Bald Villain just dropped two new tracks today, and they couldn’t be more radically different from each other.

Per Ennio is a tribute to the maestro, Ennio Morricone. It’s in the style of his spaghetti western scores, with a boom-bap touch. You can find it at the Southbound Tracks storefront, as well as the Villain’s Soundcloud and YouTube.

Fascinated is a cover of the freestyle classic by Company B. This instrumental version ventures into happy hardcore territory, and is probably the most “EDM” thing we’ve put out thus far. Freestyle was some of the Villain’s first dance music, so the chance to go back and play around in this beautiful genre was a privilege.

You want goals, boss? Bald Villain is about to be a lot more prolific. Stick around.

The best music students are eager to know more from the start. They learn simple scales, easy chords, familiar melodies. Eventually they're on to rudimentary arrangements of their own. (The punk years.) If they're good, they keep learning, get better, and know when to change.

Some musicians and producers miss that last part. We are, after all, creatures of habit. If one method works, why bother learning? (The new wave years.) While a young producer should always be on the hunt for more professional tools and methods, old heads owe it to themselves to try new things. This space is for learners old and new.

Think of your earliest experiences as a musician, producer, or artist. Maybe you sang in school choir, took piano lessons, or read a lot of lyrics as a kid. Somehow, you got your hands on a device, a means of recording your musical acumen, if not your full potential. What was it? If you're my age, it was a tape recorder. If you're a little younger, you probably had a desktop computer in the house, maybe a camcorder or two. Younger still and you had access to phones and tablets. What's the first thing you did with that device? In my case, I had to be reprimanded early on for recording household conversations without obtaining my subjects' permission. My parents called me a little Nixon, a cruel insult at the time. I later used the recorder for more noble means, such as making an audio bootleg of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

What were your best projects, made with your earliest tools? What tricks did you learn when you were at your most creative? How long did it take you to get in the zone? How long until you got tired? How good did you get until you switched to your next method? What was that method?

Did you get better?

Most artists will say yes. They're probably right. If you start as a punk rock guitarist, you might get pretty good when you start incorporating blues, jazz, and classical music into you repertoire. The same can be said for making the switch from paint to sculpture, audio to video, analog to digital. We take what we know about one method and apply it to the next. The result, hopefully, is better art.

As an exercise, map your progression, from year to year if you can, as an artist. Conjure up sense memories of methods, styles, tricks, and anything else you want to add. Throw everything in there: student films, childhood music recitals, whatever you can think of.

Everyone is an amateur at something. Chances are, you've had the passion to become a professional more than a few times.

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I'll give this a shot.

My earliest musical experiences are of my father playing guitar. He'd play his acoustic around the house a lot, and had the loudest band I've ever heard. We would barbecue and my they would jam. I first heard a lot of seventies rock classics as cover tunes my dad played. ZZ Top, Foghat, and Lynyrd Skynyrd never sounded as heavy.

Around that time, my parents got me a Fisher Price tape recorder. After I got away from surveillance and copyright infringement, I began to imitate some of the sounds, music and voices from my read-along tapes and records, as well as things I heard on TV. Within a few years, I graduated to an Emerson tape recorder, a sleek, silver machine that ate batteries like Andre the Giant drank beer. It was the first recorder I used as an instrument, manipulating buttons in ways meant to elicit strange effects.

The pause button was the most useful tool. Every time I played my recordings back, I'd notice a slight chirp at the end of each take. This was where I had hit the pause button, which would briefly change the speed of the tape right before stopping. I soon noticed that if you held the pause button halfway down while playing a tape, it would speed things up, chipmunking the sound. I then learned that if I recorded my voice this way, I would get strange results upon playback, usually a long, slow, slurring sound like monsters in cartoons. I wasn’t making movies, but I had inadvertently discovered slow motion.

More importantly, I had learned a lesson: experimentation is key. You must break rules from time to time.

By my tenth birthday, I was making mix tapes, pause tapes meant to emulate the megamixes they played on radio and at dances, and recording songs and comedy bits with friends and family. The result was a series of recordings that, while crude, gave me a sense of rhythm and timing. Like a good music lesson, it taught me to listen.

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You get the idea. Think about how you first learned to do this. Try to recapture that feeling. See where else it takes you.