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Mini-Tunes Music Genre

How I came up with Mini-Tunes

The world has changed a lot in recent years. There are new gadgets that simplify people's lives, robots that do the work for humans, and artificial intelligence that takes on most of the work of finding statistics, logical solutions to problems, and creating content for the customer. All of this was created because people needed it. Let's be honest, with the advent of these assistants, and people became lazy. We got bored reading long posts, and Twitter came along. We got bored watching long videos and TikTok and YouTube 'Shorts' came along. It occurred to me, why don't we create short songs for people who get bored with long music? Songs that change frequently and don't bore the listener. Music of different styles containing in itself a compressed essence of all the best that a composer could introduce into his song without repetition. I started experimenting, and I got a set of interesting short tracks which I called Mini-Tunes.

Mini-Tunes Writing Rules

To begin with, it is necessary to understand that Mini-Tunes is an Electronic genre that can contain any sub-genre or a combination of them. Tracks can contain live instruments as well, but can't be fully live. The length of a Mini-Tunes track is no less than one minute and no more than two minutes, ideally something in between these two values. The Mini-Tune starts with a cymbal crash or a hit and in rare exceptions without them. The mini-tune ends with a raiser or uplifter. It is necessary to create a kind of loop when playing it in autoplay. The song as if ending goes into itself. Above I mentioned the exception of an intro without crash; it is appropriate in the case when the song ends without raiser and can begin accordingly without crash. Since the listener can put these songs in a loop they should be unobtrusive as much as possible. This is where we get to the body of the song. Ideally, everything that composers often repeat when writing a song, such as the chorus or a hook, can be inserted only once without repeating it. So if the listener likes the song, he will repeat it, and if not, he will listen to it without obsessing and the song will not bore him with what you thought was cool. Your task is to put in a minute and a half the whole essence of your song. If your idea, for example, fits into 30 seconds, then you can drastically change the style or add a new fresh hook or chorus or solo or change the style. Above I mentioned the importance of the beginning and end of a song because when creating an album the listener may and most likely will wants to put the album in shuffle. So even if the songs have different scales, genres and speed they will seamlessly flow into each other creating the impression of one big megamix.

Quality of Mini-Tunes Tracks

Writing short songs doesn't mean that their quality should be any different from that of full-length songs. The process is the same as always, cleaning and balancing the sound, mixing and mastering. In Mini-Tunes you can use both analog and electronic instruments and sample libraries. If you don't have to worry about the quality of virtual instruments, as their developers have taken care of it, samples are often dirty and wet and need serious work on them. Just like samples, the use of live instruments needs quality analog instruments and subsequent cleaning of the samples recorded from them. Who and how to do it is not up to me, but to the composer himself. Whether he will process and improve his track himself or give this work to an audio engineer is up to the composer. Anyway, the quality of mini-tunes is the second important factor of success of this style. The listener can often not only get bored with a long and monotonous composition, but also be annoyed by the poor quality of the music, such as excessively loud treble or too loud bass or lack of de-esser on the vocals. The factor of lightness and ease depends both on the variety of hooks for a short period of time and the absence of irritating elements in the sound of the composition itself. As for video sequences for Mini-Tunes music, they can be anything. The main thing is to match the mood and quality of today's market. I can make an analogy here with shooting at bottles with a riffle, as ordinary composers do, and with a shotgun, as others like me and I do. It is easier to hit a bottle with a shotgun than with a rifle, and at the same time to hit nearby cans, and the more perfect the pellets are, the easier they will penetrate into the very essence of the target.

What Do Mini-Tunes Look Like From The Outside?

Because mini-tunes are short, your album is likely to have a lot of them, let's say thirty to forty tracks. It will be difficult for a listener to memorize such a large number of songs, especially if there are several albums and the styles within each track change frequently, as well as the genres of the songs themselves. Let's imagine that the listener adds several such albums to the playlist, turns on the shuffle button and presses play, then as a result the listener gets a kind of musical kaleidoscope which has much less chances to bore the listener. If suddenly at some point he/she liked one of the songs, he/she can press the 'loop 1' button and listen to this song several times, then turning off the loop will continue to listen to his/her playlist further. In fact, playing such albums or playlists with mini-tunes is very similar to the work of a DJ, who in essence does the same thing I described above, namely trying to keep your vibe with frequent change of songs, playing them a little bit at a time, without stopping and trying to make a smooth or organic transition between them. As an example, I can name the work of Liam Howlett from The Prodigy. One of his albums is called “The Dirtchamber Sessions Volume One” in which something similar happens. The difference is that he doesn't divide his megamix into even logical segments and uses other people's music as his remixes, but the idea is very similar. Just imagine the advantages of Mini-Tunes: songs are easy to write, easy to listen to, suitable for any audience as they are not limited to a certain genre or style of music, can be appropriate as voiceovers for amateur videos and commercials. Mini-Tunes does not need to be edited for radio, and the audio files themselves are lightweight. Creating video clips for such songs is much more cheaper and the creation process is much easier. There are more opportunities to use keywords in song titles and of course the chances increase, just compare an hour long album of 10 songs and the same hour long album of forty songs. The chances of being heard increase by 400% or simply put four times! From my point of view, the style I am proposing is full of advantages and practically devoid of disadvantages. So, Mini-Tunes - “Mini” because short and “Tunes” because any genre. Friends join me, and we will create and promote this interesting style and the way to create something new in the musical industry.

Mini-Tunes Is Simple.

My name is Jon Gleur  and if you have read my Bio you will know that I am not mentally healthy. My mental abnormalities directly affect what I write, and the result is a kind of musical pun or kaleidoscope. I am not forcing or moreover advising you to copy my style literally. You probably have your own way of looking at music, and I don't want to change it or influence it in any way. There is a two-minute timeframe in which you are free to do whatever you want, because Mini-Tunes is simple and easy. If you want to create an entire album in Drum'n'Bass style, you're welcome. If you want to make a lounge or ambience album it's no problem, even if ambience means 8 minutes long tracks, you can break them into four tracks of 2 minutes each or five tracks. You may not even change their content much, but remember that the listener may simply get bored of listening to them and will skip such tracks, which will be detrimental to the rating of your band in the future. Try for a moment to imagine yourself as a listener instead of a composer. Does the listener have to hear any idea in your songs, is it important for him/her to hear the crystal clear quality of your songs or does he/she just fall for hooks and melody? Wouldn't he/she want to listen to something else after 10 minutes? Putting yourself in his/her shoes you can see that listeners are all different, with different moods and preferences, that they listen to music can drive their car, run on the treadmill in the gym and just sit on the couch drinking coffee and thinking about life. There are people who are looking for music to decorate their video clip in stories or advertisements on a social platform. In the end we make music for them and to become famous and popular we sometimes need to realize what and for whom we write music and consider our consumer. The ability to combine what others like with what we like makes our life happier and richer. The ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others and gives us the answer to the question whether the vocals in our song will be appropriate and whether we should add or exclude explicit phrases in the song, as well as where this music can be heard to. Can we listen to it in a store or in a car or at a disco club? Can children listen to it and is it music that can be of interest to the elderly? Is it important to give a song a cryptic name or to give it the name that people look for most often? Answering these questions is easier when you disassociate yourself from yourself and listen to your music as an outsider and it's really not that hard, just remember that sometimes you don't want to complicate things for other people, many people want Minitunes to be simple, because there are plenty of complexities in our lives. But in the end it's up to you to decide and that was just my friendly advice on what you might want to look out for.

by Jon Gleur

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