A fledgling artist's journey into music production
Hey.
Remember when I talked about this whole concept of building your own synth patches, using a professional one as a guide?
Well, today I released a tutorial that SHOWS you how to do it. Y’know, in case your learning style is different, or to show off my amateur video-making skillz.
Anyway, enjoy.
If anyone has been following this blog, they will notice I haven’t posted anything in some time now.
We’ve done it again, folks.
After two years-ish of living in our triplex in Halifax proper, we felt the need for a change.
Fast-forward through all the stress of getting outbid over and over, and we found this roomy little number (well, the number is blurred out, but you know what I mean).
A few details about the place:
We did the bulk of the moving yesterday, so only the living room has any semblance of normalcy at the moment, but we both booked three more days off to finalize the move and start unpacking the many MANY boxes.
So you might ask, what does this mean for my music work going forward? Well, two things really:
I used to love listening to motivational speeches, the kind you can find on YouTube, usually with lots of rah-rah music in the background.
One of the most important lessons those inspirational people managed to pound into my head was this: Find a way to make your goals important to you.
Doesn’t that sound obvious? And yet, most of us only half-a** our goals, having little appreciation for how hard it can be to stay motivated during those long plateaus where it’s seems like nothing’s working.
Many adults conclude after a few failed attempts that they just don’t have that ‘special stuff’ that enables others to achieve their goals – never realizing they simply weren’t using the right mental tool for the job.
We are at our least creative, when we have the most options.
Choice is paralyzing. The myraid of possible paths expands in our mind, like a thousand voices, each clamouring to pick me, pick me!
Even if you DO pick one, that only makes the others louder, and before you’ve taken more than a step, you wonder if perhaps you’ve made a mistake, maybe this other instrument, or effect, is even better…
Thing is, it’s not really about making the ‘right’ choice – it’s about narrowing the focus, finding a mental framework within which the creative juices can flow.
This article is inspired by Realizing the Power of Now, a series of talks by Eckhart Tolle. Don’t worry skeptics; I’m going to be talking psychology, not spirituality, today.
As I’ve written about many times previously, there is a great deal of conflict between the brain and body, or if you like, the conscious and subconscious. And it does NOT help you compose or produce any better.
The brain tends to be the biggest troublemaker, mostly because it doesn’t know when to shut up.
It will try and make creative decisions, but these will be based on logical factors like what your contemporaries are doing, what riffs worked for you in the past, etc.
This results in one-dimensional or ‘pandering’ music, where it sounds like a washed-out clone of it’s brethren.
The body is rather more mysterious in the eyes of science, expressing itself through sensations and emotions. The upside is those vague perceptions are informed by a LOT more information, as when we have an intuition about something.
Ideally the subconscious is the one pulling the strings, with the brain stepping in for more calculated decisions, like the length of reverb time, or the best mastering settings for a particular streaming service.
In practice however, the conscious brain is all too comfortable overriding the body’s intelligence. One way to prevent this, is by focusing on the present moment, or the now.
Okay, a little background: Our consciousness generally works by drawing from the past, or planning for the future. There’s some in-the-moment calculations, but most activity falls into the other two categories.
This can (and usually does) turn dysfunctional, as when we ruminate about the past, and/or worry about the future.
So to eliminate that, we can learn to keep our focus on what’s happening in the present moment – what Eckhart Tolle has called the razor’s edge of now.
Here’s a useful trick: Ask yourself, what at this very moment, is lacking?
You can probably think of tons of things you wish were different – the difficult client, the track you have to finish by tomorrow, etc. – but if you really think about it, these concerns only exist in the past or future.
What’s lacking at this very moment? Well, my back is a bit sore, I’m tired from a long week, but these are minor things. Nothing that would stand in the way of creating music.
And by the way, this does NOT mean you just go through life never thinking about the future. You still plan for the future, but you do so in the NOW, allowing your brain and body to work together.
As the picture above illustrates however, this is not so easily accomplished – the brain LOVES to get involved, so much so that as soon as you think about staying present, you are no longer present. You are just watching the thought.
When in front of your DAW or score sheet, your brain may try to assert itself with various thoughts and opinions, or even co-opt your body sensations of anxiety or impatience.
In time however, these feelings will start to die away, and ideas start to gently present themselves.
Which is great – in theory. So, how do we go from here to practicing our presence? (How’s that for alliteration?) Well please…
I’ve already talked about the advantages of improving your focus through meditation here, so “now” (heh) would be a good time to review them.
The more familiar you are with producing or composing music, the more easily ideas will come when you focus on the present. Keep honing that craft!
Also, it will take a little time, especially at the beginning, for your brain to quiet down and make way for the subconscious. Be sure to leave some extra time for your projects – rushed deadlines kill creativity.
Even when your brain calms down, ideas don’t always appear automatically. In that case, try something, anything, to get the ball rolling. Transpose a chord. Throw in an unusual plugin. Go outside and run around the house three times.
As you become more experienced, pay attention to the moment in which you hear each new or altered sound – before the brain kicks in.
As Eckhart explains, there’s a moment, when we first perceive something, when the brain has not yet analyzed and labelled it. There is only pure, undiluted, awareness.
This is where our honest feelings about what we hear surface, where we can genuinely tell whether we’ve created something beautiful to our ears, or it isn’t quite hitting the mark.
If we miss this, a moment later the brain steps in with, ‘ah, my fans will love this!’ or ‘ugh, that sounds so raspy’, or something, and then that thought will dictate how we feel next.
But developing this skill of staying in the now allows us increasingly to know what we are creating isn’t just generally ‘good’ music: It’s aligned with the kind of good WE want to create.
So learning to stay in the now is vital to getting our mental chatter out of the way and improving the quality of our creative insights. But it’s usefulness doesn’t end at the studio door.
Imagine going through your day without all the worrying, all the ruminating, about what was and could be. How much more pleasant would that make the experience?
One of the best things about staying focused on the now, is you can start practicing – right now. When else is there?
Credits:
‘A Barber Shaving a Client’s Face’ by Los Muertos Crew
‘Brain Anatomy Human Science Health’ by holdentrils from Pixabay
‘Close Up Photo of Men Having Conversation’ by ANTONI SHKRABA
‘Dreamy ethnic businessman thinking about project’ by Michael Burrows
‘Round Mirror’ by Ethan Sees
‘Woman making heart with hands while having video call’ by Artem Podrez
I recently took on a music project for a buddy of mine – it’s an 80’s-style track to go with his new (and awesome) tabletop game, Fight to Survive. Check out his kickstarter here.
An interesting wrinkle is that, while the game hearkens back to campy buddy cop shows and classic martial arts movies like Bloodsport, the game is actually meant to span the entire 20th century. Which means the track should too.
The project is nearly finished now, and while I have largely failed to span an entire century of music in a single track, the effort taught me a great deal about the value of creating music from earlier time periods.
Today, everything hurts.
There are days, when so many things go wrong at once, it starts to feel like this is it: I’ve used up all my chances over the years, and now it’s crap-city from here on out.
On these days, the brain doesn’t work properly. It’s important to remember that – it’s the thing that helps you perceive reality, after all.
When we feel bad, really bad, the whole world can seem to become infected with that badness, so you have to dig to find the brighter parts.
It starts with general frustration, as you try and keep up with the demands of others (and more so, your own conscious/ unconscious demands), then grows into a kind of raging against the world, your circumstances, the people around you, anything that helps you pretend you have some control over what you are experiencing.
And then eventually, it gives way to some kind of despair, or perhaps a sad acceptance, that this is how things are going to be for a while.
Some days, you just know you aren’t going to be at your best. This isn’t foreshadowing: The evidence is constant, and ongoing. The realization happens midday, not when you open your eyes in the morning.
And when that day comes, you can do just ONE thing right, for sure – you stay on the job to the end. You finish your shift, or the project, or whatever it is that stands in your way.
Because this is what you do now. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a musician, or a composer, or at least some kind of artist. That means you’ve found something rare, something that makes you happier than anything else.
So, if you aren’t going to do this, what else?
I did hit a slight turning point, when I realized there were, in the end, only one or two things that, had they been different, would have made the difference between a hard day and a good one.
For example, if my brain hadn’t felt like molasses, I would have felt on top of my barista shift, instead of missing orders and feeling I was always behind.
Or, if I’d known a little more about certain aspects of opening for the day, I might have finished that work more quickly, thus allowing me to be more ready for the first customers. Which probably would have helped with the molasses-feeling.
That’s helpful, because it reminds me that what made the day hard was likely just random chance; snake-eyes on the dice. Which means the next roll is just as likely to be a winner as it was the day before.
Maybe even a tiny bit MORE likely.
Photo Credits:
‘Silhouette Photo of Woman’ by Engin Akyurt from Pexels
I’ve picked up a new job. It’s not music-related, at all. It’s menial, and tiring, and the hours are long. But it pays the bills. In short, it’s what others refer to as a “real” job.
Three times a week, I now go to bed at 9pm, wake up at 3am, and drive to the workplace, where I serve customers as a barista from 4-11am.
I then go home, stretch, nap, then work as much as I can on my musical projects before the evening. Which hasn’t been much so far, but I’m adapting – today is already one of the best so far.
You might think this would bother me, but so far at least, it hasn’t. And I think that is almost entirely due to something I love talking about in this blog – my mindset.
A few years back, in a dance studio in Toronto, I was introduced to a fantastic tango song by another instructor. “This is great! When are you going to perform it?” I asked.
“Oh no”, she shook her head emphatically, “I need to find the right person to perform it with first.”
Most of us have certain projects we would LOVE to work on, but don’t – they’re so d*mn good, we feel we could ruin them if we rushed in before we have the right resources, skills, etc.
At the same time however, we risk taking this too far, adopting a perfectionist attitude that keeps us from taking on the work we love most. Where do we find the balance?
