The EP Formula - Module 1.1 [10 Steps to Creating Your First Music EP Project]

Module 1 - The 10 Step Blueprint
Welcome to Module 1 of EP Planning

Today we are going to cover all the foundational stuff that I know most musicians and producers want to skip but I don’t want you guys to skip it because in order for you guys to not only create great music. You also have to set yourself up for success.

We have to treat ourselves like professionals, even if this is a hobby for you. Respect your time by putting a plan in place to ensure you get things done but it also turns out the way you want it to sound.

Life gets busy and will constantly throw things at you, so in order for you to work we gotta plan a little bit and that’s what this entire module is all about. We are going to go over lots of helpful things that I use when me and my friends use to plan our EP.

If you love structure and discipline you’re going to love this. If you’re a typical creative and hate to be boxed in. This will be a good learning experience for you that will help you to grow a little bit.

Step 1 is what this module is all about. EP Planning
So the first step is to plan out some things like, genres of the songs you’re going to create. How many songs are gonna be on your EP? What is your budget? What are your deadlines for this project? These are things we will be going over on Step 1

Step 2 is Collaborators.
Whether you’re going to work with collaborators or not. Whether they will be remote or in-person. To what level. Thinking through and getting the collaboration arrangements in place.

Now that you’ve done some planning and you mapped out your collaboration strategy

Step 3 is Song skeletons
This is where you actually get into songwriting.
You don’t need to finish songs here necessarily.
But you want to create sparks of ideas and start to frame out the overall flow and arrangements and have loose song ideas come to life.

Again, You’re not completing the song in this step, you’re just getting some ideas out in place so we can keep the momentum going.

Step 4 is Writing Lyrics and Melodies
This step is pretty self-explanatory, Lot of times people like to start with lyrics but you will later see in the lyrics module that it is actually a really helpful trick to start with melodies and let the melodies guide you and inspire you. And not getting too caught up on what the song is going to be about, just enjoying the process of creating, and then we will go back and finalize the melody and the lyrics.

Step 5 is Producing.
What do you mean by producing? That’s such a generic term that is thrown around a lot in a creative space. In our case, it's all about really filling out our song skeletons from our previous step. It's about making the song ideas that are exciting and really adding a lot of production “candy” to make the song really come to life.

Step 6 is Mixing.
This is where you now have everything recorded and set in place, you’re no longer adding new things in this stage, you’re simply enhancing what you’ve already recorded and making them sound radio-ready.

Step 7 is Mastering
We will go in-depth about what Mastering is and even utilize some amazing cheap automated tools to really finalize your product, but this where you get your final mixes up to commercial level and get them in the right format sounding their absolute best and ready to share with the world.

Step 8 is Readying your EP
This is getting your EP ready, what does this include?
Naming your EP, sequencing the order of your songs, creating cover arts, etc. This is where all the pieces come together and starts to become a complete project.

Step 9 is Distributing Your EP
Actually putting it out there in the world, on streaming platforms, digitally, etc We will go in-depth on multiple different ways you can go about distributing your music out to the world in the later module. This is where you share your music to the world and it is actually available for consumption.

Lastly Step 10 is Promoting your EP
Probably the step where most of us are weakest in, because we are primarily creatives and we feel like we got it out there in the world, but this is one of the most important step in the process because you’ve done all this work leading up to this point, but now you need people to know about your music.

In this step, we will cover steps to promote and strategies to get your music out there and grow your fanbase.

So these are the basic roadmaps for creating your EP.

Tomorrow on Module 1.2 we will be discussing your goals and your true purpose of why you want to pursue this passion.