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"Making your own work is a good thing to do, even if no one else is interested in what you are making. To create is to be human." Tattoo that on my forehead backwards.
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It's also good to build a body of work. It creates more opportunities for discovery and it is a fun way to look back on your own journey and have a sense of accomplishment.
"Making your own work is a good thing to do, even if no one else is interested in what you are making. To create is to be human." Tattoo that on my forehead backwards.
"Making your own work is a good thing to do, even if no one else is interested in what you are making. To create is to be human." Tattoo that on my forehead backwards.
One important skill I've found necessary in both music and my software career is dissociation. By that, I mean the ability to separate yourself from the work that you've created. It's natural to feel that what you have made is a reflection of yourself and your value, but it also leads to a lot of fear. In the music world, this manifests as a fear of releasing music and instead endlessly tweaking knobs and refining 4 bar loops; in the software world, I see it manifest in the form of not making difficult decisions out of fear of taking responsibility, due to the fear of failure of those decisions reflecting on you personally.
In leadership training sessions I've taken at Amazon and elsewhere, this attempts to get addressed by some bs "vulnerability" segment where the facilitator asks you to share something about your childhood that was difficult, or a time when you made a mistake in your life, something like that. Personally I just make something up or say something really generic here, which I assume many others do as well. I feel like a much more effective way to train this "dissociation" skill would be something like the Christmas Music approach. Music and art are deeply personal works; sharing something you've created to the world and getting sometimes harsh feedback (or, more likely, no feedback at all!) is a far better way to learn how to be vulnerable than a carefully chosen story from your childhood that makes you look like you had it rough (but not too rough). It's also more relevant since it's about making your output vulnerable, rather than your personality.
Musically, I have a bit of a fanbase now, which I still find shocking. But still, every time I release a new song and see the initial Soundcloud plays roll in my stomach goes into knots. Why aren't they liking it? Is this song way worse than my other songs? Did I release garbage and people hate me now? It's a very tough feeling to overcome.
My friends and I have a tradition where we each write a song and then play them on News Years Eve. We usually procrastinate and do it at the last minute. There are usually some good bits and we have fun doing it. It's low pressure and the deadline forces us to finish.
For me, technology can be more distracting than beneficial. Modern DAWs have so many settings. There's always something new to try or a setting to tweak. My goal for now is to try staying focused on the composition of the piece and capturing the mood and feeling I am trying to convey. If your composition isn't solid, your track isn't going to be good no matter how much time you spend on the mixdown or getting your drum kit just so.
Easier said and done, but that's my goal!
> Christmas Music One important skill I've found necessary in both music and my software career is dissociation . By that, I mean the ability to separate yourself from the work that you've created. It's natural to feel that what you have made is a reflection of yourself and your value, but it also leads to a lot of fear. In the music world, this manifests as a fear of releasing music and instead endlessly tweaking kn…
This is pretty common, and I’d like to add that there are more reasons besides “fear” for endlessly tweaking knobs and refining four-bar loops. Fear is a good explanation, and it’s not a wrong explanation, but it’s only a part of the explanation and as I’ve gotten older I’ve placed less weight on “fear” as the explanation for these things.
“Practice makes perfect” is the old adage but “practice makes permanent” is a bit more accurate. If you practice a piece of music, but your technique is sloppy, through practice, your sloppy technique becomes more habitual and permanent. The same thing happens with songwriting and composition—you work on a four-bar section of a song for too long and that four-bar section becomes permanently engraved in your mind as the only section of that song, a single section that loops forever. At this point it’s not a question of whether you are scared to release music or whether you feel vulnerable. Your mind has simply worn ruts into the ground that pass through these four bars over and over again.
This is one of the many places you can get stuck in when writing music and it’s one of the more common. There are plenty of people who never even make it to the four-bar loop, just noodling on guitar over and over again against some backing track. There are plenty of people who don’t even make it to noodling, and just play scales or licks that they know, never making the jump from playing something they know to making something new. And then there are people who get stuck playing scales or chords in isolation, without even a backing track, because they spent so long playing without a metronome or backing track that their timing is just complete garbage.
There’s a technique to bust past the four-bar loop, however. What you do is you just bust past the four-bar loop immediately, as soon as you’ve written it. Don’t give in to the temptation to listen to it over and over again. You might think that if you listen to those four bars you might be able to hear what comes next in your mind, but in fact, the more you listen to those four bars repeating, the more your brain gets used to the idea that after you hear those four bars, you hear the same four bars again.
In short, what you have to do is write a B section to your A section as soon as possible and before you spend too much time listening to the A section. When possible, I recommend writing your B section before you listen to the A section even once. At least, I recommend that you try working that way. There will be problems with the A section that you want to go back and fix but you can do that later.
And once you get past the four-bar loop, there are other places to get stuck. Just like it is possible to tweak the four-bar loop over and over again, it’s possible to tweak the chorus, verse, bridge, intro, or any other part of a song over and over again. You can end up rewriting lyrics, adding and removing instruments, completely redoing the arrangements, etc. “Fear” is a workable explanation for why these songs don’t get released, but the fact is, you hear your own song often enough and you just have no idea what parts of it are any good. You have to move fast enough to keep a fresh perspective, but slow enough to work out the details of your song, and that’s a delicate balance.