"Get numb before you get good"
Sometimes you have to grind and get good enough to have fun.
Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
11–20 of 82 posts
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#12It's a strange balance.
On the one hand, if you don't start with guidance from a mentor, you'll likely hit a bunch of obstacles because you don't have the knowledge to avoid them. And it's orders of magnitude more difficult to adjust a bad habit than to not form it in the first place (at least for physical habits). So before doing the "chores" one ought to do a sanity check with a trusted mentor.
On the other hand, the only mentoring the Shaggs needed was about how to tune a guitar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9d4ESlpHY
If they had started with a music teacher, there is a 99.9999% chance they would have all ended up playing a tune in 4/4 in the same tempo instead of the asynchronous rhythmic cycles that they came up with.
Edit: clarification
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#13Everything 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.
> bounce often
I get it, but feel that goes against my software-engineering-make-everything-repeatable learnings
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#14Going 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”
Do you have a link to this interview, or remember where you saw it? I did some searching but couldn't find it.
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#15"Inspiration is for amateurs" - Steven Pressfield in "The War of Art"
I think he mentions something about honing your craft so you're prepared for when inspiration strikes.
I imagine it's not that different for musicians or programmers.
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#16This is how i became a programmer
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#17There are some valuable points.
The point that we can write something we don't like and then circle back around to it and decide what was good or bad about it has been incredibly fruitful. Revision is the soul of good artistic output. That's pretty key to this ability to know we can just, like, crank out a song and then tweak it till it works.
An initial quibble I have is this: once you're that engaged in productive art making, you're not "pretending" to be a "professional musician"... you are legitimately a musician with a musical practice. It's not like selling your tracks or productions changes that process... that's just what folks who do this stuff at a high level are doing.
Also, I will say that if I write a lot in a short period of time, as I do when I get motivated (usually because of entering or leaving a band) that if I am writing 20 or so songs a month, they all start to sound similar.
That can be very good, but it can also be very bad. It's been helpful to spend a lot more time revising stuff, going back and writing new things, tweaking words or passages. Someone told me today that they "write like no one will ever read it, and then revise it till you're okay with anyone reading it" and that felt helpful.
A final thought that I have is that usually what pushes me out of these productive writing seasons is that eventually I just don't have that much that I can sell. The band can only do so many songs, there isn't any real market for low end electronic, I don't think I have it in me to go on a tour of house concerts like the other folks I know seriously doing that kind of music. Etc.
And so I at some point I will go back to just woodshedding different instruments (I've been playing a lot of clarinet and trumpet lately, though I probably ought to be working on my piano skills).
Because in my experience (as limited as it has been) once you realize that you can, just, like, sit down and write as much as you feel like writing, it eventually begs the question of "why"?
I'm in a period where I am writing every day (folk and country songs, mostly) and even that enjoyable process, which borders on the expressiveness of poetry, I think will eventually peter out, as it has done off and on over the last couple of decades.
That's a just fine thing, as I need to practice my arranging chops and get more horn players into my jazz band. And spend more time marketing the bands, and all the other crap that comes along with making music as we do.
Anyhow, it was a good article, with helpful stuff. I hope that the author is able to keep up the stoke and is producing stuff they enjoy.
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#18Reading this through my own musician lens made me simultaneously glad for the author, and a bit disappointed too.
There are aspects of the post I definitely relate to, including the title itself. Although I framed the “chore” as practice and routine. Even so, most of my breakthroughs as a musician have been either aided or directly propelled by time away from the “chore” or even playing at all.
Motivation to be prolific has all but once[1] come from internal bursts of creativity, and artificially motivating that way has generally been creatively stifling. Maybe the music I could have created would eventually overcome that, but I didn’t like the feeling that I was pushing myself to create something that felt dead as soon as I’d created it. I’d rather go years without touching an instrument and feel like what happens when I find my way back has the life I’m ready to bring to it and the motivation I feel then when I do.
So my SoundCloud[2] is pretty sparse and doesn’t even include many things I’ve recorded in previous bursts. I’m certainly not a musician in the sense that I’m actively producing works for a hoped-for audience but as a person who likes to play music and sometimes record it, I’m glad the way I’ve treated music as a chore is to devote myself to the music that feels like it’s ready to come out of me rather than trying to force something out that isn’t there.
1: The exception was I decided one time to participate in the prompt (“challenge”) to record an album in one month. I actually took the “challenge” further, to record a track per day for that month. Only got 12 tracks in, but it went better than I expected.
2: Same handle as here
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#19Everything 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.
> bounce often I get it, but feel that goes against my software-engineering-make-everything-repeatable learnings
They seem like two separate things, and each will give you different characteristics.
The other thing is, for really crazy feedback and timbre manipulation ideas, there is only so far you can go before you run out of knobs to twist and CPU cycles to burn
Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”
Do you have a link to this interview, or remember where you saw it? I did some searching but couldn't find it.
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