never believed in a 10 minute track.

[madehumble]

Honestly, it depends. I have done some tracks in a few hours and others have taken several days. On the average I will say that a day or two is my usual time. Only because I want to connect with the track and also look for ways to make it better.

[Stackx]

I mean are we talking about full tracks here or just beats? I'm sure a basic beat can be thrown down in 30 min or less. But it won't be finished or perfected. It doesn't really matter though because if your adding vocals to it and talking about perfecting the track and mixing and mastering there's no way that's possible in less then 4 hours all together. I can easily spend a week on one of my own personal tracks. If I was in a rush though I'm pretty sure I can crack one out in 2 days.

[beat you down]

if it doesn't happen the first 10 min. it's not a good day for beat making in my case.

the initial idea that is.

finishing a track... now that's more like never.

[BezowinZ]

Days, weeks... I have tracks years old that are still at the idea stage. Being more of a song writer & producer, and a sub par musician, most of my time is spent teaching myself & practicing bass, guitar & keyboard parts. It takes time to make it sound like I know what I'm doing.

Once, I did a track for a dude that needed it the next night for a show. I put in 10 or so hours with a couple of short breaks in between. I had to do a mix & a "get it loud" master in that 10 hours also. With the time constraint, I kept it very simple. In retrospect, it was one of my better tracks at the time, at least from a straight up hip hop perspective.

[Balalaikka]

I don't know exactly how long it takes, but I'm guessing about 30 hours. That's composing, writing lyrics, recording vox, mixing and mastering. Usually I make a demo recording and then after I've listened to the song for a while I might make changes to the lyrics and the beat and record everything again.

Once me and my partner in rhyme were hired to make a song for a seminar. We got the material the night before (8pm) and we were supposed to perform the song next morning 9am. Now, I could've made the beat earlier, but I just wasn't inspired I guess. I tried a couple of melodies and then decided to construct the beat around this piano arpeggio. Even before I had added the drums my friend already had written the top line melody and lyrics for the chorus. We recorded that over the drums and piano and then I added strings, brass and the bass. He had already started to write his verse and I wrote mine. At this point it was probably pass midnight and I started to have a migraine. I just had to force myself to record the verse in like a 15 minutes. Then I mixed and mastered to whole thing. We were finished 02:30am and performed the song the next morning (we just played it and performed another song live). So it took us about 6 hours from start to finish. The record was so good that we decided put in our next album. The mix was very good too even though I had migraine and had fatigue. There were only small things I had to fine tune.

[TYPHY]

when a beat makes it to my soundcloud, it never gets revisited lol.
the quickest a beat has made it to my soundcloud is 1 day, that included mixing as well.

it was actually yesterday lol.

usually it takes me 2-3 days for a beat to be completed, mixing and all.

[Classicbeats101]

Ill lay the foundation down within a hour or so. I then take a break because you never wanna get caught in the moment only to realize your beat actually sounds like crap. Ill go back to revise it and have the whole format laid out chorus verse bridge etc. As far as completion I never feel its complete until we go in the studio add vocals and mix/master it. Once thats done then I feel the satisfaction of the concept being done completely.

[Jay-]

id have to think that most hip hop and pop songs were done in 10 min or less.
Sounds like hell to me, sounds like a guy twiddeling a tonkia piano with beats and rapping over it.

shit.

[CJ Mastering]

It depends on how many tracks are in that song. If the song has 50 tracks in it, then it can take a whole work day to mix it
A song that has 8 tracks in it can take anywhere form 30 minutes to an hour.

It all just depends on what that song has

[Mr. Tom]

3 hours per track

[Realigion]

As rapper, I don't have the patience to go through a sound kit, so when I explore my production concepts it's in a different sense then the normal role that come to mind when thinking of a producer. I have a lack of technical proficiency in the technical side of things so when I'm in the studio or communicating with producers I'm able to lay out a road map of the sound I want to bring to life track by track.

[3rd Degree]

It depends on if I am sampling. Just listening to records could add 5 minutes to 5 hours per track. Usually 30 min to 2 hours.

Now, after that stage, or if I am composing, if I don't have something I am really feeling in 5-20 minutes, it's not worth finishing. I would say at that point, contextually it's anywhere from 80-99% done. Meaning, anything else I do only has a very minor impact on the track.

It may take anywhere from 1-3 hours to fill in the blanks the average listener could care less about. But, I find the extra 1-20% to is very important to me and their is no reason to skip it. Then you have things like drum change ups, drop outs, etc, which may get totally redone later.


I then spend at least an hour getting things to sound the way I want, usually experimenting/tweeking more than I need to but it's all part of it. This isn't even mixing, it's just processing.

Now add about an hour to mix.



The reality is, it really only takes a short time to make a beat. If I had someone else mixing things, and they knew what I liked, I could skip the mixing stage but also the processing stage. If I was going to sit in on mixing, or again, have a mixing engineer who knew what to do, I wouldn't take the time to drop out elements, which can be pretty time consuming. Basically, I could cut out 3-4 hours if that work ended up in another persons hands which would bring me in the 30 minute to 1 hour range.


That said, the last thing I pride myself on is being quick. I really take time to never question if I like something, so that 20 minutes that is most of a beat is not saved if it's wack. Taking anywhere from 4-8 hours on a beat improved my consistency tremendously over the last 5-6 years. More importantly, it saves me time in the long run because I don't make 6 beats a day anymore that don't go anywhere. I make as little as 3-4 a month sometimes when it's busy but often all of those go somewhere.

[Ward Boss]

Right now, I'm taking forever. I'm coming back to making beats after a few years off. I've spent a lot of time listening to my beats from 5-10-12 years ago, that I did fairly quickly. And I realize some of the beats were hot and the ideas were good, but it was pretty much amateur hour.

Now I'm trying bring a higher quality standard to my game, since the expectations today are higher, and mine are too. On the beats I've done lately that are going somewhere, I'd say I've easily spent 10-15 hours each, playing and recording drums, building drum beats, playing instruments and coming up with ideas, deciding what to keep/not to keep, turning that into a coherent structure that someone could rhyme over or sing a song to. Plus, I'm trying to learn mixing on a higher level, so a lot of time is spent there listening and revising.

Although it's time consuming, I feel good that each new version of a beat gets better and each new mix sounds better. When I was younger I didn't hang in there long enough to make my music better.

On the other hand, when I get a song idea and get inspired and work hard to realize that, it usually sucks for one reason or another. Usually the stuff that seems shallow at first and comes together quickly ends up being the best. Go figure.