#34

Really nice thread with very familiar problems and directions.
I once had a conversation about this with a friend that is also artist.
He said: If I give you €10.000 tomorrow for a finished track, will it be finished?

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#35

This isn’t new, but it’s a comforting read.

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#36

Jazz musicians spend their time learning the repertoire before they start writing their own compositions. ‘Be yourself’ is good advice, but I wouldn’t worry too much about that in the beginning stages of trying to create something. Making music with electronics is exciting since there are so many possibilities, but that can feel crippling for a lot of people. Spending time to analyze and emulate what you like is a very healthy practice that leads to new ideas.

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#37

I’m 35. I started playing guitar when I was 12. On my next birthday, I will have been a songwriter for two thirds of my life. But I spent so many of those years draped in shame, guilt, self-doubt, and all the other emotions that accompany the commitment to being an artist. I know that you all know what I am talking about.

Right now, I am more artistically productive and fulfilled than I have ever been. I recorded music about 175 days this year, and practiced 5 days per week on average. I am proud of that, and not ashamed to say so. So many years have gone differently, and more than I’d care to admit flew by without a single recording. This thread is a good opportunity to think about why that is, in case it could be helpful to others. So, here we go?

  1. Sit down to write.

Stephen Pressfield said it best in The War of Art: Writing is easy—it’s sitting down to write that is the hard part.

This is so true, for me anyway. Making intentional time for music every day is so difficult. But if you’ll do this— if you’ll set aside a specific chunk of time in a consistent physical space that is consecrated to the task at hand— you almost can’t help but be productive. How many years did I waste waiting on The Muse? On “inspiration”?

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham whether he wrote every day or just when he was inspired. He replied that he only worked while inspired, but that fortunately inspiration struck him every day at nine o’clock sharp. Think about it.

Anything that you want to grow and flourish needs food, water, and love every day. Your art especially.

  1. Mind Your "In Breaths"

Others have said this, so I’ll keep it brief. Remember that you are expressing- exhaling, so to speak- when you make music. You are expending. You must also inhale. Watch movies, listen to music, go for a walk. Encounter phenomena which make you feel small. In short, expose yourself to things, situations, and people which require interpretation on your part. That is what making art is (for me); attempting to make sense of or express a reaction to the ineffable.

So breathe something in that baffles you.

  1. Don’t Quit

With art (and pretty much everything else), you can have so much success if you just show up every day and don’t quit. Ride the endless wave of elation and disappointment and joy and fear and don’t ever stop. Most people quit. Just hang in there for the long haul and you’re already most of the way there.

Look, if you only showed up for work two days a week, you’d get fired, right? Well, treat your art- your most sacred act- with at least as much respect as you give your day job.

  1. Find A Mentor

Which is to say, find someone that you want to be like and ask them to commit to a structured mentoring relationship for a set period of time. If you find an album you love, ask that person to teach you. They might say yes! Capping the commitment to a certain amount of time every week for a few months increases the likelihood in my experience. Approaching them with clear goals helps as well.

If you ask Jon Hopkins to teach you electronic music, you’re not being realistic. But if you ask him how he programmed the upper octaves on the Sub Phatty in the final two minutes of “Luminous Beings”, he very well may tell you. That’s what I mean by clear goals

  1. Decouple Creation and Judgment

There is a time to write, and a time to decide which things go in the “keeper pile” and which things were fun exercises that will remain private. They are not the same time. Write something, work on it until you feel good, then move on for a day or a week. Set a regular interval for evaluating your work. I often find that pieces I felt really great about are, when I return to them, not keepers. But also I’ll stumble upon something I don’t remember working on and hear something worth pursuing. The point is, Creator Brain and Editor Brain should not approach the same project on the same day. They are allies, but not partners, if that makes any sense.

Beware, this approach will make your art better at the expense of your personal comfort. You will leave material on the cutting room floor. Do it. Much the way that a film editor cuts shots the director and DP are personally attached to in order to make a better film, you will ditch sections, songs, entire projects, because Editor Brain is not satisfied. I could go on and on about this one, but will leave it here for now.

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#38

I love this quote and it is something I say regularly—thank you for sharing here. It was nice to hear it again.

Also @mattlowery I enjoyed your thoughts and can definitely relate to them despite being in the process of committing to them. I’ve had a similar experience this year and can definitely say that a prepared/defined place and time to work on music regularly is super beneficial for me. Our musical timelines are similar, though I’m 40 and am still very much in the developmental phase of my practice and expression.

I would share this story from life and the wisdom I was gifted in my 20’s. I was fortunate to meet in my early 20’s a talented painter in his 70’s. His name was Dick Wray and I would recommend anyone interested search his work as it’s beautiful. I will proudly brag of my friend/mentor and share that over his career he achieved quite a few things: he had a solo show at The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in the 70’s (or 80’s) and Bukowski read at the opening; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston owns some of his work and displays it occasionally; and I believe that MoMA also owns one or two of his early pieces. I share this because I think it’s awesome but also to give weight to his words.

Call it serendipity, but I met Dick through my ex-wife who met him because he was a regular at the restaurant she waited tables at. When I met him we hit it off because I was young and driven to create and communicate and had many ideas about that and he enjoyed being able to chat with someone younger. He wasn’t your typical 70 year old—we usually hung out after my shift ended at 10pm and would talk until the wee hours of the morning. On top of educating me about painting and drawing and how to view art (I’m very much an acolyte of his in that regard—his influence was strong), we spoke at length of the “work” of art. Below are the gems he shared.

“Everyone has thousands of bad paintings in them. You have to work and get them out of you. Once you start getting them out, some good ones will pop out every now and then.”

Of everything he said this has stuck with me. The truth of it is so easy to see and many here have alluded to this phenomenon: creation involves work and requires that the creator invest time in their craft.

Dick worked as a carpenter his whole life and didn’t start making real money from his paintings until his 60’s.

I know your question wasn’t related to the commerce of creation, and this fact isn’t strictly about commerce either. It highlights the fact that he painted and exhibited for 50 years before his work was in a place that he had established a voice that otgers responded to and had built a following for. This can be picked apart for many reasons (painting vs music, pre-internet days, etc.), but please don’t ignore the fact that it demonstrates a lifetime commitment to a craft.

“Everyone is so quick to share what they’ve made. Some things just need to be made and thrown away.”

Here was talking about the tendency of young artists to believe that anything and everything they created should be for the purpose of exhibition and his point was that a lot of work is strictly for the artist. The work helps the artist develop their expression.

I think those are most applicable to the conversation at hand. As I said, Dick was a mentor I stumbled upon and didn’t waste the opportunity to learn from. One more anecdote and I think it’s appropriate, but Dick was fascinated by the line. His work was a study of it and he enjoyed seeing what other artists did with it. (His favorite was Matisse, whose line he said was “confident.”) Given the name of the forum, I thought this last fact would be fun to share.

Anyway, I hope this guidance shared with me is helpful to others. Thanks to all who are sharing their thoughts here. I’m enjoying reading them. I will end my very long post with my own thought—a response to the spirit of the OP, but not necessarily a specific question.

My recent breakthrough has been to check my ego. For some stupid reason, I get so caught up in the creation of a sound that I spend more time concerning myself with how it’s made rather than how it sounds. What @makamqore shared applies to what I’m trying to communicate here. I’ve found that by checking that part of my brain that thinks that the sounds that comprise a piece should be impressive to others and instead just focusing on how something sounds frees me to create and to pursue ideas as they come unencumbered by self-judgment.

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#39

Hell yeah. Jeph Jerman made music just by rubbing rocks on the ground. And it was awesome!

His music is more about just the act of listening, or the intention and focus behind it. And certain things come out of it, like texture, its pace, etc. But a lot of his solo stuff is just exploring certain objects. So the gear truly doesn’t matter – at least I feel like he proved that to me, personally.

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#40

One thing I’ve found helpful is taking your stuff to a new place and just committing to playing for a while. Like busking somewhere outside, or any space you don’t typically visit. Just start playing and try to play for a long time, longer than you usually play.

Sometimes if I can just get it out, the form will kind of shape itself. And changing my environment can help it come out.

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#41

I split my time between two overarching creative disciplines - visual art, from which I make my living as an illustrator while also making a lot of personal work, and music, which I feel compelled to do and is important for my spiritual well-being, but which I have no aspiration to make money from. Both have their own set of mental and practical challenges.

I think for both disciplines something that is easy to overlook, especially as you get older, is simply PRACTICE. Setting aside a little time each day (perhaps early?) to explore a principle, to deepen an understanding of some small thing, to just get rolling. The warm up. I have to remind myself to do this, to draw in my sketchbook to explore my thoughts and expand my vocabulary, to test out some sound idea before applying in a context later.

My life as an illustrator comes with deadlines, which are a blessing, because the deadlines inherently override my doubts - things simply need to be finished, at whatever skill level I currently possess. Writing this now of course I realize what benefit it would be to set some firm deadlines in my music or personal art projects as well (assuming the goal is to have finished products)

I’ll echo @mattlowery’s mention of Stephen Pressfield’s “The War of Art” - it’s a good and motivating book, not because there are any surprising truths in it but because of how obvious it is - really all there is is to sit down and do the thing. Figure out what the thing is and then do it.

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#42

100% agree. I think there’s something really valuable about reaching out to people when you find those things you really like in someone’s music, or the mix engineer if it’s in the mix, etc. I’ve done this maybe a dozen times and nearly universally people have gotten back to me with great little tidbits that have stuck with me. I think over time, I’ve realized, a small bit about what you enjoy in their music, followed by a pointed question about the specific thing you want to know about is key…pretty easy to find people’s emails. If the cold-call aspect of it is anxiety-inducing, start with people on this forum (they obviously want to talk about the art making process if they’re here!), find something in the releases category and ask them in the thread.

I’ve never had a mentor-type situation, definitely not anything with formalized parameters, but I do have a few long running email threads or local friends that I talk to about art making stuff somewhat regularly, and that’s super nice. I’m definitely of the camp “art is communication” and these types of communications of art between artists is probably my favorite aspect of that.

I think something that’s important to remember is that artistic development is not linear. Everything you create is not going to 100% of the time be “better” than the last thing (if you look at your favorite music, how often is it that the artist’s most recent record is your favorite?) And if you try something new, it’s gonna start out being hard (learning curve to jump over), the output is going to suck, and you’re not gonna know where you want to go with it. It’s all a balance…refine the things that have worked in the past, try new things and find out of that which you want to explore more, taking what you learned and applying that to the new path.

I think it’s very important to find ways to share things (either publicly through something like lines or with friends) that are rough and not quite there, or don’t have a larger context (yet). In my experience there’s kind of a sweet-spot to things where you’re interested in it in the short term as you’re figuring it out, then time passes where it becomes stale in some way or another (or you are burnt out on it), and then eventually you’re able to revisit and fit it in a larger context. It’s like gardening, you put the plants in the ground (record the thing), make sure to give them the proper nutrients (organize your archive, share with others to get some feedback and a sense of where you might want to go with it), and then eventually some will die because a deer got to them (this has become a silly metaphor lol), but some grow and you want to show them off!

That being said, some people can just churn out stuff and it’s fully-formed, mixed and ready to go on an album (of which they’ve released several in the past year), and sometimes I get anxious that I have so many loose ends going at once, but as long as I give myself room to breathe with those and continue to be creative, I try to trust that they’ll get finished when they are ready to.

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#43

I’ve felt this for a while too. I relate to the hunter prototype, but I’d like to become more of a gatherer as that is more sustainable.

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#44

I definitely agree about the joy of sharing unfinished work. I realize the quote from my friend was perhaps at odds with that, because I definitely agree that sharing rough work is fun and inspiring. Someone else in the thread said something about just releasing work into the wild and letting others find it and appreciate it and I definitely agree with that sentiment too.

I suppose I would qualify that quote about not all work being “for exhibition” as simply another way to challenge one to not focus on outcome, but work and see what, if anything, is learned or developed from a session of work. Maybe… lol

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#45

yeah, I agree. It’s like 100% of stuff you make is not gold, and that’s totally okay and good. Sometimes that stuff does have something about it, and you have to press on to figure out what it is that’s good.

I liked the thought that you have to get the 1000 bad paintings out first, it’s good to remember as long as your painting (in the loose sense of the word), you’re working toward that.

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#46

Bookmarked this thread for later reading.
For the past +10 years I’ve had big struggles with personal musical fulfillment. Even if I’ve had moderate success with bands that have led to worldwide touring and releases I still have a big need to create something of my own, something that feels more like me.

I really love what I am doing when I have time to sit down and just doodle out sounds with my equipment, I just have big issues “writing stuff to tape” and sometimes, if I do, I just end up erasing recordings because they are not “perfect”. Looking forward to reading what insights you wonderful people have on the matter.

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#47

These are some interesting thoughts: thanks for sharing. On the subject of material I don’t share, I think this is something I do (I often make something then just turn the setup off and is gone). The mindset that drove this for me was a period of making a track every day (eventually limiting myself to one hour, and requiring a 2 or three section arranged composition) and publishing them all. I didn’t publish them because I wanted to share, so much as a forcing function for completing them.

What this taught me is that, in the course of making music, I’ll hit on good ideas and bad ideas but in the end, what matters is my skill and voice. Specifically, that each track might be unique but, if I can do it once I can do it again. This eliminated the feeling that everything I made was precious (what if I can’t do it again?). I think that is a driving force in over sharing: a thought that what you made is never going to be seen again; what if it’s the best thing I’ve ever made and I just don’t recognise it? I continued to make music daily for some time afterwards, but instead of publishing, I’d just delete it. I go through exactly the same process with every change I make to my setup: spend a month creating things that I’ll just delete.

Eventually I’ll find my voice in the new setup and find a way to use it for my purposes (Vs just doing what the so seems to do most readily). The process then repeats: I changed my setup to better match my voice, then I find my voice in the setup. Only peripherally related, but I’ve found it helpful to try and clearly state and define what I want to achieve musically and in terms of how I create music. Things like: Embrace the ephemeral nature of sounds and ideas; favour the complex and opinionated over the simple and generic; or your musical setup should be allowed to influence you as much as you influence it. Having these touchstones really helps me make choices and deciding if I’m moving in the right direction.

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#48

I feel like I’m constantly in a similar situation, but what I discovered that helps me is this:

Sit down, prepare your a patch, setup, or instrument, improvise something with and record it with no judgement. Treat it like a performance, try to give it a beggining, middle and end. I almost exclusively record this live to a stereo mix (though that’s changing recently). What this does is force you to be in the moment and make decisions. Keeping it to a stereo mix allows you very few changes post-mix. I bounce the track to Google Drive and check it out the next day. Whats happened is that over the course of the last three years or so I have hundreds of these tracks and every few months I sort through them and just by pure percentage I have enough stuff that I like enough to release on Bandcamp. Even if you don’t release it, it offers a document or journal to watch your progression.

I used to be the type of person that would overdub everything and be so picky about stuff that it would take me a really long time to get it out, so long that I’d actually hate it before it was done. This method doesn’t give me time to hate it because of overwork, I only hate it if I didn’t like the performance, then I just move on to the next one in the next sitting.

What I’m moving to now is doing the same thing, but recording everything live in Live as separate tracks but with automation, so the live performance is maintained, but I have the ability to edit things later if I choose. I’m allowing myself this option for now, even though I haven’t really taken advantage of that type of editing yet.

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#49

“what you receive depends on what you give. the workman gives the toil of his arm, his energy, his movement; for this the craft gives him a notion of the resistance of the material and its manner of reaction. the artisan gives the craft his love; and to him the craft responds by making him one with his work. but the craftsman gives the craft his passionate research into the laws of nature which govern it; and the craft teaches him wisdom.” - de Lubicz

“but he learned more from the river than vasudeva could teach him. he learned from it continually. above all, he learned how to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinions.” - hermann hesse

thanks for sharing everyone. I feel much softer having read your replies and stories. a few quotes that have stuck with me over the years

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#50

Such a beautiful thread! Thanks to you all for sharing your insights…

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#51

So, my artist side is doing ok (I remember to hit record these days!) I practice. Could practice more. But the editor/curator side of me is totally MIA. I have a really hard time going back and taking stock. It just feels very squicky to me. Like I might be about to form an opinion about something I did in the past. I guess it scares me.

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#52

Lots of good comments here.
I would like to say that this year, for me, has been very good musically speaking because I have recorded a lot of new tracks and videos. This travel can be very hard sometimes when you don’t have the expected results you wanted. Its hard work, but looking back is very rewarding when you see in the distance all the music you created.
As others have said: do work a lot and finalize your tracks.

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#53

This has been such a good thread. Thanks, everyone.

I, too, really grapple with this, and actually recently have been trying to pull myself out of a funk about it by two things: really getting to know a single instrument, and consciously playing and throwing things away and not worrying about it (yeah, I know the advice from most people is to record everything).

My thinking has been something like this.

  1. I began in electronic music after playing flute my entire childhood and about half of my adult life.
  2. I have never bothered to record myself playing flute.
  3. I have seldom played flute in public, and when I have, it has been to a largely deaf audience (literally; a Celtic trio I was in made the rounds through local retirement homes).
  4. Since learning piano, I only record myself playing when my instructor makes me (i.e., Zoom concerts).
    I don’t really worry about how I “sound” or “completing” pieces on the flute or piano, except for the assignments to master by my instructor, and that’s very much a pedagogical exercise, not a “cut a track and post it to Soundcloud or YouTube”.

I think I really need to see my electronic music making as ephemeral, in the same way that I see my noodling at the piano. Making sounds for sounds sake, which is restful to me, not as something I need to map out with goals and milestones.

Just play every day and be happy with it. If something comes of it, great; if not, that is OK too.

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