Your perception of your own music

[antman]

You know that feeling. Youve been working on a track for a few days and the excitement you had for it just isn't there anymore.

To you, it sounds very bland and boring. Lifeless almost. But you let a trusted, honest friend listen to it and he flips his shit. It turns out the track really is great, you just cant finish it because every time you play it, it bores you and lacks that initial feeling of "wow this is gonna be awesome"

WHY does this happen? How do I avoid this?

[SunkLo]

This happens a lot when you get stuck in little technical details in the composition stage instead of writing and arranging. I find it's best to work from coarse to fine, like making a sculpture. When you have the initial spark of inspiration, try to get the track composed as quickly as possible without letting the technology get in your way. Once you've got all the basic ideas down you can go in and refine everything. Otherwise you'll spend forever listening to the same 8 bar loop and lose all perspective of it by the time it comes to write the next section.

I find the best workflow is to have very discrete sections, almost as if you're a production house with different employees. Don the songwriter hat and get the full idea sketched out, then try to capture a performance acting as a band, then assume the role of the producer and try to tailor the recording and arrangement to suit the performance, then mix the recordings in such a way that they sound cohesive as a track, finally assume the role of the mastering engineer and work on the broad spectral palette of the song in relation to it's future medium. If you can get each job done without dipping into the other roles the whole process will go much smoother and you'll be less likely to stall. Of course doing this perfectly requires a lot of foresight and experience and never completely goes according to plan. But it's a good ideal to shoot for.

[dotcurrency]

You know that feeling. Youve been working on a track for a few days and the excitement you had for it just isn't there anymore.

To you, it sounds very bland and boring. Lifeless almost. But you let a trusted, honest friend listen to it and he flips his shit. It turns out the track really is great, you just cant finish it because every time you play it, it bores you and lacks that initial feeling of "wow this is gonna be awesome"

WHY does this happen? How do I avoid this?

I used to (still do kind of) have that problem. but when working on the track in my signature (not advertising) I didn't feel that at all. I spent 17 days and about 90 hours of production time on the project and not once did I feel like shit about it.
Before that tune in my sig there's about 230 unfinished projects because of exactly what youre talking about.

I think honestly what it boils down to is do you REALLY like the project youre working on? Because even now I still listen to the song I made and kind of jam out to it haha. I have had many projects where the first 10 hours im like "omg this is going to be fucking dope" and then i send it to a friend and hes like "yeah dude this is sick let me hear it when youre done" and it never gets done because i moved on.


TLDR;
What I did also that might have helped was forcing myself not to start any other project until that one was finished. Thats probably why it took me 17 days to complete haha. Sure there were some slow days where i didnt get much done and other days I zoomed through sections but I did not let myself open my daw ONCE unless it was to work on that track. Try that?

[test_recordings]

Give yourself a break listening to tracks, your friend's listening with fresh ears. Or you just have different taste in music, you can't help that

[titchbit]

This is just my drunken theory and others might disageree:

Just finish it if you've gotten that far. Even if it's not gonna make you rich and famous, my view is that the more songs you got under the belt, the better. It's like a resume. If you're serious about this, then some day people are gonna wanna see your full resume. If you've only made 4 tunes your whole life, even if they're really good, I bet it would look a lot better if you had 15 decent tunes and 4 REALLY good tunes, ya knoww?

Plus you need to be in the habit of finishing tunes. Every tune you don't finish jusst reinforces that "quitting" mentality imo. You also getting a disproportionately lower amount of practice in the later stages of song writing, such as mixing and mastering, adding transitions, vocals, what have you.

Not to mention, have you noticed that once an artist has established a good reputation, even if they put out a relatively shit song, it's still rated relatively highly? Further down the road, if you want to put an album together, I would definitely want to have a healthy library of old songs to pick from if I wanted to add one or two songs to an album that was three quarters of the way done. If you've got some decent songs sitting on the hard drive, you could always dig them up and then throw them on the album. They won't be the top songs but as long as they get the job done, then that's all you need.

[Crimsonghost]

This is just my drunken theory and others might disageree:

Just finish it if you've gotten that far. Even if it's not gonna make you rich and famous, my view is that the more songs you got under the belt, the better. It's like a resume. If you're serious about this, then some day people are gonna wanna see your full resume. If you've only made 4 tunes your whole life, even if they're really good, I bet it would look a lot better if you had 15 decent tunes and 4 REALLY good tunes, ya knoww?

Plus you need to be in the habit of finishing tunes. Every tune you don't finish jusst reinforces that "quitting" mentality imo. You also getting a disproportionately lower amount of practice in the later stages of song writing, such as mixing and mastering, adding transitions, vocals, what have you.

Not to mention, have you noticed that once an artist has established a good reputation, even if they put out a relatively shit song, it's still rated relatively highly? Further down the road, if you want to put an album together, I would definitely want to have a healthy library of old songs to pick from if I wanted to add one or two songs to an album that was three quarters of the way done. If you've got some decent songs sitting on the hard drive, you could always dig them up and then throw them on the album. They won't be the top songs but as long as they get the job done, then that's all you need.

It's best to just get shit finished, even though you don't like it. Just like my sample pack track. I didn't care for the track but it had to get done.

I think it's also a very natural thing to lose interest in you're tracks. A lot of people still work on songs they don't care for and just butcher them for other things. Personally, this is something I need start working on. Usually, about once a month, I go through my library and delete about 90% of my unfinished tracks. Even though I'm sure there's good ideas in there.

But yeah, just keep makin as many tunes as you can. Every track makes you that much better.

[forbidden]

This happens a lot when you get stuck in little technical details in the composition stage instead of writing and arranging. I find it's best to work from coarse to fine, like making a sculpture. When you have the initial spark of inspiration, try to get the track composed as quickly as possible without letting the technology get in your way. Once you've got all the basic ideas down you can go in and refine everything. Otherwise you'll spend forever listening to the same 8 bar loop and lose all perspective of it by the time it comes to write the next section.

I find the best workflow is to have very discrete sections, almost as if you're a production house with different employees. Don the songwriter hat and get the full idea sketched out, then try to capture a performance acting as a band, then assume the role of the producer and try to tailor the recording and arrangement to suit the performance, then mix the recordings in such a way that they sound cohesive as a track, finally assume the role of the mastering engineer and work on the broad spectral palette of the song in relation to it's future medium. If you can get each job done without dipping into the other roles the whole process will go much smoother and you'll be less likely to stall. Of course doing this perfectly requires a lot of foresight and experience and never completely goes according to plan. But it's a good ideal to shoot for.

this a great post and you should feel great.

[Add9]

You know that feeling. Youve been working on a track for a few days and the excitement you had for it just isn't there anymore.

To you, it sounds very bland and boring. Lifeless almost. But you let a trusted, honest friend listen to it and he flips his shit. It turns out the track really is great, you just cant finish it because every time you play it, it bores you and lacks that initial feeling of "wow this is gonna be awesome"

WHY does this happen? How do I avoid this?

Story of my life... what I do is I try to produce as fast as possible when I'm starting a new track. The moment an idea comes into my head of something to add the track, I do it without thinking or analyzing it. Then later I decide to change or get rid of the parts I don't like.

Just let your creativity take over... but whatever you do, don't be adjusting 0.5 increments of gain on that EQ or fiddling with the release on that compressor. That shit can come later. You can practice sound design later too... now is the time to fucking make some music.

I try to always get an intro, buildup, and drop complete during the first session of working on a track. Sometimes the breakdown as well if I'm really feeling it. The best part about this approach is that the next time I work on the track, I have the better part of a track already arranged, and when I play it all the way through it sounds amazing because it's the first time I heard it all together with fresh ears.

[Crimsonghost]

Something ive been doing a lot latley is using some crappy headphones (ipod) for producing on. That way i dont have to worry about things like eq/compression/ect. I might do some adjusting on the levels, but thats it. Its really helped me get my ideas down a lot faster. Even if they still suck, at least im getting them out of my system for a later use.

[wub]

Listening to my own stuff is about what frame of mind I'm in and the mood it evokes. Most of it has a melancholic feel to it, not sure if that's intentional on a sub conscious level or it's reflective of most of my stuff being written in the evenings or when I'm home alone at the weekends.

[Huts]

I get this feeling when I don't have any direction for the track and I'm stuck trying to add new elements, I quickly get bored. The last 2 tracks I've finished it seemed like I avoided this by trying to do things a little differently.

First I tried to get all the creative parts done first and independent of one another, I'll try to explain. I make my main melody first to get the theme of the track out of the way, this usually leads to me making the first breakdown next, this is usually my favorite part of making a track. Next I'll create the drums. I'll then make the main drop (melody/bass/pads/all the 'musical' elements) and add my drums LAST. This way I've already got an idea of what I want and I can craft my sounds to fit with my drums, but the main idea is already there I just get the fun of making it fit, almost like doing a remix I feel. It seems a little odd but it's really helped, I never really have every part of a section done in totality so I'm always tweaking or adding things which keeps it interesting.

Also I've got a folder with go-to effects and stuff just to get ideas out quickly. I've got some nice uplift/downlifters, impacts, kicks/claps/snares, sidechain triggers etc. that I just start with to get the ball rolling. I used to start a project and spend the first 30mins picking the perfect samples with no idea of where the tracks headed.. recipe for disaster

[fragments]

I know all songs from what we do to classical music has parts like "intros" etc. But am I the only one that doesn't think about this at all for a quite a bit of the composing process?

I usually get about 64 bars of something that progresses quite noticeably over time. Usually start with melody/bass etc. then drums. I look at this as the "fullest" the track will ever be--though I don't define it as being a "main section" or anything.

I bounce all those instrument stems down to audio and then I begin arranging in my DAW chopping up those files and playing around with audio until I start to get something going and move on from there.

I guess my point is I try not to define anything very clearly until I'm about fifty percent done. I may even take my first arrangement, bounce that to audio and begin again chopping/arranging in a new project.

[societyloser1]

This is just my drunken theory and others might disageree:

Just finish it if you've gotten that far. Even if it's not gonna make you rich and famous, my view is that the more songs you got under the belt, the better. It's like a resume. If you're serious about this, then some day people are gonna wanna see your full resume. If you've only made 4 tunes your whole life, even if they're really good, I bet it would look a lot better if you had 15 decent tunes and 4 REALLY good tunes, ya knoww?

Plus you need to be in the habit of finishing tunes. Every tune you don't finish jusst reinforces that "quitting" mentality imo. You also getting a disproportionately lower amount of practice in the later stages of song writing, such as mixing and mastering, adding transitions, vocals, what have you.

Not to mention, have you noticed that once an artist has established a good reputation, even if they put out a relatively shit song, it's still rated relatively highly? Further down the road, if you want to put an album together, I would definitely want to have a healthy library of old songs to pick from if I wanted to add one or two songs to an album that was three quarters of the way done. If you've got some decent songs sitting on the hard drive, you could always dig them up and then throw them on the album. They won't be the top songs but as long as they get the job done, then that's all you need.

my view is that the more songs you got under the belt, the better. It's like a resume. If you're serious about this, then some day people are gonna wanna see your full resume. If you've only made 4 tunes your whole life, even if they're really good, I bet it would look a lot better if you had 15 decent tunes and 4 REALLY good tunes, ya knoww?

Sorry, but that's some stupid advice!
Even finishing your song is stupid advice... If it feels wrong, just move on and start a new one!
And if you really wanna finish the track... Make a basic arrangement, use fade in/out. Call your album dedication, be a prick online and become one of my biggest influences/heroes!

[titchbit]

This is just my drunken theory and others might disageree:

Just finish it if you've gotten that far. Even if it's not gonna make you rich and famous, my view is that the more songs you got under the belt, the better. It's like a resume. If you're serious about this, then some day people are gonna wanna see your full resume. If you've only made 4 tunes your whole life, even if they're really good, I bet it would look a lot better if you had 15 decent tunes and 4 REALLY good tunes, ya knoww?

Plus you need to be in the habit of finishing tunes. Every tune you don't finish jusst reinforces that "quitting" mentality imo. You also getting a disproportionately lower amount of practice in the later stages of song writing, such as mixing and mastering, adding transitions, vocals, what have you.

Not to mention, have you noticed that once an artist has established a good reputation, even if they put out a relatively shit song, it's still rated relatively highly? Further down the road, if you want to put an album together, I would definitely want to have a healthy library of old songs to pick from if I wanted to add one or two songs to an album that was three quarters of the way done. If you've got some decent songs sitting on the hard drive, you could always dig them up and then throw them on the album. They won't be the top songs but as long as they get the job done, then that's all you need.

my view is that the more songs you got under the belt, the better. It's like a resume. If you're serious about this, then some day people are gonna wanna see your full resume. If you've only made 4 tunes your whole life, even if they're really good, I bet it would look a lot better if you had 15 decent tunes and 4 REALLY good tunes, ya knoww?

Sorry, but that's some stupid advice!
Even finishing your song is stupid advice... If it feels wrong, just move on and start a new one!
And if you really wanna finish the track... Make a basic arrangement, use fade in/out. Call your album dedication, be a prick online and become one of my biggest influences/heroes!

wut?

[Crimsonghost]

wut?

[SunkLo]

Yeah I've said something similar before. If you abandon every track at the first sign of struggle, all your experience is going to be skewed towards the beginning stages of production. And then because of that you'll be more likely to struggle once you hit the same point on the next track, causing you to jump ship and repeat the whole process. The only way to break that feedback loop is to persevere through the process and try to follow it to a conclusion. You might not end up with album material but the experience you gain will prove very valuable once you've got a keeper on your hands and need to go all the way.



An odd comparison would be banging some girlfriends before getting married so that you're not incompetent and incapable of having a relationship when you meet your prospective soulmate.

...

[dotcurrency]

wut?

seriously though,

wut?

[Pulp]

I try and listen to my tunes in as many different places as possible. Not just for referencing, but I find just listening to your own tune with other people in the room can make yourself look at your own tune differently. And of course if they're nodding their heads, bonus

[ehbes]

I really like em until I export them and listen back, at which point it becomes meh

[mks]

I'm feelin' it.

I've been blasting it in my car for the last couple of days straight.