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Things I sort of believe about making music

johnwhiles.com

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Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#71

Post by S_A_P »

mjr00 wrote: post #17

> 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…

Very well said. I used to attach my self worth to my release and if people didn’t like it I would feel it was a personal affront. Then I realized that

1) you can’t please everyone 2) if I put in the best effort towards the finished product that I really could see that the song was simply a creative journey I went on and it may not be for everyone but it was the best I could do with that idea. 3) acknowledgment of “The Muse”. Sometimes it’s there and things just flow out like magic. It feels like you’re a vessel of the universe. That is what makes music making fun and rewarding. The end product is usually better when this is happening but not always. Sometimes, though, you have to grind out a song and every step is hard and unnatural feeling. These sorts of projects can also end up great and that too is rewarding. 4) I’ve said this on hacker news before but it bears repeating- as long as you are putting in your best effort don’t make your music so precious. It’s just a song. Non musicians will either like it or not and not really care about how you crafted the song. They don’t care that you spent 30 grand to buy a vintage Jupiter-8 for all the keyboard parts. Use the gear you have that inspires you. Make music often and finish everything you start before starting something else. Forcing yourself to finish creates a habit of focus.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#72

Post by jscheel »

bartread wrote: post #59

> At some point I became a software engineer, had more disposable income, and had discovered the concept of modular synthesisers. Obviously this is a terrible combination. Good grief but this made me laugh. I partially fell down that damn rabbit hole myself, although managed to avoid modular thus far. I decided to get back into making music during the 2020 lockdowns, spent a lot of time kitting out my office to doubl…

Are... are we brothers? I too have stayed out of the modular world, but yeah, I feel you. I started back with music production a year or so before the pandemic, but things have gotten a bit... more... since then. Sitting next to my polybrute, neutron, crave, model:cycles, mpc one, microfreak, typhon, nts-1, keystep pro and 61sl mk3, launchpad pro, 828es, and an ada8200. Not to mention all the kontakt libraries and vsts on my hard-drive. You think modular is bad, just wait until you spend 3 hours comparing the sound of a mezzoforte staccato middle C played on a trumpet in 4 different virtual instrument libraries. I've finished some tracks, but definitely not enough. I've learned to just enjoy the experience.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#73

Post by _moof »

bartread wrote: post #59

> At some point I became a software engineer, had more disposable income, and had discovered the concept of modular synthesisers. Obviously this is a terrible combination. Good grief but this made me laugh. I partially fell down that damn rabbit hole myself, although managed to avoid modular thus far. I decided to get back into making music during the 2020 lockdowns, spent a lot of time kitting out my office to doubl…

As someone who is prone to obsessing over gear I really appreciate Tom Morello's approach to it as an antidote. Way back in the '80s(?) his stuff got stolen out of his car, and since he had a gig that night he had to scramble to just get whatever shitty amp he could. He's been playing through that shitty amp ever since. His main guitar is still the Telecaster his roommate traded to him back then too. He says he used to obsess over gear and finding exactly the same tone as someone else, and then one day he just said, you know what, the tone I have is the tone I have, and I'm just going to make that mine.

All that and more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpY4IIy6b98

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#74

Post by adzm »

klodolph wrote: post #20
mjr00 wrote: post #17

> 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…

> In the music world, this manifests as a fear of releasing music and instead endlessly tweaking knobs and refining 4 bar loops; 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 wei…

I'm going to try this advice. I have a tendency to get stuck in the 4 or 8 bar loops quite often, yet in my head I don't seem to have trouble thinking about what comes next -- but once I get in the actual DAW or pick up a guitar I end up stuck in that pattern. Thanks for sharing, wish me luck ;)

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#75

Post by leviathant »

the_only_law wrote: post #30
stuntkite wrote: post #2

"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.

I’m always saddened to see a very cool project posted here only for the waves of “yeah but how does it make money”.

"You don't have to monetize your joy" - via https://repeller.com/trap-of-turning-hobbies-into-hustles/

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#76

Post by comboy »

slothtrop wrote: post #15
stuntkite wrote: post #2

"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.

I have a history of being hung up about my perceived importance about making art/entertainment in a world saturated with it. Which is kind of inconsistent given that I don't lend a greater degree of importance to most other things, but it's just the unshakable sensation that yields when I rationalize what to do. What is flipping things a little is focusing on desire for "flow", or enjoying mastery, that I do not want…

Objectively there is no rational argument you can make why colonizing other stars is better than recording sounds of farts. It all drops down to our values.

But I got hung up about that too.

My solution - as always it turns out to be a bit of this and a bit of that. It's a personal very complex function that takes into account what you know, what you believe, what you value and what you feel. Very difficult to compute. Luckily you don't need to think about it at all. Your subconscious brain is already computing it all the best it can and presents you the result in the purest form: "I want to do X now".

It's pretty amazing.

Inevitable follow up - but I don't know what I want to do - do nothing. It works.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#77

Post by leviathant »

bartread wrote: post #59

> At some point I became a software engineer, had more disposable income, and had discovered the concept of modular synthesisers. Obviously this is a terrible combination. Good grief but this made me laugh. I partially fell down that damn rabbit hole myself, although managed to avoid modular thus far. I decided to get back into making music during the 2020 lockdowns, spent a lot of time kitting out my office to doubl…

>And how many tracks have I finished since I started all this? None.

I used to give my friends grief over this!

For most of my adult life, I've been making music - starting out on trackers, joining a punk band as a drummer (who had never played drums at that point), switching up to bass, and then due to life circumstances, moving to a smaller space in the suburbs and going back to electronic music. I made a little pact to myself that I wouldn't buy new equipment unless I recorded and released music, which not only worked out well for my productivity, but kept me familiarized with why I'd bought the gear that I had in the first place, keeping new acquisitions at bay.

A buddy of mine who moved across the country has a pretty fantastic collection of music equipment, and we'd trade tracks now and then, and I'd harass him: "Have you written a single song yet, with all that gear?"

Lately, I've taken a different view though. There's probably more content uploaded to YouTube in a single day than I could watch in my lifetime. While it used to be that "releasing an album" was kind of a special event, and that there were certain pipelines that could mean your weird side project landed in the ears of millions of people, what does a 'release' even mean today?

If you find catharsis in endless noodling, or swimming in sound design, absolutely soak it up, and who cares if you never release it? There are people who spend hundreds of dollars on white noise generators because it helps them relax. When I got my first 'real' synthesizer, a Kawai K3M, I used to set the filter to sample-and-hold, run it through delay and reverb, and just let that burble on while I fell asleep. That's fine!

Swinging the pendulum back to 'finish stuff' - a big thing that helped me was joining a band. When three other people are like "shut up it's fine, hit record" and then you do it, and then people buy it and don't complain about the little things you wish you could have done better, it really helps you emerge from that weird "perfectionist" bubble that solo musicians can fall into. Define a scope, fulfill that scope, come up with some cover art (pay an artist friend, use Photoshop, pay someone on Fiverr, whatever), upload it to Bandcamp, and tell your friends.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#78

Post by slothtrop »

comboy wrote: post #76
slothtrop wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a history of being hung up about my perceived importance about making art/entertainment in a world saturated with it. Which is kind of inconsistent given that I don't lend a greater degree of importance to most other things, but it's just the unshakable sensation that yields when I rationalize what to do. What is flipping things a little is focusing on desire for "flow", or enjoying mastery, that I do not want…

Objectively there is no rational argument you can make why colonizing other stars is better than recording sounds of farts. It all drops down to our values. But I got hung up about that too. My solution - as always it turns out to be a bit of this and a bit of that. It's a personal very complex function that takes into account what you know, what you believe, what you value and what you feel. Very difficult to comput…

That seems good for tapping into desires, but may be an unreliable heuristic for long-term. In part because we are creatures of habit, and our habits can be hijacked, or plainly unhealthy. We may have several prospective or competing desires - if instant gratification is among them, that is the path of least resistance, the grooves deepen. "I want.. to sit down, eat, and watch something, and be left alone". Delayed gratification is abstracted enough that moment-to-moment desire leads you off course. If we have in us a desire for validation or high-level engagement which drives us to do something, keeping an eye on the prize may mean disposing with whatever the imminent "X" is right now.

The point of frustration is that these motivators, which drive us to try to master something, can be tepid or inconsistent and therefore insufficient. You end up needing a sense of obligation, i.e. discipline. At least for me, getting anything done means creating habits, because 'desire' is a shot in the dark. There's a quote from somewhere that power is "acting in the face of uncertainty". Desire and motivation is a murky area to me, beyond obvious things.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#79

Post by chris_st »

leviathant wrote: post #77
bartread wrote: post #59

> At some point I became a software engineer, had more disposable income, and had discovered the concept of modular synthesisers. Obviously this is a terrible combination. Good grief but this made me laugh. I partially fell down that damn rabbit hole myself, although managed to avoid modular thus far. I decided to get back into making music during the 2020 lockdowns, spent a lot of time kitting out my office to doubl…

>And how many tracks have I finished since I started all this? None. I used to give my friends grief over this! For most of my adult life, I've been making music - starting out on trackers, joining a punk band as a drummer (who had never played drums at that point), switching up to bass, and then due to life circumstances, moving to a smaller space in the suburbs and going back to electronic music. I made a little pa…

> There's probably more content uploaded to YouTube in a single day than I could watch in my lifetime.

"500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide (Tubefilter, 2019). That’s 30,000 hours of video uploaded every hour. And 720,000 hours of video uploaded every day to YouTube. Wow. To put this into perspective, it would take you close to 82 years to watch the amount of videos uploaded to YouTube in only an hour. That’s a lifetime of watching YouTube videos."

From https://www.oberlo.com/blog/youtube-statistics

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#80

Post by pards »

thisismitch wrote: post #5

I've had a similar approach to music except, instead of field recordings, I started with MIDI keyboards in the mid-90s instead. For me, it's been a fun hobby to keep my toes in music while I play software engineer most of the week. I can confirm all six of the tips in the article are correct. > Anyway, I eventually discovered a life changing life-hack which I have now used for years to force myself to finish and rele…

The Korn parody is brilliant!
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