Dubstepforum.com

antman wrote: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?

dubunked wrote: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.

SunkLo wrote: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.

antman wrote: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?

dubunked wrote: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.

societyloser1 wrote:

dubunked wrote: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!

dubunked wrote: wut?

Crimsonghost wrote:

dubunked wrote: wut?

dubunked wrote: wut?