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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

#81

Post by stuntkite »

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”.

I've spent the last sixish years trying to take all the things I know that are pretty valuable and channel them into a project that is absolutely impossible to monetize. It's a meditation on death and seeing something in the world that is only mine. Just trying to create something that is a reflection of me and make it exist to make me laugh or smile when it's dope. Sometimes other people are interested. That's cool.

Part of this came out of the frustration of being a knowledge worker. I don't know how many contracts I've had to negotiate where someone is hiring me for some shit like GIS or Unity3D and they want a perpetual non-compete where I can't ever work on those things again. Like what? You came to me. If a carpenter makes you a chair you don't get to own his woodshop and it's not my fault that I found knack for computer in the 90s and now the whole world needs that shit.

For a while I'd get frustrated when I'd show people my project and they'd be like "I don't see how this can be a business." Now I kind of love it and lean in and troll the shit out of it. Also I'm getting pretty good at combining sounds, pixels, and GIS information in real time. Which no one on earth would ever pay me to do if I waited around for a paycheck to do it.

Also it's really nice prior art coverage when moving into new operations. Hunt bliss not vested shares. The more people that do that the better the world can be.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#82

Post by comboy »

slothtrop wrote: post #78
comboy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

In my opinion you do not need discipline and forcing yourself to do anything. Introspection and retrospection is enough. You want to watch something or play something? Go for it. What is the reason not to if you want to?

When you watch yourself then you notice that you seem miserable just doing A but you felt great doing B. That's enough. Now it's part of the function.

Trying to force yourself to do something is like trying to lift yourself up by your trousers.

Ultimately it's you that eventually decide that you want to do it now, the rest is some unnecessarily complex story.

You want to do things you want in life. Forcing yourself to do anything is just a story.

If you eliminate wishful thinking, then wanting some goal in the future is the same as wanting taking to take some action now that you know is necessary.

Any time I catch myself thinking that I'm doing or about to do something that I think I don't want to do, I do a bit of debugging and untangle the story in my head.

Probably not explained clear enough. But basically eliminating wishful thinking and realizing that >> I only do things I want Habits are still powerful given the above, but observing them I don't have habits which I don't want to have - I usually rather fix the story than behavior, so there's also that.

"keeping eye on the prize" and such - there is no cake (and I think that's great)

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#83

Post by slothtrop »

comboy wrote: post #82
slothtrop wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

In my opinion you do not need discipline and forcing yourself to do anything. Introspection and retrospection is enough. You want to watch something or play something? Go for it. What is the reason not to if you want to? When you watch yourself then you notice that you seem miserable just doing A but you felt great doing B. That's enough. Now it's part of the function. Trying to force yourself to do something is like…

> Trying to force yourself to do something is like trying to lift yourself up by your trousers.

Everyone who's had to practice 1000s of hours has had to have discipline.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#84

Post by comboy »

slothtrop wrote: post #83
comboy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion you do not need discipline and forcing yourself to do anything. Introspection and retrospection is enough. You want to watch something or play something? Go for it. What is the reason not to if you want to? When you watch yourself then you notice that you seem miserable just doing A but you felt great doing B. That's enough. Now it's part of the function. Trying to force yourself to do something is like…

> Trying to force yourself to do something is like trying to lift yourself up by your trousers. Everyone who's had to practice 1000s of hours has had to have discipline.

Who says you have to practice?

In the context of coding I just craved it, never needed any discipline.

With music most seem to learn like the author just wanting to create something and learning along the way rather than "now it's time for my 2 hours of ableton practice"

With instruments I think the situation is pathological. We teach everybody to learn the exact same things, scales, patterns and chords in the exact same way, and then ask them to be original. But you can just take an instrument and start making random sounds, better and better over time because there's tight feedback loop linked with your music perception. And sure, you won't be able to play what others have played - but you will be able to express yourself in an unique way.

I think most of those who did spend 1000s of hours on specific thing, did not require any discipline to do these things. They just wanted to do them. Even if they sucked at it.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#85

Post by slothtrop »

comboy wrote: post #84
slothtrop wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trying to force yourself to do something is like trying to lift yourself up by your trousers. Everyone who's had to practice 1000s of hours has had to have discipline.

Who says you have to practice? In the context of coding I just craved it, never needed any discipline. With music most seem to learn like the author just wanting to create something and learning along the way rather than "now it's time for my 2 hours of ableton practice" With instruments I think the situation is pathological. We teach everybody to learn the exact same things, scales, patterns and chords in the exact…

> I think most of those who did spend 1000s of hours on specific thing, did not require any discipline to do these things.

I think this is a complete, utter fantasy.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#86

Post by leviathant »

chris_st wrote: post #79
leviathant wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

I believe the appropriate response here is "Thanks, I hate it"

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#87

Post by logbiscuitswave »

> I’d start pieces, make reasonable progress, and then spend hours making irrelevant changes no one would notice getting more and more confused about what I was doing, and whether the piece I was working on was any good

Even the greats can succumb to this. The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson got caught in this trap when working on the band’s Smile album in 1966. He intended it to be a entire album in the modular cut/paste vein that Good Vibrations used (which was still pretty novel at the time). He spent nearly a year experimenting, tinkering, and retooling to the point of creative paralysis. Having to release something, the entire project was scrapped and the original project became something of legend among aficionados. It wasn’t actually “completed” until 2004 when Wilson was finally able to revisit the project. Funnily enough the big motivator to finish the project was a deadline — just like the article recommended. In Wilson’s case, it was a commitment to perform the material at a series of sold out live shows.

While I’m not a musician, I certainly understand the desire for some measure of perfection in my software or hardware projects — many times to the point of creative paralysis and eventual abandonment. It’s said that “shipping is a feature” and sometimes you just have to settle for “good enough” if you ever want to share your creations with others.

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#89

Post by vonseel »

chris_st wrote: post #79
leviathant wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

> 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.

The author must have misspoke there, as that's the math for a year, but it's still cool. 720000 / (365 * 24) = 82.19

Re: Things I sort of believe about making music

#90

Post by drcongo »

kcindric wrote: post #50
drcongo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one resonated hard with me too. I make music purely as a creative outlet that isn't my job, and because my job is on a laptop all day, I've deliberately chosen to produce music purely on iOS so that I can have that total context switch. I release stuff on Bandcamp, and recently on streaming services too (apart from Spotify), but I'm releasing it mostly as an ending, like waving your kid off to university or some…

Are you trying to say that working in a different OS is an enough context switch for you? I also produced a lot of music but when I switched careers and became a developer a struggle to create using a laptop and a DAW.

Yeah, absolutely. Except it's not just a different OS, it's a different physical device. My Mac only gets used for work (and playing around with music visualisation), my iPad only gets used for music, I think of it as a portable studio - the iOS music ecosystem is incredible these days.
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