[HN Gopher] Things I sort of believe about making music
___________________________________________________________________
Things I sort of believe about making music
Author : jwhiles
Score : 180 points
Date : 2022-04-25 18:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.johnwhiles.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.johnwhiles.com)
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| As a hobby composer, my takeaways have been very similar.
| Inspiration can be sudden and fleeting. If I don't finish
| something in a short period of time, I loose the feeling and
| impetus for what I was writing. I've started an order of
| magnitude more tracks than I've finished.
|
| 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!
| kcindric wrote:
| Great post! Nowadays I struggle a lot with creating music. I
| mostly WFH and most of my job equipment (laptop + monitor) and my
| music equipment (guitars, synths, pedals etc.) with my music
| recording equipment (laptop + monitor) is in the same room. I
| don't have the luxury of another hobby only room so I mostly
| finish my day job and never return into my office until the next
| work day starts.
|
| Also there's the recording medium problem, which is the same as
| my work medium - a laptop. I would love to hear some suggestions
| how to turn this around.
| kamranjon wrote:
| I just recently purchased a Tascam DP-008EX which is a small,
| portable (even runs on batteries), 8 track recorder that is
| entirely self contained. I love it. I want to completely remove
| the computer from my music process because I find it
| distracting. This is a great way to do it which harkens back a
| bit to the older 4 or 8 track cassette recorders but this has
| some nice built in stuff like phantom power, reverb knobs on
| every track, etc.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| > Also there's the recording medium problem, which is the same
| as my work medium - a laptop. I would love to hear some
| suggestions how to turn this around.
|
| I've been thinking about this a lot lately. work is on the work
| laptop on the couch, personal is on the personal laptop on the
| couch. desk goes mostly unused at the moment, but music gear is
| surrounding the desk.
|
| here's my current line of thinking:
|
| * work on work laptop on the couch
|
| * personal laptop moves to desk, where monitors and music gear
| live
|
| * personal couch work gets moved to iPad Pro to be purchased,
| so different form factor
|
| I think I'm stuck on the iPad Pro right now, because FOMO in 5
| months, but otherwise I think I have my next steps figured out.
| stuntkite wrote:
| "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.
| slothtrop wrote:
| 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 solely tied to
| my vocation. I also have a separate but similar itch, which is
| to work with my hands with no cognitive overhead. I don't feel
| an obligation to create (to "be human", for pride, validation,
| etc) nor am I particularly creative. However, my sense is it
| can satisfy wants where passive consumption falls short.
| Probably I could be just as satisfied if I obsessed over a
| sport.
| comboy wrote:
| 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.
| slothtrop wrote:
| 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.
| smitty1e wrote:
| I just had a big project land with a dull thud.
|
| It felt great though; the learning along the way was
| invaluable.
|
| Principle: be patient with yourself on this heuristic journey
| and keep improving.
| YPCrumble wrote:
| What was the project?
| smitty1e wrote:
| It is a precursor to my PhD proposal. With massively
| overlapping vector shapes I want to analyze, making a "faux
| raster" index of boxes contained in the shapes seems a good
| approach.
|
| Except that I wound up discovering an improvement for my
| immediate question that obviated all of the intermediate
| schema I'd build up.
|
| Big shout out to Spatialite (https://www.gaia-gis.it/) and
| GeoAlchemy-2
| (https://geoalchemy-2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).
| brk wrote:
| I've been wanting to explore doing tattoos to express my
| creativity, if you're ever in the Tampa area, stop by and I'll
| take you up on that!
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yup. This is so hard to internalize. And to keep fresh in ones
| mind after extended periods of time with no external
| gratification. I stopped making a lot of art in the past
| because I felt like It was just for me and that wasnt enough.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I'm always saddened to see a very cool project posted here only
| for the waves of "yeah but how does it make money".
| leviathant wrote:
| "You don't have to monetize your joy" - via
| https://repeller.com/trap-of-turning-hobbies-into-hustles/
| stuntkite wrote:
| 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.
| drcongo wrote:
| 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 something -
| I'm not releasing it for anyone else. However, having said all
| that, I get enormous joy from hearing one of my tracks being
| played by a DJ I've never met on the other side of the world.
| kcindric wrote:
| 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.
| tgv wrote:
| I had experienced the modular trap with sample libraries. I've
| got a bunch, and they're really good, but setting things up and
| adding modulation tracks and getting the reverb right and all
| that, and then getting the mix to sound really good is so
| frustrating...
| 58x14 wrote:
| Here's where I'm at in my musical endeavors:
|
| - I have world-class equipment (a Nord Stage 3 among other
| things) that has radically changed my perception of sound, which
| is both a good and a bad thing. The positive is I'm becoming much
| more precise and subtle, and the negative is I'm often distracted
| by the new depth of sound and technology
|
| - I'm aware of when I feel inclined to practice, when I feel
| inclined to compose, and when I feel inclined to improv and have
| fun
|
| - I crave novelty and variety more than consistency
|
| As a result, my current strategy is to build a library of simple
| patterns, like a chord progression, a melody, a beat, a specific
| sound.
|
| When I feel inclined to practice, I'll choose a key and find a
| pattern to repeat and explore. Maybe I'll change the sound or the
| tempo, and explore that pattern. Maybe I add a layer, which
| branches into its own pattern. I also do this with lyrics.
|
| Over time, I expect that many of these patterns will converge
| into actual tracks. It's happening already - I'll combine some
| lyrics with a melody and a beat and suddenly I'm inspired to
| create more layers.
|
| I'm in no rush to produce or publish anything; I have only a
| handful of hours a week set aside for music. But I know those
| hours are well spent, and in the future, I know I will continue
| to grow and develop as a musician and a writer. At that point
| I'll certainly experience the inevitable loop of "is this good
| enough to publish?"
|
| And once I reach that point I suppose I'll release a Christmas
| song and probably call it "my antithesis."
| mjr00 wrote:
| > 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 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.
| klodolph wrote:
| > 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 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.
| adzm wrote:
| 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 ;)
| mjr00 wrote:
| Absolutely, there are different reasons for it. Maybe a 4-bar
| loop is a bad example since, as you rightly point out,
| getting stuck in a loop is commonly due to lack of
| songwriting chops and is a more technical skill that needs to
| be practiced.
|
| On music production forums I frequently see people comment
| that they've been working on a track or album for _years_ ,
| they're just trying to get it _perfect_ before they finally
| release it, so they 're constantly doing tweaking to what's
| already there. That kind of behavior definitely indicates
| fear to me.
| dylan604 wrote:
| One of the things I learned from an art teacher with a PhD
| that I met without taking their classes was the hardest thing
| for an artist to learn is "when is the project done?" It's on
| the same level in software of "good enough". It might not be
| perfect (by who's definition), it might be able to be
| refactored and more elegant, but at some point it has to be
| released.
|
| In software, we have version 2.0 etc releases to keep the
| tweaking going. In music, there are remixes. In other art
| forms, the same artist can make new versions. Knowing that
| you can do that kind of reworking can help get you to
| accepting done sooner.
| munificent wrote:
| The psychology of art is fascinating because it's a mixture of
| conflicting drives.
|
| Caring about how others perceive your work helps incentivize
| you to get better and grind through all of the non-creative
| work required to get stuff in front of an audience. But it also
| creates anxiety that you'll be rejected by them.
|
| Believing in yourself and the worth of your art helps overcome
| that anxiety and allows you to make authentic work that is
| personal in ways that resonate with others instead of
| pandering. But it also risks making you oblivious to actual
| useful critical feedback and can make you inflexible and
| unpleasant to collaborate with.
|
| There is an interesting feedback loop between artist and
| audience. I think the best art comes from an artist intensely
| connecting with their own inner emotions in ways that reveal
| something meaningful and true to the audience. That level of
| vulnerability is difficult without external support, so it's
| incredibly hard to do that without an audience that it
| resonates with. It's like each artists needs to find their own
| local microclimate of the _right_ fans in order to blossom.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| > Did I release garbage and people hate me now?
|
| Isn't it easier to believe people just forgot about you?
| rocqua wrote:
| If I would choose to believe that, there would still be that
| naggling doubt at the back of my mind. That doubt, no matter
| how unreasonable I know it is, can gnaw.
| S_A_P wrote:
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> I would listen back to my recordings, trying to overdub new
| parts, feeling like I was playing pretty tight and in time. But
| when I listened back my playing would sound totally off. I was
| always miles behind the beat, sounding incredibly sloppy and
| rhythmless. For months I thought this was a deficiency in my
| playing, until eventually I discovered some latency setting, read
| about what latency was and realised what was going on. I tried my
| best to fix my latency problems, failed, put up with it for ages,
| and then eventually used my student loan to buy an audio
| interface and a shure SM57 microphone. These are two of the best
| buys I've ever made. I could suddenly record things that were
| pretty much in time, and also everything I recorded sounded way
| way better._
|
| When overdubbing you don't actually need to minimize latency: as
| long as your latency is constant, you can adjust for it. For
| example, if your end-to-end latency is 200ms you can tell your
| music program to adjust, shifting everything you record 200ms
| earlier.
| michaelgrafl wrote:
| That's playback latency. But if monitoring latency is too high,
| you get sloppy playing.
|
| That's only relevant if you monitor through your audio
| interface, of course.
|
| Also, I'm not sure if all DAWs have always compensated playback
| latency the way you describe. But I agree that it shouldn't be
| a problem in general.
| jefftk wrote:
| They'd written "feeling like I was playing pretty tight and
| in time", so it doesn't sound like they had a problem with
| monitoring latency. Probably not using any monitoring?
| thraxil wrote:
| > Also, I'm not sure if all DAWs have always compensated
| playback latency the way you describe. But I agree that it
| shouldn't be a problem in general.
|
| Ableton definitely does, and that's what they say they were
| using.
| jefftk wrote:
| My guess is their low-end usb mic did not accurately report
| its latency, and so the Ableton wasn't able to
| automatically adjust. It's still a possible to adjust
| manually, though.
| robbiex88 wrote:
| My guess is inadequate driver support for the USB mic.
| I'm running a focusrite 2i2 3rd gen, and although I have
| gripes with the drivers, the performance is miles beyond
| the default windows drivers and is fairly solid.
| klodolph wrote:
| Right now it seems like that's one of the biggest
| arguments against USB mics, if not the biggest.
| Standalone USB audio interfaces tend to have better
| drivers. AFAIK this is more relevant on Windows, just due
| to the complete shitshow that is Windows audio drivers,
| and not really relevant on Macs.
|
| Due to the various problems with USB microphones, I
| generally recommend something like a Scarlett Solo + SM57
| or SM58 as an entry point if you're buying your own gear.
| This has a price tag around US$250, once you include a
| XLR cable. Just like there's diminishing returns when you
| buy expensive interfaces/preamps/mics, there's also a
| sharp dropoff in quality and experience once you go below
| this baseline.
|
| Even though you can find cheaper microphones and cheaper
| interfaces, I haven't found any that I can reliably
| recommend.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I like the Christmas Music thing. People's expectations are
| massively lowered.
|
| With respect to putting things out there, a _very_ common
| question on Quora is "how do I protect myself from getting
| ripped off?"
|
| I always think of what a fairly well-known web personality at
| Google said to me:
|
| _The risk on the Internet is not that you 'll be ripped off.
| It's that you'll be ignored._
| threefour wrote:
| On the topic of getting things done, I've applied a bit of
| software development skills to making music. Instead of creating
| an increasingly growing body of works I focus on a smaller number
| of "products" that I improve on over time. I get some ideas that
| are my backlog and I implement them and release a new version. I
| think of it as an analog to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; one
| work that he made and just kept improving over the course of his
| lifetime.
| thisismitch wrote:
| 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 release
| music. It's called 'Christmas Music'.
|
| Funnily enough, my life-hack was 'Birthday Songs'. I would write
| 30-60 second songs, most not very good and some parodies, for my
| friends' birthdays just to keep busy musically. Eventually I
| wrote a full-length birthday song for my friend's dad's 70th
| birthday. I also wrote a Christmas song and a Thanksgiving song.
|
| > 6: 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
|
| Now I have a fancy audio interface, Universal Audio Apollo x4,
| and a small collection of high quality microphones and
| instruments. And I'm still happy recording pointless, joke songs.
|
| Example songs
|
| First birthday song: https://soundcloud.com/mitchell-anicas-
| project/easy-29
|
| Korn parody birthday song: https://soundcloud.com/mitchell-
| anicas-project/happy-birthda...
|
| Full-length birthday song: https://soundcloud.com/mitchell-
| anicas-project/ferrell-dise
|
| Thanksgiving song: https://soundcloud.com/mitchell-anicas-
| project/ooh-its-thank...
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| I laughed, well done!
| cos2pi wrote:
| Haha, thanks for sharing. Really enjoyed how you captured the
| essence of Freak on a Leash.
| pards wrote:
| The Korn parody is brilliant!
| fuckofff wrote:
| jancsika wrote:
| > For months I thought this was a deficiency in my playing, until
| eventually I discovered some latency setting, read about what
| latency was and realised what was going on.
|
| It's a good idea for anyone doing things related recording audio:
| ask someone how to measure the "round trip latency" in the
| software you're using. Ask on forums, HN, Facebook groups how to
| do it. If someone responds with simple arithmetic to calculate
| latency, or responds with the term "latency" that isn't preceded
| by the words "round trip," or does anything _other_ than tell you
| a surefire way to measure the round trip latency for that
| software: go somewhere else and ask again.
|
| This will get you a baseline _measurement_ of your system: one
| that that you can use to ask future questions and get practical
| answers.
|
| If you don't do this you'll get spammed with "help" from people
| who write before they measure.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Really like this approach.
|
| The rawness of the use of everyday sounds reminded me of Burial -
| Untrue.
| imbnwa wrote:
| That's one of the greatest albums of the 00s, should be on
| people's Top 50 if not Top 25
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Yes it's great! I do go back to it quite a bit.
| bartread wrote:
| > 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 double as a studio. Spent too much time
| watching gear reviews on YouTube, and Studio Time by Tom
| Holkenborg (Junkie XL). Bought a Polybrute, and a bunch of second
| hand kit: couple of acid boxes, an old Akai sampler (actually two
| of them from which I built a single "monster" rig), a DX7 (which
| I can confirm _is_ very hard to program, although Dexed helps), a
| couple of drum machines, and some other stuff. This is on top of
| kit I already owned.
|
| I also repainted and refloored the room, added 72 sockets, routed
| power cables around the walls, and fitted industrial cable
| conduit to route signal cables over the ceiling. I fitted floor
| to ceiling shelving around 3 sides of the room, and added guitar
| hangers to the fourth wall. I then fitted a 1200W equivalent LED
| ceiling light cluster for working, a few other LED lamps, and
| added a 57 metres (really) of coloured LED strip lighting. Bear
| in mind we're talking about a room that's 2.5m x 2.5m so it's
| possibly in the top 10 of the most excessively lit rooms in all
| of human history.
|
| And how many tracks have I finished since I started all this?
|
| None.
|
| Point 3 is, at least for me the single take home message I
| absolutely needed to read from this:
|
| > 3: You need to find ways to force yourself to finish things.
| Arbitrary deadlines are actually sometimes good.
|
| Number 6 is also an absolute gem:
|
| > 6: 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
|
| Great article.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I've struggled with releasing music for years, because the
| music, in my mind, has to be a finished product. Polished.
| Perfect. Flawless.
|
| For years I felt the same way about art too.
|
| I come from a video game background, and games have to be
| "done" before you start showing them off.
|
| Two things changed in my recent past: 1. Getting an art mentor
| who encouraged me to show off partially completed artwork,
| showing my working progress. 2. Joining a company where we
| encourage each other to show off our work that is incomplete,
| broken or "not even a functioning prototype" with no
| expectation of criticism or feedback other than an
| acknowledgement that you have progressed.
|
| And then in December of last year I resolved to release stuff,
| no matter it's state. Once a month I had to release a music
| track. And so far, I've done pretty well. I slid a little in
| March, and April came in a little later than I would have
| liked, but so far, it has been working out well for me.
|
| And yeah, number 6 is the gem. I've always held the belief "I
| create for me, even if nobody else is paying attention." So if
| I am creating for me, why do I care if it isn't ready to show
| the world? Just put it on a virtual shelf for display and be
| proud that I did _something_, _anything_.
| leviathant wrote:
| >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.
| chris_st wrote:
| > _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
| wdfx wrote:
| I sympathise but also you have to realise that setting up the
| studio itself is a creative endeavour!
|
| I didn't go as far as you but I have definitely enjoyed the
| process of setting up my musical space so that it is ready to
| go ...
|
| But there is a conscious decision to be made to stop fiddling
| with the setup and just bloody use it!
| jscheel wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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
| malthaus wrote:
| I feel you!
|
| Before lockdown i shared my home with some music gear; now I
| more or less have a bed in a music studio and my actual,
| finished musical output has approached 0.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Modular synth is a boondoggle like literally the first thing he
| warns against lol.
| tmountain wrote:
| It tows the line between tinkering satisfaction and musical
| satisfaction. It's easy to get wrapped up in the tinkering
| aspect (which can be really fun) and not create anything
| musical in the process. This is fine unless you have goals that
| come with the your hobby pointed towards releasing something--
| in which case, the tinkering part can become a time suck
| pulling you away from your objective.
| abcc8 wrote:
| One part of my personal creative process I didn't find discussed
| or mentioned in the post is about having a goal for one's
| creative endeavor. I've found the idea of sitting down to simply
| 'write a song' or 'create something' doesn't work for me. What
| does work for me is having a specific goal and working towards
| that goal. The goals don't have to be overly complex, but I need
| at least some nugget of an idea that I can consciously refer to
| during the process to keep me on track (I'm easily distracted by
| 'possibilities' and 'choices'). An example of such a goal would
| be that I wish to write a song that has a verse with a more minor
| feel, use the I-vi-IV-V progression for the bridge, make the
| chorus upbeat, have a Joy Division meets the 50s vibe, and write
| some lyrics that tells a story that starts with driving
| somewhere.
|
| This method isn't foolproof and sometimes I have ideas that don't
| work or result in bad songs, but occasionally the final product
| is good enough that I can introduce it to the band and
| incorporate the new song into our practice/performance setlist.
| Having a goal that I write down gives me an idea of what I want
| the final product to look/feel/sound like while still leaving
| room for spontaneity, as I'll edit the goal if I think of a
| better idea. A side benefit of this approach is that it makes it
| easier to communicate the gist of the song to other musicians
| when they ask what it sounds like and/or what it is about.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Cool stuff. Got about 8 months to get some Christmas tunes
| cranked out.
| fuckofff wrote:
| maydup-nem wrote:
| > If you change your processes too much it is hard to built up an
| identity other than as someone who is inconsistent.
|
| nah
|
| and why should consistency matter across songs anyway, unless you
| are writing a concept album?
| MDGeist wrote:
| Totally agree with the importance of FINISHING work and just put
| it out there! I'm always writing and recording but I have never
| put out a full release (independently) until this year. I got to
| learn all about getting physical copies made and trying to market
| them this time.
|
| 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.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| tleb_ wrote:
| That comment feels out of place; at least try to link it with
| the content posted.
| drcongo wrote:
| It also appears in every single HN thread about music.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| It's relevant.
| taylodl wrote:
| It's not at all clear that it solves the problems being
| discussed here. All we can see on the site are claims.
| Makes me 10x more productive in writing music? That's a
| bold claim to make while absolutely nothing backing it
| up. Can I import my plugins? What are you doing to aid
| with recording? Can you even record?
|
| Lots of questions.
|
| No answers.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Yes, 10x productive in writing music. Yes you can import
| plugins. You can record midi. Audio recording support
| will be added later.
|
| It's very midi writing oriented.
| matthewh806 wrote:
| Surely it's up to you now to make the case as to why it's
| relevant? A 2 two word answer just stating the opposite
| of what the previous poster said doesn't magically make
| it so...
|
| I agree with other comments here that your
| "revolutionary" music IDE gets spammed into every
| discussion related to music - but the actual website you
| link to doesn't really give any hint as to what it really
| is either, just a bunch of vague sounding marketing
| friendly hype words.
|
| I hope what you make truly is revolutionary & unique and
| I will take a look at it when it launches out of
| curiosity (so your relentlessness in plugging it has, it
| would seem, worked). But please can you explain how it is
| relevant to the article / discussion here?
| Minor49er wrote:
| The only thing that this has in common with the article
| is that it's related to music creation in some way.
| Beyond that broad scope, there really isn't much.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| That's close enough for me.
| rocketbop wrote:
| The issue is that isn't close enough for anyone else.
| homonculus1 wrote:
| The point about equipment is a really important one. A lot of
| people have a very stupid attitude that art is some kind of
| special domain where the tools don't matter--a true artist works
| beauty with whatever he has!
|
| Leave that nonsense at the door. If you were learning how to do
| landscaping, you'd buy a chainsaw, a shovel, and a blower.
| Anything less would leave you unequipped to do the job.
|
| I guess some guys have a gear fetish and can't stop from buying
| their 20th shiny guitar. Well, ignore EVERYTHING they have to say
| and get yourself the equipment you need. It can make the
| difference between waffling with no purpose and iterating
| productively.
| smrq wrote:
| Hell, if you want 20 guitars and can afford it, get 20 guitars.
| Ideally each one brings something new to the table for you. I
| had a sudden uptick in creativity immediately after buying #6.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| True up to a point. There's a difference between content and
| production values. Production values are the frame. But you
| have to put something strong in the frame, otherwise the frame
| looks empty.
|
| Give Paul McCartney a shitty USB mike and a shitty guitar and
| he'll still sound like Paul McCartney. Whatever he creates will
| be unusually musical, even if it's not polished.
|
| Give most people world class studio time with a top engineer
| and they'll produce something mediocre at best, no matter how
| how much effort goes into it.
|
| Good tools get out of the way and sound right without much
| effort, but all that really does is remove one layer of
| distraction/excuse.
|
| The gear fetish market is driven by people who are mostly just
| collectors. Some musicians are also collectors. They will buy
| special vintage guitars, synths, studio processors, and so on
| because they're useful and the sound works for them.
|
| But mostly it's middle aged middle class professionals -
| dentists, doctors, lawyers, some software developers - buying
| equipment as a hobby in itself, because buying is a lot easier
| and less stressful than creating.
| filoleg wrote:
| > But mostly it's middle aged middle class professionals -
| dentists, doctors, lawyers, some software developers - buying
| equipment as a hobby in itself, because buying is a lot
| easier and less stressful than creating.
|
| This hits a bit too close to home.
|
| I thought that it was a nice touch in Silicon Valley (the TV
| show), for their corporate lawyer to have a fancy Gibson Les
| Paul guitar (with a bunch of autographs on it) in his office
| that he touched exactly once on camera. All while having no
| amps or pedals or speakers or anything else to use it with at
| all.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>>> 3: You need to find ways to force yourself to finish things.
| Arbitrary deadlines are actually sometimes good.
|
| That's one of the joys of live performance. You show up, play,
| then it's gone forever. The other is not having to keep up with
| technology.
| bobbiechen wrote:
| Incredibly relatable on the Christmas music. I did this in 2020
| with my roommate and it really was a lot of fun - I wrote that up
| here: https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2020/12/22/the-making-of-
| christm...
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| Nice blog post, to the point.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-26 23:01 UTC)