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I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.)
Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio.
If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surge of energy running through your bones when making the music, why would anyone else feel anything? Mixing and the music sounding "professional" is completely secondary. Even detrimental a lot of the time, to be honest.
Applies to many other things than music as well. I don't any great technology comes out and about without that loop, either.
This lines up with my own experience with writing and (more recently) blogging.
You get over the fear of writing by doing a LOT of it, until you get to a point where writing a story or blog post stops feeling "special" and becomes just another thing you do. Each individual piece of writing stops feeling like an important work of art that you must get right at any cost, and becomes more like doing the dishes or taking out the garbage.
You can then separate the act of creating from the act of curating and editing. I regularly cut thousands of words from my writing before I share in public. I regularly throw away (well, archive) fully written drafts because I don't like them. A few years ago, this would've been unimaginable. Today, it feels like part of the process.
At some point, you gain confidence that you'll always have another story, another blog post, another poem inside you. If the current thing sucks, you just write another thing, and another, and another, until something clicks. It's freeing.
IME when creative work starts feeling like "just a job" is EXACTLY when it also becomes most fulfilling and satisfying.
I’ve been a recording musician for 28 years. Making music a boring chore is not the answer. The best musicians do two things: learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity and second, understand music theory in depth for when that fails and you get stuck.
A lot of my hobbyist musician friends were way more prolific during covid. The extra time seemed to have unlocked their ability to be way more creative to de-stress. I myself had a burst of activity recording music and improving my guitar technique for a couple of years.Sadly it dipped again post covid. However, more recently I'm trying to find a middle ground with AI cutting corners with the boring repeatable stuff of audio engineering and shifting focus to the creative and the technique. Feels like things have turned the corner here and I can get a pretty professional mix out quick without sacrificing my creativity. I love that middle ground where AI is truly helping me accelerate my output as a hired gun that mixes my sound while the calluses and note selections/ arrangement are all mine.
Same boring/creative split we hit building tools for our shop. AI's great at the repetitive grunt work but the second you let it touch anything that needed a decision, output got mushy. Keeping it on comping and cleanup, not arrangement, seems like the sustainable split.
Like with so many other artistic things, people can have very different workflows. Some people need to produce a lot of material, consistently, and then filter out. Stephen King is known for having such a workflow. Others will only produce when they find the motivation, and can go for long periods without producing anything.
I’m a performer, not composer, but what OP describes is very similar to the routines performers do: technical exercises, rhythm section chores, improv, current pieces, etc. Reps are the only key.
One challenge I've always had with having many concurrent project tracks is how to name them so they are distinct in my head. I made instrumental music so there's no lyrical line to hook into. Using "created at" datestamps for filenames is not great, but neither is obscure codenames.
I also make instrumental music, and I have this same problem. What I do is: find a word or phrase that matches the rhythmic phrasing of my main melody. That becomes the working title.
An example is how Paul McCartney’s original title for “Yesterday” was “Scrambled Eggs,” since those words fit naturally over the start of the melody.
I do exactly this but with working titles from whatever I was eating or watching during that session, so "Cold Pizza" or "Rerun." Doesn't need to scan rhythmically, just needs to be dumb enough that I remember which file it is six months later.
This is totally something I ran into! I start with a simple Project 73 (increment the number always), then after I have started to get a good feeling of it, I name it something that sounds emotionally close to what the song feels like for me. I try not to overthink this part and just let it be whatever feels right.
From that point I can keep building/writing the song more, but at least now it has some identity.
Does renaming actually change anything about the song, or is it just a checkpoint that makes you feel like progress happened? I've done the same thing and I'm never sure if the identity comes from the name or just from having spent more hours on it by then.
You can follow the "correct horse battery staple" method the author referred to in the article. Another handy tool is a BIP39 seed generator (https://iancoleman.io/bip39/), but use the generated seed as a small pool of candidates that might catch your fancy. "hockey rival" or "pepper garment" or "frozen artwork" could be project names.
The joy of participating in music, to me, is one of the few domains where we can still, to an extent, hide away from the relentless enclosure and commodification of every facet of our existence in the name of capitalist value extraction. Imagining oneself as an assembly line in order to rush past the experience of the creative process and arrive as quickly as possible at a finished artifact — to me this is an act of submission. It is accepting that one's market value as a musician, as measured by the number and popularity of commodities they produce, is of vastly greater importance than the depth and quality of their musical experiences, than any joy, pleasure, satisfaction, connection, growth, expression, or catharsis they experience through their participation in music.
I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
> I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
It depends what your goal is - if your goal is to have an enjoyable hobby, then yes, it's probably missing the point.
If your goal is to have the best outputs, then that might involve a different creative process.
If your goal is to make (good amounts of) money, then the popularity of your music is actually important. Writing music that will be popular is a skill in itself, which is probably a different skill to just writing the music that you find the most joy and satisfaction in writing. Writing music that brings you joy and hoping others find the same joy in it might work, but I suspect the musicians making the most money are often working hard to write what the market wants/accepts rather than just what brings them the most joy. There will be exceptions to every rule however.
Worth separating two claims here. That structure and constraint boost creative output is well supported (Csikszentmihalyi's flow work, the general finding that unlimited freedom often stalls production). Whether that process still counts as "the point" of music-making is a values question, not an empirical one, and no amount of research settles it.
> But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
It’s perfectly fine if _your_ point in playing music is rooted in some flavor of anti-capitalism and your intrinsic joy of your creative process. _His_ point was to write an album during a sabbatical. He succeeded and then some!
Disagree that this needs the "immersed in a scene" counterpoint either. Discipline and inspiration aren't opposites, they're sequential. You grind out technique on autopilot so when the actual idea shows up you're not fumbling with the instrument to catch it.
Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio.
If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surge of energy running through your bones when making the music, why would anyone else feel anything? Mixing and the music sounding "professional" is completely secondary. Even detrimental a lot of the time, to be honest.
Applies to many other things than music as well. I don't any great technology comes out and about without that loop, either.