How much time do you spend on your tracks?

  tauboo said:

all the options make me lose focus and i get worried about putting a lot of time and effort into taking it in the wrong direction. if i'm especially pleased with the track so far, that becomes even more of a problem.

 

then working on it becomes more and more sparse, to the point that i'm just listening to it. then i end up quickly making an ending and recording it. never to touch it again, and if i do nothing comes of it.

 

blah.

Totally totally relate to this. I hate it when a track rocks so far but you feel like its hard to esculate it to the next level and you so desperately don't want to ruin its potential.

I had one tune, which was totally fuckin killer and the fuckin file corrupted!! I swear that track was totally coming together from start to finish. Even months now after its gone I still have the melody/harmonies in my mind and that is weird. Its almost like the trauma of losing it has created a permenant stamp in my mind.

I try to sum things up for a track in at least a week ifnot a couple of days. I come back to it after doing more tracks and mix everything down, sometimes edit the larger structure. if I can't get a good sounding product in that period of time i tend to abandon it. my philosophy is that if the general idea for a song doesn't fully develop in a week or so then its probably not a very good idea to begin with.

i take everything from minutes to years. mostly i do work on stuff in big chunks of 3hrs or so of intense tracking (tracking as opposed to making samples, patches, editing etc. etc. which i do when not in the mood for composing, although they all get changed and modified as i compose as well.) usually its as long as i'm not interrupted by nature or fannybawses.

i'll tend to do 3hr chunks several times per track - i get a rough base of the track in the first iteration (usually takes me about 50 patterns in the tracker), add tons or change tons in the second then take it properly where i want to go in the last couple. final sequencing and all those tiny little bits of variation and mixing tweaks are done when i can finally be arsed to do that. usually theres a lot done on the way but there's normally a point near completion where i let a track sit for ages til i get round to tidying up and mixing down.

  Mr. Magoo said:

i usally start with either a bassline and a drum pattern, then the melody, and then i just sit there, cause i have no idea what to do next PLEASE HELP!!! seriously

I just run the amen through ring mod and call it day.

sometimes I add the jungle bird or a king tubby 440hz beep with tape echo.

add some "record scratching" and maybe a chuck D sample.

oh yeah, then I put an amen break in there again (with supatrigga on there, of course).

actually, leave your b-line, drums and melody and make them huge liek led zeppelin. spend time on space and atmospheric delays and effects and you will create all the rest of the background shit this way. or not. or throw the amen back in.

I frequently exercise myself to force myself into write a track in 1-3 hours, usually its silly or makes fun of a genre of music on purpse.

Usually my tracks take roughly 15 days.

Sometimes they have taken months.

Sometimes months. Usually a week or two of straight up studio time though. I say months because i'll take a step back from something and ponder for a few days at a time too. If I hadn't been switching between sequencers for the past couple years I would have saved all my old files so I could keep working on some of them too.

usually leave it till the last crumb of my day

its a bit of a hassle really

A friend of mine starts and finishes a song almost every day. For me this just doesnt seem to work. I have to let tracks rest for a while ,forget all about them and then after some months re-discovering them. It's like I can hear much clearer then what the track needs, where it goes etc.

  Derelic7 said:

I've always been really impatient with my tracks and "finish" them way too soon, usually resulting in them being half assed, repetitive or generally unpolished.

I do that, and let them sit on my hard drive for a year or two. And some of them I'll come back to and just be able to finish. It even tends to not even sound anything like it originall did.

The only tracks I have ever properly finished took weeks or months. A lot of that time was spent listening to the track over and over again agonizing over what to do with it next. (I thought this shit was sposed to be fun!)

3 days to a week on average

I'm the same, around about a week. Though the one I'm working on at the moment is 20 minutes and it's taking quite a while (3 weeks so far, phew!).

around a month or so generally

On average now I tend to take just under a week, working probably an average of 8 or 9 hours a day. (for experimental electronic stuff) For a while I was banging them out in three day spurts, but they weren't quite as sophisticated in the programming department back then. The track that I made faster than any other took 11 hours --I had half a day to start and finish a track for this compilation, and my submission was the follow up to the Venetian Snares track (he gave me some nice source samples to work with, which helped). If anyone's interested, it's posted here:

The tracks in the compilation were all joined together by someone else, so the start of my track now also contains the ending of Aaron's song, Peeing Yelloq. I think it works.

Usually I like to take lots of breaks in between so that I can get back to it with fresh ears. The best ideas always occur after I've had a good sleep break. Might have something to do with the parts playing around in my head while I fall asleep. If I work on a track for several hours straight, I often come up with lots of shit ideas I have to reinvent later or scrap when I can listen back more objectively.

about 20 mins to make a decent sketch...and about X years to finish that sketch.