Gender disparity is an issue that affects the entirety of the music industry. I’ve taken extensive action to fight this problem with projects like Cafemnee and Time For My Music. I’ve also sought to expand my horizons and scope of action as a female musician, which both empowers me and helps open the path for more women to follow.
One area of music creation that’s particularly afflicted by gender disparity is music production. The sixth annual report on the music industry from Stacy L- Smith and the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which studied more than one thousand songs released between 2012 and 2022, found that only 5.2% of said songs featured a female producer. They also found that only 3.4% of music producers active in 2022 were women. This speaks very negatively of the autonomy and control that female songwriters and musicians have over the creation and release of music.
Personally, I’ve wanted to improve my music production skills for a while. I have two main reasons: as a gigging musician, I want to make my own backing tracks; and as a songwriter, I want more tools and versatility in my process. Xylo Aria’s Intro to Music Production online course was perfect to achieve this.
Despite the fact that my commitments make it difficult to follow longer courses, I told myself that I couldn’t miss the opportunity. During seven weeks, I learned and/or honed a number of valuable music production skills. We had an inclusive and women-friendly Discord community to interact and evaluate our progress, and we also had three masterclasses with Xylo.
I’m now way more confident with Ableton, the software used in the course, and I can create sounding tracks digitally whenever I need them. The experience was so positive that I decided to continue learning from Xylo and enrolled into the MPW’s Master Your Music Full Year Program. I’m very excited about it, and I will definitely keep you up to date with how the experience goes.
In the meantime, have a listen of one of my original compositions, titled ‘My Love’, as I played it at my self-produced show Not Just Jazz IV in 2017.
