Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
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Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
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Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#2Practicing being creative is such an important thing for anyone who creates. It's like practicing improvising.
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#3Going through something somewhat similar, here's where I got hung up: too many ideas that had "potential". I found it really difficult to figure out where to draw the line that would keep me moving forward with material generation, as opposed to reviewing old material.
Come to think of it, I had the same problem with my Anki decks. I created too many cards and eventually fell too far behind.
It's too bad because I really enjoy recording all my rehearsals.
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#4Everything in music is essentially a remix at its core. The Noisia guys had a similar philosophy of “resample and bounce often”. Always be making bleeps and bloops, then reprocess them, then reprocess them again, as many ways as possible without turning harmonic information into noise (from a band named Noisia, ikr), until you have something that feels novel and rhythmic.
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#5Going through something somewhat similar, here's where I got hung up: too many ideas that had "potential". I found it really difficult to figure out where to draw the line that would keep me moving forward with material generation, as opposed to reviewing old material. Come to think of it, I had the same problem with my Anki decks. I created too many cards and eventually fell too far behind. It's too bad because I re…
I remember seeing a Brian Eno interview where he lambasted non-session musicians as “(every one of them) thinking that they’ve got a Darkside Of The Moon in them, but then they just go into the studio and get lost in playing with Synth patches”
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#6> In September, 2 months in, I was not only trying to make as many songs as possible, under the nagging time pressure of my sabbatical slipping away like sand; I also started working with other musicians.
The author focuses a lot on the prolific creation and "boring" routine, which I completely agree with, and I want to steal some of their routine for my own creative time.
However I think they're underselling the impact of the time pressure and the collaboration with others that keeps them accountable for actually doing the thing. Also the enormous continuous chunk of free time for this to all happen in.
I'll be very interested to know the follow up to: "I now know I can make as many albums as I want without even needing to take time off work."
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#7I also wonder if writing music was chore-like due to the genre the author chose, specifically four-on-the-floor techno music that has largely fixed and repetitive structures?
This music is meant to be mixed by DJs, after all, so consistency is really key to a lot of the techno genre. Of course, there are very creative divergences in this genre from artists such as Four Tet and Floating Points.
Would the author still have the same level of output writing songs with lyrics, where you're explaining a life-story or concept?
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#8Going through something somewhat similar, here's where I got hung up: too many ideas that had "potential". I found it really difficult to figure out where to draw the line that would keep me moving forward with material generation, as opposed to reviewing old material. Come to think of it, I had the same problem with my Anki decks. I created too many cards and eventually fell too far behind. It's too bad because I re…
I remember seeing a Brian Eno interview where he lambasted non-session musicians as “(every one of them) thinking that they’ve got a Darkside Of The Moon in them, but then they just go into the studio and get lost in playing with Synth patches”
Kind of like this recent HN post, “Fractal Tasks and the Journey through the Forest of the Infinite”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33481368
I have a lot of music gear, including one of those analog modular synthesizers that Eno mentions. It’s so easy to get lost in timbres and textures.
And then on top of that, it’s so easy to get inside of a great loop and just layer it up into a big, lush sound, but not a song.
More and more, I see the parallels between my history as a composer/audio engineer and software engineer.
After becoming an SE, I can dive into that same mode that I’m in when programming, but just building a musical composition. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
Anyway, both tasks require the skill of zooming in and out on the scope of what you’re building.
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#9This feels very similar to how Stephen King talks about writing books. He has a set number of words to hit each day and seems to hit it almost every day. Definitely a chore as opposed to a burst of creative passion at that point.
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#10I also wonder if writing music was chore-like due to the genre the author chose, specifically four-on-the-floor techno music that has largely fixed and repetitive structures? This music is meant to be mixed by DJs, after all, so consistency is really key to a lot of the techno genre. Of course, there are very creative divergences in this genre from artists such as Four Tet and Floating Points. Would the author still…
I think so, yes.
Back in college, an Anthropology professor told our class "a culture is a set of ready-made solutions to common problems". It's one of the best definitions of anything I've ever heard.
In music, I think genre is the same thing. If you sit down try to make "music", you are faced with just an astronomical number of choices to make before you get to a finished compositions. What instrumentation? Acoustic or electric? How many? What effects? Arrangement? Melody? Harmony? Lyrics or not? If so, sung or rapped? What language? What about? Are there drums? Acoustic or electronic? Sampled?
If you come at it with a total blank slate where you're equally open to creating avant garde free jazz or electric disco zydeco, you'll get so overwhelmed by the number of choices to make that you'll never finish.
So what most musicians do is pick a genre. Sure, they might stray out of it, but it at least gives them default answers for most of the high level structural questions. If you pick techno, you can start assuming there will be drums, 4/4 time, around 120-140 BPM, synths, etc.
The genre defaults for electronic music are particularly visible because they're mechanical since DJs need them for continuous mixes, but every other genre is equally formulaic in its way. Other genres with more prestige like to pretend each of their songs is a unique magical snowflake, but it's not the case. Otherwise, people wouldn't have freaked out when Bob Dylan played electric.
And, definitely, yes, when it comes to lyrics, you can absolutely pound them out. Writing is a skill like any other and it's incredibly amenable to discipline and practice. There's a reason so many successful authors have very rigid writing routines.