No further need to learn to play like these crazy guys: https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=973
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.
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.
In the end, whatever works for you.
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.
This is all pretty vibe-y but I think that might be what the post’s author found the ability to do and is trying to teach? TFA links to this other post in a similar vein: https://commoncog.com/get-numb-get-good/
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.
For me, I'm much better at getting bike rides and runs in if I'm training for something, so I "have to" do my saturday long run. Others would do this "fun" (hobby) stuff without prompting but have a very hard time doing their chores.
As a piano player who's been noodling around for a few years, trying to learn to write original stuff and not making much progress, something like this is probably what I need.
> Routines might be a better name, but I like how action-oriented and well defined "chore" sounds.
The article's use of "boring" is somewhat misleading too, I think. It's trendy to say that being bored is good, but really that's always about enjoying patience, not about experiencing drudgery and having a miserable time.
The author does mention that part of the process is collaboration with other musicians. It seems by setting their "chores" they are increasing their immersion.
There have been thousands if not hundreds of thousands of albums released under contract that the artists were not really into, yet listeners discovered them and were incredibly engaged with.
I'm thinking right now of the endless list of utterly mid jazz fusion albums (eg. on Columbia Records) that came out in the 78-88 period. Retrospectively the artists have said they hated the music, hated making it and didn't like the results, but there were plenty of people who loved it. I am sure there are other blobs like this. Now, the artists might be lying, or might have forgotten how they felt about it at the time, but that's what they say ...
So yeah, you don't need a "surge energy running through your bones". Sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn't.
From that point I can keep building/writing the song more, but at least now it has some identity.
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!
Come think it, I feel that I have on the other side of this many times: I read a post or watch a video that opens up something in my brain and I get a sort of crush on the author. I read everything they write or watch all their videos. For some authors, I retain interest. But for others, where it seems like they produce regularly in order to maintain the frequency, I lose interest.
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.
do you tell it "make the bass louder", or does it actually listen to the audio and goes "hmm, too much highs on the pad, let me turn them down a bit"
The big thing there is, that he already was a professional musician and completely inside a creative scene before leaving for the cabin. (DeYarmond Edison was the band he was in before Bon Iver.)
But yes, things were going way sideways for him, liver issues with mono, so he went to process whatever was going on and had been going on in complete isolation. (Although for the next album, he actually set up a whole "creative commune", a new band around Bon Iver instead of it being just himself, and so on. And I think you can hear the colors he wanted back in the music from it directly.)
A lot of examples of artists going into bouts of isolation, but almost always coming into it from an intense experience. So, the two don't have to be day to day intertwined, although for Techno specifically it's usually the case.
That's where the editing and curation step comes in, at least for me. I write a lot more than I publish. If my writing:publishing ratio ever became 1:1, I'll stop publishing things that are interesting and insightful (well, interesting and insightful to me personally; other people might judge my writing differently).
Sometimes what works for me is to write something and let it sit in my drafts for a few days. Then if I read it back and still find it worth sharing, I polish it and hit the publish button. If not, it goes into a folder called "Retired" in my Obsidian.
My consternation comes from the fact that we seem, culturally, to have arrived at a place where we value the creation of music (or rather, musical artifacts) in the service of gaining something (fame and profit, primarily) over enjoyment of the experience of music.
06 Jul, 2022
In the summer of 2020, I took a 3 months sabbatical in order to finish an album. The experience deeply transformed how I make music – I now know I can make as many albums as I want without even needing to take time off work.
I had been making music since 2005, but never released anything besides a first album, a charming work of youthful innocence and ignorance.
Up until that first COVID summer of 2020, I had finished two dozen songs, some better some worse, none great. Making a song always felt like a special accomplishment: something that would only happen if the stars aligned, not something repeatable; certainly not repeatable enough to put together 10 cohesive songs for an album.
In the first two months of my sabbatical, I managed to put together a around 10 songs and improve my technique, by sheer virtue of having 10 hours a day to focus and watch tutorials.
The real change however was turning music making from a hit or miss hobby into a repeatable, boring, "professional" routine.
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.
I had found a couple of small online techno producer communities – in those early COVID days, everybody was online all the time, bored at home, anxiously living through the summer by fully engaging into their hobbies. Collaborating was just the easiest thing to do.
One song in progress turned into 5, which quickly turned into 10 collaborations, then 15. Every morning jam would sprout 10 viable loops; mixdowns had to be ready by the afternoon because people were waiting for them; my inbox would have 3 new sketches and requests. Music making started to crystallize into little "chores":
I call these tasks chores because there is really nothing special about them: they are fairly mechanical. Routines might be a better name, but I like how action-oriented and well defined "chore" sounds.
Sometimes, good things would happen; sometimes, mediocre things would. Most often, it was impossible to judge the quality of the session in the immediate aftermath.
The only important thing was: put in the hours, switch when a task becomes stale and frustrating, and always (always!) file away the results so that they can be quickly recalled later. If no task is appealing, take a break and go for a bike ride.
Soon thereafter, I was starting to finish 1, then 2, then 3 songs a day, without even noticing it. Everything was just a sequence of sessions that were all similar to previous sessions. Many of those songs never made it beyond being called "jam a02 idea 5" (I switched to a correct horse battery staple naming scheme when it became impossible to sort out which of the 200 "techno jam 0x" tracks was the right one).
How musically valuable a certain idea was only became apparent over time, and in context. Ideas that the brain had forgotten about, especially when they were drowned in a sheer ocean of material, could easily be discarded or drastically edited. There was no emotion attached to them anymore: they were just one file amongst many others.
I knew that even if something wasn't good enough, I could just put in the hours and come up with new material. It wasn't a matter of inspiration or luck or serendipity anymore.
I learned that there is no correlation (or indeed, if there is, it is a negative correlation) between how satisfying a session felt and how interesting the resulting material was. Some of my now favourite music came from the most frustrating sessions. Only rarely did the stars align, where a bomb track comes together in one magical session.
In that last month of sabbatical, I finished 40 tracks. Of those, I released 4 as my first EP. I went back to work, but I was able to release many more over the following year.
The reason I was able to etch these steps into my brain was the sheer quantity of work I did. You have to get numb before you get good. There was so much material, so much to be done that there was no choice but to get systematic and bureaucratic about it.
Had I continued to make a song here and there, over the weekend, I would have never discovered that making music is boring – I had to pretend being a working musician to get to that point. I had to fake it to make it.
And while creating tracks is just a chore now, I couldn't be happier: the labor is quickly forgotten, but the music stays forever.
How often do you listen to a song and think of these stories in your head? When you listen to the Beatles are you seeing Paul McCartney singing? I think for many people the answer is yes. These things (the story and the music itself) become connected and the story provides the context within which many people enjoy the music.
I'll admit this is a bit disappointing. I'd like to think that any piece could stand up on its on merits without some lore being required to appreciate it. But I have relented to the idea that this is just a very human thing. We do it with everything as it's just the way most of us are wired.
It seems like the majority of music I listen to has no lore attached to it.