The topic of today is efficiency, getting things done in a short period of time.
Even though I've always worked fast, particularly with my former hardware setup, the strict deadline I have for this project means that I must work even faster and with even more efficiency. I have no time for procastrinating or wasting time on irrelevant things. I must focus focus focus on the task at hand and do my best to improve as much as possible with the time I have left. Which isn't much, only 2,5 months as we speak. Now, I've already made some decent progress so far both from my own point of view as well as according to others. However, this isn't a cause for celebration. I'll open the champagne bottles in July if I manage to reach my goal. Until then, I'll settle for a single pint of cheap production beer.
While I've always been a fast and efficient worker at whatever job I had at the time, the creative arts are something else. You can't just show up at 8'o clock in the morning, put your working gloves on and start working. It just doesn't quite work like that in music or at least, it doesn't work like that for me. I need the right mood, the right spirit, the right mindset that allows me to focus analytically. Those don't just appear out of thin air, unfortunately. They need to be lured out somehow.
The first 3 weeks of this project were very easy in that department, I was feeling really creative and energetic, I was able to just turn on the DAW anytime I wanted and write something I was at least somewhat satisfied with. The last week has been something entirely different. All music, including masterpieces I usually love, have just sounded plain bad. I've been unable to turn on the DAW without forcing myself. I was unable to judge what I had written because everything just sounded wrong. I might have accidentally created and deleted the greatest melody ever written, simply because I've been unable to analyze anything.
But, since the ongoing topic of this blog is improving myself both as a producer as well as a human being, I decided to take the bull by the horns. For a second I imagined that my mouse is a sling and I have to take down the mighty beast that is Goliath. At least for the time being it seems to have worked, as I managed to write this track in about 4 hours. It's not the greatest thing ever written, but that wasn't the point either. I just had to regain my confidence, show myself that I can start and finish tracks, not just write a loop and listen to it for 10 hours, thinking about what to do about it.
Okay, mission accomplished. Sorta, kinda. It's just one track. How about something more generic instead of just something that applied to this particular situation? How do you do something creative when you simply have to do so, because of a specific deadline or simply because your income is dependent on it? How do you force yourself to be creative when in fact you'd rather watch a few seasons of Seinfeld?
As always, there is no universal answer to that question. We're all individuals, what works for me might not work for others. For me, there are three major factors that lure the creative spirit in me out of it's cave and allow me to actually finish something relatively quickly.
1) Inspiration. Quite obvious. Listen to something great and it might inspire you to write something great too. There's more to that than meets the eye however. It's not always clear what exactly might inspire you. It's not necessarily even music. Eating a delicious pizza when you're suffering from the mother of all hangovers can be a borderline religious experience. Watching a great movie or a TV show can trigger your creative side. Even if it's as simple as listening to music, it's not always clear what music exactly will do the trick. Sometimes something similar than you want to make might work, sometimes it might be black metal. Thankfully, living in the 21st century has it's merits such as having instant access to practically any kind of music you can think of for free, thanks to Youtube. It can be extremely inspiring to just listen to something you didn't even know existed. Happy accidents for the win! Or if that doesn't tickle your fancy you can always just play something that you know you love, even if you don't own the record yourself. Listening to other people's music to find inspiration is of particular value once you have trained your ears to analyze what's going on. Not necessarily traditional music theory analysis, just having a keen ear and being able to spot things other people don't even hear unless they're pointed out to them. Production tricks, arrangement, melodies, harmonies, rhythms, most forms of music have something of value that can be useful to analyze and learn. The most important thing in this is that it can set your mind to the right state, a creative state. You don't necessarily need to copy the things you heard or make anything resembling the source of inpiration. You just want to enter that "I wanna make music and I wanna make it right now" kind of zone.
2) Knowledge. By this I mean musical knowledge (the scales, the chords and such) production knowledge (when and how to use EQ, compression, reverb and so on) and simply knowing the tools you own from the inside out, so when that moment of genius hits you you are actually able to do something about it and not just spend the next 3 hours finding the right kick or whatever. Gathering this knowledge can take some time, quite a long time actually. There are some shortcuts such as Youtube tutorials, but those usually just scratch the surface or alternatively, aren't that relevant to what you want to accomplish. Very few people are able to make great music with little to no training. Some insanely talented individuals perhaps, but most require years of practice and hard work to reach a satisfactory level, some never reach that. Once you reach that level however, you can very quickly turn a simple idea into something resembling a finished track. At least for the way I work, it's important to get a rough skeleton of a track quite quickly. It's hard for me to imagine, for example, what might happen after the breakdown if all I have is a short loop. That's why I quite often make a rough arrangement quite early on, to have some sort of a frame which I can later fill with better elements. Without that frame I very easily fall into loop zone and just play the same thing for hours, doing irrelevant, minor edits instead of focusing on what's really important. Having something that roughly feels like a complete track helps me to actually finish that track to a satisfactory level.
3) Planning. Related to knowledge, but still somewhat a different entity. By planning I mean that you should know what you want to achieve. It's not always relevant of course, sometimes you want to just experiment. But when you're stuck, it can be useful to have some sort of a plan that you follow. The plan could be something quite specific, like "I want to make a track like Bar A Thym with cowbells and parallel chords". It could also be something like "Today I will learn how to use polyrhythms". The way I usually do it is by simply using a template in my DAW which has a basic house beat ready and all sorts of carefully chosen plugins ready to be used. Some might condemn that kind of behaviour, saying it leads to just repeating some kind of a stagnated formula. In a way it's true, I openly admit that I'm not trying to invent anything groundbreaking here. I just want to write a great house track. Having that template saves me about 30 minutes of work that I'll nearly always do the same way anyway. It also means that I can just start laying down musical ideas, instead of going through tons of tools.
That's pretty much it. When I don't feel creative but have free time and the desire to make house music, I just simply listen to something inspiring, then load my template and use the knowledge I've gathered over the years. Sounds pretty basic, but the difference is that I do it consciously, after analysing what works for me. It's not random, it's not something I read from a book, it's just what works for me personally. Just aimlessly throwing sounds together is fun of course, I've spent countless of hours on that. However, now my aim is to get certain kind of results in just a few months, so I must streamline my process, almost to a degree of building some sort of a house music assembly line. Sounds quite boring when I put it like that, but that's what you get when you start a crazy project like this.
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