Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

Any advice on how to get out of that rut? I'm thinking I just need to introduce a "review" phase where I habitually go through previous stuff.

Oh... in the middle of typing this I realized a big stumbler for me!

I don't bounce my work in progress from DAW projects to audio, so there's just no avoiding opening each individual project in my DAW, waiting for it to load, hoping all the synths and samples are still installed, etc.

I think I've just convinced myself why I should have a bounced version of everything I do in a "parallel folder" so I can quickly preview stuff and only open the actual project when I want to use it.

Anyway thanks for the music production rubber duck debugging session!

In about 2003 I tried something very similar, except I time boxed a song. I had to spend an hour and a half and each song could only take 15 minutes. That ended up being incredibly fruitful.

You don't have time to think, you just go stream of consciousness through whatever comes to mind. Drums are weird? Too bad, there is no time, go with it. Throw in a 8 bar synth or piano loop. It's not good? Well, there isn't much time so on to the next thing.

This ended doing a few things for me. For one, there was no second guessing anything. You just made what you made. For two there was no pressure to do a good job. You can't do a good job you are just rushing through. That lets things just flow. Thirdly it allowed me to try a ton of things that I wouldn't normally try. There was no wrong answer. All three are kinda related.

I made some of my favorite songs that way and they are songs I still love. I later applied this to writing a technical book. I forced myself to write for 5 minutes a day, everyday. Sometimes it'd be 2 hours and other times it'd be 5 minutes but I got the book done and it became pretty popular. (also had a monetary penalty if I couldn't write on any particular day).

I really love this way of working. Just time box and go.

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?

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."

My first one was in graphic design. I've studied it in college and done it professionally for many years. At first it was fascinating and artistically fulfilling. Each new logo was a small new adventure. I've worked on them for weeks, I fought with clients to keep my ideas, It took tons of effort from me and from them to achieve something. Through the years I became so much better at logo making. It took me a week to produce a logo that I was kind of happy with. Now I can do 5 better ones just in a couple of hours. I went through the same process that the author of the article went and became an art-producing machine. But at the same time I burned out and lost the love for my artworks. They lost their story and meaning. They were not special anymore. I remember the projects I've worked on in the first months of my career, but it's hard to remember what I've worked on last month. My hands are having fun doing what they know, but the artistic soul feels empty and unfulfilled.

At some point of burning out on graphic design I've picked up music. Started singing, learning instruments from scratch, writing simple stuff. Five years later, I have about 10-15 songs that I am really happy with. I don't have children, but those songs are the most similar that I've experienced to fatherhood. I am so proud of them. They don't feel like mine, or even like a part of me, but I love them and am happy that I did what was needed for them to exist.

My musical life is an absolute struggle. It was so hard starting learning music in my 20s from scratch. It was hard picking up each instrument, hard to perform before people. Each song takes me months of stressful rewriting. I still haven't recorded most of my stuff and am sticking to live performance for now. Of course I spend most of my practice time thinking of how I can improve this process, get better, more efficient. I love my songs and I want to be able to create much more of them and much faster.

But at the same moment, do I?

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

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

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.

- Select a topic / part to write about

- Write for half an hour without worrying about quality

- Analyzing my writing and summarizing the main points

- Making the text more understandable by reorganizing the thoughts

- Text editing

My productivity has increased following a chore.

The group that made one piece a day over 3 months allegedely created much higher quality pottery than the group that tried to perfect one piece of pottery over 3 months.

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.

Music is a universal language we all can speak, we have to understand how to listen to the muse and translate, like any language, but it's there.

Working on the grammar, lexicon, syntax, and then building interesting vocabulatory repertoire is the "work," but it's hardly work if your only goal is to make something that moves the audience.

I recommend anyone with any passing interest in music or musicianship read Victor Wooten's "The Music Lesson." It's short, but an absolutely beautiful expression of what music is - and why it's more about community and communication and connection than anything else we (humans) have - music and fire are the foundations of humanity.

Sometimes you have to grind and get good enough to have fun.

> I don't worry about inspiration or anything like that.... later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write."

Many non-musicians are surprised by this, expecting that the finished product to emerge as a result of talent and inspiration. Several years ago I was involved in preparations to host a well-known international artist whose name you would recognize immediately. We were told to block four to six hours per day for her practice time.

The creative process itself must be similar. There’s a quote from Chuck Close, the painter. “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”

What’s equally mysterious is that in this work, a dialect is in play. It is at the same time a chore and all-consuming & gratifying in a “flow” sense. Rarely is it fun.

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.

This is unsettling as a SWE trying to break into the music industry as a hobby. You didn't really go into this; is there something in particular that was boring other than the routine?

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