Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

https://the.scapegoat.dev/turning-music-into-a-chore-is-what-made-me-an-artist/

by larve • 4 years ago

217 77 4 years ago

the.scapegoat.dev

Practicing being creative is such an important thing for anyone who creates. It's like practicing improvising.

tunesmith• 4 years ago

Going through something somewhat similar, here's where I got hung up: too many ideas that had "potential". I found it really difficult to figure out where to draw the line that would keep me moving forward with material generation, as opposed to reviewing old material.

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.

raydiatian4• 4 years ago

I remember seeing a Brian Eno interview where he lambasted non-session musicians as “(every one of them) thinking that they’ve got a Darkside Of The Moon in them, but then they just go into the studio and get lost in playing with Synth patches”

jcpst• 4 years ago

Kind of like this recent HN post, “Fractal Tasks and the Journey through the Forest of the Infinite”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33481368

I have a lot of music gear, including one of those analog modular synthesizers that Eno mentions. It’s so easy to get lost in timbres and textures.

And then on top of that, it’s so easy to get inside of a great loop and just layer it up into a big, lush sound, but not a song.

More and more, I see the parallels between my history as a composer/audio engineer and software engineer.

After becoming an SE, I can dive into that same mode that I’m in when programming, but just building a musical composition. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Anyway, both tasks require the skill of zooming in and out on the scope of what you’re building.

nagonago2• 4 years ago

Do you have a link to this interview, or remember where you saw it? I did some searching but couldn't find it.

raydiatian4• 4 years ago

Everything in music is essentially a remix at its core. The Noisia guys had a similar philosophy of “resample and bounce often”. Always be making bleeps and bloops, then reprocess them, then reprocess them again, as many ways as possible without turning harmonic information into noise (from a band named Noisia, ikr), until you have something that feels novel and rhythmic.

alfiedotwtf2• 4 years ago

bounce often

I get it, but feel that goes against my software-engineering-make-everything-repeatable learnings

raydiatian4• 4 years ago

They seem like two separate things, and each will give you different characteristics.

The other thing is, for really crazy feedback and timbre manipulation ideas, there is only so far you can go before you run out of knobs to twist and CPU cycles to burn

xhevahir• 4 years ago

I remember hearing somebody suggest bouncing things to audio (and other destructive operations, presumably) as a way of avoiding the analysis-paralysis that more flexible formats like MIDI can induce.

an_aparallel• 4 years ago

there's a best of both worlds: re-synthesis. In FL Studio, a nice technique is bouncing a bunch of lead/synth/reese sounds, picking the best (helps if its a time measure that makes sense) - then importing it into Harmour (a Resynthesis VST) - the sound is recreated with 512(?) partials (aka sine waves) then those sounds can be manipulated to oblivion :)

DavidPiper2• 4 years ago

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.

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."

larve4• 4 years ago

(author here)

100%, the time pressure and collaboration is what made things fall into place. It’s what made me realize that I have to keep at it, rain or sunshine, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to complete what I set out to do.

As for the follow-up: I have been very much focused on writing and programming this year, and haven’t felt the itch to make music, but I can feel that I will take it up again soon. However, I have been keeping up my practice time and been reasonably steady at writing my blog and the enormous iceberg of notes underneath.

I see the same approach working for me in writing (being prolific, producing a lot of garbage, layering and juxtaposing and experimenting), although I am an absolute amateur and at the beginning of my journey.

The point of having copious amounts of free time is interesting. I often wonder about exactly the same follow up as you: what makes this sustainable?

I did produce most of my music while having a full time job after coming back from the sabbatical. It felt like having a 1-2h window before breakfast and some longer sessions in the weekend was extremely more effective than spending entire days without a clear focus. Further, once I did get about 20 songs released and « leveled » up technically, I found that the studio time tended to yield more bang for the buck. That could just be a technical thing: I got a bit of gear that made recording my hardware and my mixing so much easier (SSL UC1 and UF8 and a ERM multiclock).

One to two hours (not that that’s not a lot of time, but I don’t have children) a day adds up really quickly if you keep a consistent output. I kept a similar rhythm this year for writing and I’m about to pass 800k words written in my vault. That’s about 800k words of garbage, but it’s impressive nonetheless :)

DavidPiper2• 4 years ago

Hey, thanks for taking the time to reply.

I have been very much focused on writing and programming this year, and haven’t felt the itch to make music, but I can feel that I will take it up again soon

Know that feeling very well! I haven't taken a large chunk of time like that yet, and so my whole process is dribs and drabs. But I'm going to try applying some of the "make it a process" things you talk about even to those times and see what happens.

Further, once I did get about 20 songs released and « leveled » up technically, I found that the studio time tended to yield more bang for the buck. That could just be a technical thing: I got a bit of gear that made recording my hardware and my mixing so much easier (SSL UC1 and UF8 and a ERM multiclock).

The right gear has definitely helped me. I'm only up to about 6 originals, and I can feel the technical improvement on my part with each piece still. I do a lot of transcribing though too as a way of practicing with the tools and learning what others do. That being said, I'm still in limbo about whether all that practice is actaully applicable or just a deeper form of artistic procrastination.

100% agree about the 2 hours a day, somehow I'm not finding that at the moment (also no kids), but I think it's mostly due to a renewed focus on reading and a slight balloon in doomscrolling recently which I have to address.

800k words is very impressive, keep it up! No doubt in a few weeks I'll decide to commit to learning to draw well, and the timer resets back to 0 for that new hobby too :)

j_kao2• 4 years ago

I also wonder if writing music was chore-like due to the genre the author chose, specifically four-on-the-floor techno music that has largely fixed and repetitive structures?

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?

munificent2• 4 years ago

I think so, yes.

Back in college, an Anthropology professor told our class "a culture is a set of ready-made solutions to common problems". It's one of the best definitions of anything I've ever heard.

In music, I think genre is the same thing. If you sit down try to make "music", you are faced with just an astronomical number of choices to make before you get to a finished compositions. What instrumentation? Acoustic or electric? How many? What effects? Arrangement? Melody? Harmony? Lyrics or not? If so, sung or rapped? What language? What about? Are there drums? Acoustic or electronic? Sampled?

If you come at it with a total blank slate where you're equally open to creating avant garde free jazz or electric disco zydeco, you'll get so overwhelmed by the number of choices to make that you'll never finish.

So what most musicians do is pick a genre. Sure, they might stray out of it, but it at least gives them default answers for most of the high level structural questions. If you pick techno, you can start assuming there will be drums, 4/4 time, around 120-140 BPM, synths, etc.

The genre defaults for electronic music are particularly visible because they're mechanical since DJs need them for continuous mixes, but every other genre is equally formulaic in its way. Other genres with more prestige like to pretend each of their songs is a unique magical snowflake, but it's not the case. Otherwise, people wouldn't have freaked out when Bob Dylan played electric.

And, definitely, yes, when it comes to lyrics, you can absolutely pound them out. Writing is a skill like any other and it's incredibly amenable to discipline and practice. There's a reason so many successful authors have very rigid writing routines.

PaulHoule• 4 years ago

I was listening to Pink Floyd's Momentary Lapse of Reason just a moment ago and my son asks, "Is that some kind of cheap knockoff of The Wall?" and I said "It's the same band!"

It is very interesting but sometimes sad to see bands constrained by the limits of their own creativity as well as the expectations of their fans. People still pay to hear Stevie Nicks sell Fleetwood Mac songs out of tune, Elton John has been on his last farewell turn I don't know how many times now, but one thing they all have in common is that the fans will boo, tear down the stadium, and leave if they play anything new.

drittich• 4 years ago

That's a wonderful definition, I'm still turning it over in my mind a day later. I like how it provides a "why" for culture, with a pretty grounded reason. I tried to locate the origin of it, but just found a bunch of paraphrasings without attribution. Any idea where it originated?

larve4• 4 years ago

(author here)

I’m not a song writer but I do have a fair amount of background in jazz and some metal, and while jazz requires a lot of practice to internalize music theory, and both being music with « real » instruments require a significant amount of practice, the writing felt pretty similar. I’d collect riffs, melody fragments, sit down and experiment with chord progressions (very very nerdy and brainy), and then I’d assemble them and see if they fit or not.

The concepts I experiment with when making techno are on a similar level of braininess / research. I will have « theories » that I pursue over many bleeps bloops until I feel I have exhausted the subject. They don’t have words / story per se, but there is definitely a lot of concept and evolution to it.

The « four on the floor » and repetition part of techno can be deceiving. There is definitely some extremely formulaic techno out there, but for many songs, there might not even be a kick, and for sure there never is a loop that is the same as the previous one, as sounds will continuously evolve.

I’m pretty lacking in terms of musical talent, I ultimately left jazz and metal and real instruments behind because I just didn’t « get it ». Techno has taken me 15 years of on/off attention to finally « find myself ». (for what it’s worth, I would personally file four tet and floating points under jazz, not techno, save maybe for a few tracks :).

Genres are so very odd: I feel I can now take a 909 backbeat and a stupid 303 and have some real techno, but doing the same 10 years ago would have sounded… off.

j_kao2• 4 years ago

I hope my comment didn't come off as an attack and certainly admire what you've accomplished!

So long as the medium of techno allows you to embed your own creative characteristics, then I think that's a great form of expression (as opposed to churning out formulaic techno... though there's really nothing wrong with that, either).

In fact, setting constraints on yourself is a great way to inspire creativity and nuance (e.g. there's a lot you can do with a single note - rhythmically, harmonically, effects, dynamics, etc).

I also agree that after a certain point, genres become too simplistic of a model to describe music. I'm happy that you've put so much thought into this.

te_chris2• 4 years ago

A friend of mine just won the award for best independent album in NZ and he absolutely works by the chore philosophy and has for years. Some people do, some don’t, but if you do the chore thing for long enough it’s undeniable that your aptitude will consistently improve along with the establishment of your practice.

cardy31• 4 years ago

This feels very similar to how Stephen King talks about writing books. He has a set number of words to hit each day and seems to hit it almost every day. Definitely a chore as opposed to a burst of creative passion at that point.

akhilpotla• 4 years ago

"Get numb before you get good"

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

jancsika• 4 years ago

It's a strange balance.

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

lemonberry• 4 years ago

"Inspiration is for amateurs" - Steven Pressfield in "The War of Art"

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.

lo_zamoyski• 4 years ago

Billions of people have lived before us, long traditions predate us. The chances that you've had a single original thought in your life is virtually nil (philosophy is a great example where a failure to learn what's old usually results in repeating the same old mistakes). By learning what came before, you are much better prepared for discovery.

yummypaint2• 4 years ago

On the other hand, 7% people who have ever lived are alive now. The great philosophers of the past lived at a time when the global population cumulative population was much lower, as was literacy and education in general. I would argue there should dozens of socrates or lao-tzu level philosophers walking around right now.

bluedays• 4 years ago

This is how i became a programmer

scarecrowbob• 4 years ago

There are some valuable points.

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.

eyelidlessness• 4 years ago

Reading this through my own musician lens made me simultaneously glad for the author, and a bit disappointed too.

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

breckinloggins• 4 years ago

This feels like the kind of workflow that would fit me. My problem, though, is the "reviewing material I've already put away" part. I feel like I'm hoarding stuff rather than saving material for reuse.

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!

normcoreashore2• 4 years ago

I really feel this. I run a small studio working on my own music and music for friends. The review cycles, listening and modifying is really important for me, incremental progress and all that. I’ve been working on bespoke software to smooth out the process. Audiopile.cloud if you’re interested.

te_chris2• 4 years ago

I’m a producer/composer and I cannot recommend enough bouncing as you make iterations. It really helps get used to the music out of the context of the DAW. I’ve found it one of the key improvements I’ve made to my flow. I store everything in Dropbox so when I’m on my work laptop, say, I can go to the various bounce folders in each project folder (use Ableton and yeah, save WIP bounces with the project) and just listen to the tracks as they are. It’s super revealing.

ehnto2• 4 years ago

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.

Huh. That would be a wicked feature for a DAW to have built in. Like how photoshop generates thumbnails of the complex document within.

I think I know why they don't, and that's because some songs take a while to render, but I think it would be possible for the 98% of actual usage. I'm not sure at which point you would generate them, on save I guess? Maybe it can be like videogames, where auto-saves are frequent and don't process the preview audio, but a "full save" could contain the full preview clip.

coldtea3• 4 years ago

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.

This is a good thing to do. But another thing to try is also bouncing tracks to audio early within the same project (on another track). This basically means you "commit" to a version of them, and you work with what you got, instead of infinitely tweaking them as MIDI and playing with the VST all the time...

amccloud• 4 years ago

I'm working on a tool to help automate and enforce this bounce often and library curation workflow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwpPNCwI5Ic

Should work with any DAW on Windows or macOS. Anyone want try it out with their DAW email me: andrew@dabounce.app

iraliaf• 4 years ago

"Had I continued to make a song here and there, over the weekend, I would have never discovered that making music is boring"

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?

TheOtherHobbes• 4 years ago

There's a sense in which it's a day job, and you have to put the hours in.

But there's also a sense in which you have to have taste and inspiration. Otherwise you'll just be producing an endless stream of crap.

Unfortunately a work ethic on its own doesn't substitute for taste and talent if you don't have them. You will certainly get better with practice, but talent - or lack of it - is a hard limit.

The people who are really, really good at it have the work ethic and the taste to make the work productive.

They also have the right physical location and the right networking and self-promotion skills. But that's a different issue.

pyinstallwoes• 4 years ago

A pottery teacher split the class into two groups. One group focused on making making one piece over 3 months their best piece. Another group focused on making one piece a day over 3 months.

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.

saranormous• 4 years ago

do you have to review/publish the “chore” output for this to work? Thinking about how this applies to writing, when I don’t have the creativity every day, but it’s probably still good practice and useful to have the file of ideas

DoesntMatter223• 4 years ago

I've been making music for 20 years, just noodling mostly. I've made some tracks that friends of mine love, but I don't want to do it professionally. I just enjoy the relaxation involved.

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.

kmewhort• 4 years ago

How did you apply a monetary penalty to yourself?

rperce• 4 years ago

I'm not the person you asked, but if I had to guess, I'd guess [beeminder]: goal-tracking software where if you don't reach your goal, they charge your credit card. Each time you fail, you get charged more. It's really good!

[beeminder]: https://www.beeminder.com/

hallway_monitor• 4 years ago

There's https://www.stickk.com/ which uses a referee system. You designate a referee and they have to corroborate your reports.

fortran772• 4 years ago

I just enjoy the relaxation involved.

I can't understand this at all.

I've been playing piano for 50+ years. Still practice every day. Play in amateur recitals. It's fun, but hardly relaxing. It's a lot of work, concentration, and study. And as I get older it gets more challenging because of physical limitations (movement, eyesight, hearing) that I have to work around. My fingers don't work like they used to, and sometimes I have to decide to leave out a note, or move something to a different hand, etc. Painstaking note-by-note and phrase-by-phrase analysis.

Memorization is also tough.

dsclough• 4 years ago

Practicing piano and fooling around in a DAW are completely different realms of music related activities. The pianists all know have given me the impression the activity is many more parts stress if the goal is practicing to be able to play a challenging piece, while working in a DAW can be more like splattering paint on a canvas when done like the parent comment describes

Nition• 4 years ago

I've been playing piano for ~25 years. I pretty quickly gravitated away from learning existing pieces towards composition and improv. I'm slow at reading sheet music and can't sight read, but for playing new songs I can generally just look at the chords and get something at least close enough to sing over right away. Just messing around making stuff up is a lot more relaxing than learning by rote I think. Of course I'm never going to play Piano Concerto No. 21 so it depends what you want out of life. :)

The best example of "relaxed piano playing" I can think of is actually the old Build Mode music from The Sims[0]. I'm 90% sure that all those piano tracks are just someone messing around improvising over a few simple chords, because it sounds so much like what comes out when I'm doing the same kind of thing.

Now, it's always a little stressful to record that kind of playing because if you play something bad sounding then you'll have to start over (or at least, splice multiple takes together), but if you're just playing the piano for fun, I think it mostly is relaxing.

Have you ever tried just playing some chords in the left hand and kind of letting the right hand do what it feels like?

[0] Here's Build 3 for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gGHQicQUw4

----

Edit: Looks like that YouTube video actually links to an article which confirms my old suspicion that it's improv piano:

"When Russo and Martin couldn't quite capture that wistfulness themselves, they called Burr. A successful jazz pianist in his own right as well as a highly sought-after session musician, he was comfortable working off of Martin's ideas (and, unlike Russo, he was a pianist by trade rather than a saxophonist). Burr says he loved the cut-and-paste style of recording that Martin employed. It was a case, he says, of "just looking at Jerry and asking, 'Does this sound like what you want?'" So, while Russo went away and worked on his pieces only to see them chopped up by Martin, Burr was happy improvising."

yummypaint2• 4 years ago

Do you ever improvise or play from lead sheets? I feel like it's a different feeling from reading sheet music and many people find it more enjoyable. Personally I'm a fan of playing along with stuff here https://chordu.com/. It definitely isn't perfect but it works.

coldtea3• 4 years ago

I've been playing piano for 50+ years. Still practice every day. Play in amateur recitals. It's fun, but hardly relaxing. It's a lot of work, concentration, and study.

Perhaps you play classical or learn pieces and paly them as is? (as you speak of "memorization" and "note-by-note and phrase-by-phrase analysis").

Try something like jazz, improvisation, etc - it can be inifinitely more relaxing, and much less taxing (you study to get the general technique for something, and then you can apply it in any way you like, be lax about it, switch things around, and so on).

DoesntMatter223• 4 years ago

You are playing real music where as I am just noodling around.

kfrzcode2• 4 years ago

I like to meditate behind the fretboard, get into a groove and let my muscle memory take over, while trying to remove my self and be present for the inspiration. Listening intently while not thinking or anticipating is difficult, but it's nice to have my fundamentals to the point where I can do this. It's made my practice routines more rewarding and unlocked me when I hit sort-of ruts in my playing.

kashunstva• 4 years ago

Pianist here. The essential idea rings true. I do collaborative work, accompanying, coaching, performing with soloists and ensembles. There’s a lot of repertoire in play at any given time. Much of the background work is very much a chore - strategically breaking down the pieces into practiceable chunks, prioritizing, gradually building tempo over days to weeks, and of course building technique that allows the music to flourish.

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.

daxfohl• 4 years ago

Frank Herbert said roughly the same thing about writing Dune (from Wikipedia)

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."

kfrzcode2• 4 years ago

One of my favorite quotes from Justin Vernon is (paraphrased as) "I wasn't ready to really study music until my 30s" -- not entirely certain of his meaning but it's stuck with me as a reminder that music is and was an omnipresence, so many of my friends and peers would have just considered it another tasking or chore and left their potential inner artistry undiscovered.

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.

lucas_membrane• 4 years ago

Doing music can be fantastic when it is both a means and an end. It is a desirable end if it is enjoyed for both musical pleasure and either improvement of social relationships or production of money. If it is a desirable end, it is also usually a means to enable doing more of it. Be very pleased if every turn of your feedback cycle is totally positive.

vanadium1st• 4 years ago

I have several artistic lives.

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?

normcoreashore2• 4 years ago

do I? great question… I was listening to npr today and there was this guy talking about a book he has written on the artistic similarities of Prince and Charles Dickens. Apparently they had similar patterns of production, both extremely prolific, working on multiple major works/albums simultaneously and generally accepting a non-perfect result (subjective idea I know), and just publishing constantly etc. To beat the perfectionism creeping in I have tried to simply finish the song in one sitting. If I have to go back it’s always weird and difficult and of course my patches are not all the same and totally un-recallable with analog gear. Some of the best stuff comes by forcing a lossy non-revertable approach. Instead of polishing, just go at it again. Your best song is the one you have yet write and all that…

uiandfrp• 4 years ago

I love this because it takes making music out of this mysterious creative process to something that anyone can do much like writing an essay.

resiros• 4 years ago

That is exactly how I feel as I write my dissertation. Writing has always seemed mystical to me. I always thought it required a certain mood. Now I follow a process:

- 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.

Jeff_Brown• 4 years ago

Inspiring article. The resulting music, alas, indeed sounds like a chore to me.

bryan_cooper• 4 years ago

i'm working on an app for iterating on your music!

imagine having all of your unreleased music in one place.

no more searching through iMessages, cloud folders, or streaming services

download stew for a Spotify-like music player made for WIP music

https://testflight.apple.com/join/XaYWo9se

Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

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