Our server costs ~$56 per month to run. Please consider donating or becoming a Patron to help keep the site running. Help us gain new members by following us on Twitter and liking our page on Facebook!
Current time: March 28, 2024, 6:44 pm

Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
One at a time or what?
#1
One at a time or what?
I just posted this in the dubstep forum where it's probably more relevant but I know there's a few artistic type people on this forum too.

When I make music I've realized I have to make more than one at a time because if I listen to the same song consecutively so many times in a row it drives me crazy.

Especially while mixing the song because to me mixing is the most godawful shit part about creating a piece.  

Anyone else go through this and how do you combat it?  Personally I try and work on more than one song at a time so I'm not listening to the same one over and over.

I remember Steve Merchant who created the UK comedy the office with Ricky Gervais saying that he couldn't enjoy watching the office after it was made for about 2 years.

So for 2 years every time he would watch it, he couldn't watch it like an audience member he was still seeing it as a producer and looking out for flaws.


Are you ready for the fire? We are firemen. WE ARE FIREMEN! The heat doesn’t bother us. We live in the heat. We train in the heat. It tells us that we’re ready, we’re at home, we’re where we’re supposed to be. Flames don’t intimidate us. What do we do? We control the flame. We control them. We move the flames where we want to. And then we extinguish them.

Impersonation is treason.





Reply
#2
RE: One at a time or what?
I liked seeing one song through, but if I wasn't feeling it/nailing takes/layering too much, I moved on. So I usually had two or three songs cooking at once.

Reply
#3
RE: One at a time or what?
(December 18, 2016 at 11:01 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: I liked seeing one song through, but if I wasn't feeling it/nailing takes/layering too much, I moved on. So I usually had two or three songs cooking at once.

I never did much actual song writing, per se, but I've done quite a bit of arrangements. Whenever I was stuck over one, I'd either work on a different piece for a bit, or (what I found more effective) forget about music altogether for a bit - go to a film, build a piece of furniture, whatever. When I got back to the music, it seemed as if the transposition or progression I was looking for was there all the time.

I think it has something to do with using a different part of your brain for a while.

Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
Reply
#4
RE: One at a time or what?
When I was writing and recording music, I'd always have a number of tracks I'd switch between, every time I felt I wasn't making progress with the current one, or when my mood changed. Occasionally I'd have a manic spur of enthusiasm and/or an upcoming deadline for one particular tune and then I'd focus on that one song for a few sleep-deprived days. I'd usually only actually finish a small selection of tracks, I'd be working on, but having a large library of different projects, covering a variety of moods and styles, and at various stages of completion, made it easier for me to always have something I could work on, if I felt desensitized, stuck, or bored. Doing something else is often the best solution for writer's block and - in the long run - minimizes the time wasted, blankly staring at the screen.

I don't think there's a"right way" to go about the process, but I can't stress enough the importance of "fresh ears", during most stages of creating an audio track. If you're bored and frustrated, it's probably going to come across in the music in some way. If your ears are tired and overly familiar with the material - you'll miss a lot of things, especially during mixing. It's amazing what kind of self-delusion our brains are capable of, especially when dealing with repeated patterns, for a prolonged amount of time. I still sometimes discover clicks, noises, and distortion in my old tracks, that I never noticed before, despite - or perhaps because of - having heard them countless times.

I find, that working on a number of tracks at once also helps to keep them stylistically and sonically cohesive, which is particularly useful, if you want your demo, or commercial release to sound like an album, rather than a compilation. Of course, in such case mixing and mastering of the material is usually done after it's all been written, arranged and recorded, so that the dynamics and the frequency spectrum are even across all the tracks. It's probably less important, if you're making single tracks to put on YouTube, although it's still best to give each song at least a few days before mixing/mastering, so you have the aforementioned fresh ears and some perspective, at this crucial stage of production.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
Reply
#5
RE: One at a time or what?
No I'm very linear. One song at a time and as little backtracking as possible.

Best two pieces of advice I've ever heard is 11 minutes 3 seconds onwards in this video:





If I find myself listening to my song over and over looking for flaws in it I find that that tends to be one of my less good pieces of music and I'm probably better off just moving the next one rather than editing the fuck out of that one. It's okay to make mediocre stuff sometimes, better off moving onwards and doing better next time, in my experience.

I hate editing. I prefer tweaking. Tweaking as I go.

I think overanalysis, looking for flaws and over-editing goes against creativity and the creative process. And in fact as a very overly analytical person with a lot of obsessive compulsiveness about me I do find that making music is one of the things that helps me with my overanalysing and my obsessiveness and compusliveness, when I'm doing it right. When the O.C.D.ishness bleeds into the music and I can't stop fiddling with the same parts of the same song changing them more and more and regurgitating them then that's when I need to take a break.
Reply





Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)