Prima helps you decide what your music is for and who it is for. Chronos uses music history and a thousand-song reference library to pull your ears beyond the choices your usual playlist keeps feeding you.

The sessions are for Electronic Music producers who already know how to make a track and want stronger reasons for the choices inside it.

A track can be technically correct and still feel artistically anonymous. The mix is clean, the bass is in key, and every section arrives where the genre says it should. Then you listen back and wonder why this particular song needed to exist.

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Break the rules like an artist

Theory is descriptive, not prescriptive.

It gives names to musical relationships people found useful enough to repeat. A rule usually began as a solution to a problem. Learn what problem it solved, then decide whether your song has the same problem.

Correctness has no opinion about what the track means.

Artists break rules on purpose. Children break rules from ignorance. Both can make a mess. The artist can tell you why the mess belongs in the song.

Prima starts with intent. Take a move your genre supposedly “needs,” such as the build, the snare on three, or the sixteen-bar intro. Ask what problem that convention originally solved and whether your track has the same problem. The answer gives you a reason to follow the convention or try a different move.

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Music is a drug

Describe your music like it is a drug.

What is it for? When would somebody take it? What feeling does it intensify, interrupt, or replace?

“People who like Electronic Music” gives you very little to compose for. One person in one situation gives every strange choice a job.

The track “More Tea” came from a target that sounds almost comically narrow: Electronic Music fans who take tea seriously.

Some fans traveling through Asia sent me tea from Taiwan and later arranged a Taiwan tour. During that visit, Nathan told me about the producer Alex Pang, who had spent years making field recordings throughout Taiwan. Alex gave Nathan the archive on the condition that any use would promote Taiwan and tea culture. Nathan offered me the recordings with the same deal attached.

I made percussion from teacups, used recordings from the archive, and kept the whole record pointed at tea culture. “More Tea” spread one listener at a time among people who understood both sides of it. It became my second most popular track with very little promotion.

Its narrow purpose made it easy to remember and easy to share with the exact friend who would love it.

Prima asks you to define that kind of purpose before adding more notes. During the recorded session, pause when the audience questions appear and answer them for one track of your own. Name the listener. Name the situation. Name what the music should do for them.

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Listen beyond your usual references

Listen inside a narrow slice of one genre for long enough and your ears learn the schedule. The build rises. The drums leave. The drop arrives exactly where expected.

Repeated listening trains your expectations around the same set of likely answers. Chronos gives you a much wider reference library and shows you how to use shuffle to break that sequence.

I built a reference library of roughly one thousand songs across genres, continents, and musical history. It is a library to explore over time. The course does not require a thousand-song listening marathon.

Start with one recording your normal playlist would never serve you. Notice a decision that surprises you, irritates you, or makes you curious. Turn that reaction into a question for a track you are working on.

What happens if the drums disappear at the moment you usually make them bigger? Could one voice carry the whole section? Could the sound you would normally delete become the most recognizable part?

Shuffle matters. An Industrial track can land beside Reggae. Throat singing can land beside sitar. Your ears meet the sound before your brain loads a genre recipe. Two unlikely records can suggest a relationship you would never search for on purpose. That little collision is the useful bit.

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When “wrong” becomes a new musical language

Musical ideas move through a strange cycle. Scratching sounded like abuse of the medium, became revolutionary, turned familiar, and later became material for artists to rediscover. I call that cycle the Ouroboros.

Chronos studies those breakthroughs and the assumptions they broke, so you can hear your own assumptions clearly enough to choose what stays.

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Watch Prima and Chronos

Prima and Chronos are recorded sessions inside Mastering Composition & Arrangement. Watch them at your own pace, pause when an idea connects with your work, and try it whenever you want.

lots of love,

Dylan