complain about lack of productivity in here

i cant do a goddam thing :( i'm not even interested in making music anymore. i havent been interested in months. i'm in the middle of an ep i was supposed to finish this summer. i dont feel like anything i do is relevant anymore. i feel like i'm doing shit that's already been done. my tastes have changed. i dont like what i make anymore. i'm tired of hearing my guitar. synths sound too normal and inorganic.

just vent my brothers. just vent.

I feel everything around me and my mind is too cluttered to really get somewhere, everything feels like I'm just going to go nowhere and give up after fucking around for a while.

I feel trapped.

In a way it feels like I should crack open my skull somehow, either through physical or synthetic means, but this won't work...

yeah, I always feel like I don't have the time or place to make music. Specially now that it's freezing cold in my house. My brain flows with ideas for great toons, but I just can't get the right time to do them.

fuck school adn life for keeping me from mah synths

same here man, I have about 9 half finished tracks, and im sick of them all.

i think of great shit everywhere except my house where i end up forgetting everything, i guess i'm too distracted here.

i discovered a wonderful drug that really helps develop these "sketches", it's called alcohol

forreals, not the smartest thing to do if you are mixing a track properly but ARRANGING

GOLD

Jerry,

GOLD.

Ahhh... *relaxes*

Yeah, same really. I feel I'm always restricted by something like my lack of equipment but I really can't afford shit tbh when I'm still at school. Getting myself a laptop to put up in my room where all my synths and gear are actually, it'll help a lot (arriving literally in a few hours). Before I'd been sampling everything then taking my sampler places to record it that was pretty restricting to be honest... stupid I know but I've really needed this laptop for ages. Without sounding sad (fails) I'm pretty hyped up about it actually... I used to fucking love just messing about for hours in my mini-studio making tracks or just making cool noises it didn't matter to me. About the last year it's been pretty much dead but things seem to be recovering now.

  ieafs said:

  Fred McGriff said:

i cant do a goddam thing :( i'm not even interested in making music anymore. i havent been interested in months. i'm in the middle of an ep i was supposed to finish this summer. i dont feel like anything i do is relevant anymore. i feel like i'm doing shit that's already been done. my tastes have changed. i dont like what i make anymore. i'm tired of hearing my guitar. synths sound too normal and inorganic.

you could muck about a bit with these ideas:

 

do at least one song sketch every day for a week. i imagine you have a job or whatever, so for 2 hours or something every night try and spontaneously get something down without worrying about the sound-quality or mixing etc. you might just have two chord progressions with a simple melody over them. then just put them away for a few weeks and come back and work on the ones that 'stick'. just in general i think this is a good idea to have lots of little sketches of things around so when you feel like you can't seem to come up with anything, you can just go through your 'sketch' folder or mindisc or whatever and see if anything there takes your fancy. you instantly feel less bad if you have say 100 little ideas/seeds of songs rather than nothing at all.

 

do a cover of a song where you like part of it, but don't like the whole song. and in your cover just try and rectify the whole song. this seems to help because you start thinking in terms of the 'box' of the song... there's less pressure because you think that you're sort of arranging material that already exists, rather than the magical act of trying to come up with something out of thin air. when you're doing this you'll often find that there's like 10% of the actual song left there and everything else you've come up with yourself.

 

you play guitar right? (beak aren't you?) try and learn some new songs. i'm one of those people who never really learns by rote other people's songs. i don't just sit down and peal off a led zeppelin album or something... i just kind of improvise and muck around the whole time. but learning other people's songs i find is pretty nice sometimes because you discover a neat voicing or a nifty chord progression or something in these songs... takes your playing out of a rut sometimes too because you are subtly breaking free from those sort of habits you have in your playing. a thing i think to do as well is to arrange songs for solo fingerpicking guitar. i'm working on 'the spy who loved me' right now and it's kind of a fun challenge to arrange it for the melody, bass-line and chordal accompaniment to be all played similtaneously on guitar.

 

listen to a style of music you haven't really paid much attention to before. something really alien like traditional indian music is good because it kind of makes you throw away any mental rules you have in your head of what music is/isn't... that whole thing where a lot of that music is in a minor key which to western-ears is considered 'sad' but isn't necessarily taken that way there. you're probably like me and listen to loads of types of music, but there's always something completely new to listen to... and you don't have to start branching out into post-underground-psych-grottcore either... usually there's lots of stuff more close to home that you don't even think about. country music is a good example of that, people kind of just ignore it as hick music or something, but there's so much good stuff out there. same with early folk records and things... things like that are especially good because you have to listen in a different way sometimes. the way that a lot of folk music is built on traditional chord progressions or themes. and you've got to start listening to things like their inflections or just the pure emotion of the song rather than thinking always in novel chord progressions or timbre (like i do).

another thing i think people sometimes over-look is tradtional music from other countries. i mean it's mental, there's so many cultures and things out there with completely different styles of music that you just don't ever hear. a few months ago i heard a bagpipe/drum troupe thing practising at a local park and i really got into it and i was thinking "man, i'd love to hear more stuff like that". i'd just not thought of it before or thought of that sort of cliche of what bagpipe music is. but this was this hardcore fucking WAR MUSIC with 20 odd snare drummers completely tearing it up. and there must be loads of stuff like that out there... you know, rock music as we think of it i guess has been around for 40 odd years... and there's a lifetime's worth of great music contained in there... not to mention how new electronic music is. and think about something like traditional japanese shakuachi music that's been around for at least a 1000 or something :laughing:

 

try writing music in your head. what i mean is, write it in terms of images and texture and colour - not as notes on a stave or blips on a screen. work out what you'd like the song to be like and just note down the ideas. just think about how you'd like the song to make you feel or what you want to convey with it rather than the mechanics of doing so... i've got a sort of project i've been working on for a few years and i've only got some basic chord-progressions and source material, but i've got a notebook completely full with ideas about what i'm trying to do. a sort of blue-print of what i want the music to do and 'feel' and stuff like that.

 

or maybe try a different approach. try and write a song with only two chords and melody. set little rules like that and see what you can do within the confines of those limits...

 

anyway, i don't really know... i think the best policy is not to doubt that you're ever going to be able to write music you like again... more that you're waiting for it to arrive and what you're doing in the meantime is planting lots of little seeds so there's more of a chance something with actually grow into a flower.

wow thanks for the input

the only thing that would make that post better is a *closes briefcase* at the end

  Fred McGriff said:

i'm not even interested in making music anymore.

 

i havent been interested in months.

 

i'm in the middle of a (demo) i was supposed to finish this summer.

 

i dont feel like anything i do is relevant anymore.

 

i feel like i'm doing shit that's already been done.

 

my tastes have changed.

i feel about the same. i have much less free time than i did a year ago. i think most of all my tastes have changed. im optimistic though. making music has begun to be enjoyable again. ill never make any kind of money at this so when its not fun, i dont try. when's the next p168?

I have installed Energy XT + a load of free synths onto a 1 gig pendrive. I secretly installed asio4all onto my work computer. I sit there when no one is looking with my AKG 271's on and work on little music TEEHEHHEEEE.

With all seriousness, I've somehow come up with my most brilliant work trying to "sneak" the music out of me. THen I go home and write jungle drums and craziness ontop of it and do all the stuff I couldn't do at work cuz its a pendrive (LOL).

Fred you have a desk job right? i DARE you to try it tomarrow, ok?

Edit:

EXAMPLE!!!!

Like do not tell anyone, but when no one was looking about 15 minutes ago I made this SUPER SNEAKY LIKE!!!!

sneaky.wavFetching info...

Recording vocals pisses me off (unless it's harmonies). It almost never sounds as good in the studio as it does live, and when I get a take that often sounds good enough in my headphones, it sounds way subpar on my moniters. Fuck vocals. I spent two days getting nowhere with my leads on a song, though I did get all the harmonies down... but then I attempted some percussion stuff that sounded stupid. Guess I'll just have to wait until I can record a full kit in a bigger studio. I hate having incomplete recordings waiting for extra goods. GRRRR.

i've been in kind of a lull point myself. plenty of time, but just feeling kind of meh and uninspired. i read part of ieafs's post, and then managed to lose myself in cubase for a few hours... definitely a good post.

what resonates for me:

1. do something every day, regardless of result

2. work on trying to convey something specific

i started up cubase intending to apply no. 2 for the sake of no. 1, and it went a lot better than i expected.

  acid1 said:

I have installed Energy XT + a load of free synths onto a 1 gig pendrive. I secretly installed asio4all onto my work computer. I sit there when no one is looking with my AKG 271's on and work on little music TEEHEHHEEEE.

 

 

With all seriousness, I've somehow come up with my most brilliant work trying to "sneak" the music out of me. THen I go home and write jungle drums and craziness ontop of it and do all the stuff I couldn't do at work cuz its a pendrive (LOL).

 

Fred you have a desk job right? i DARE you to try it tomarrow, ok?

 

Edit:

 

EXAMPLE!!!!

Like do not tell anyone, but when no one was looking about 15 minutes ago I made this SUPER SNEAKY LIKE!!!!

sneaky.wavFetching info...

haha i did this a bit, i admit. i also did grunt/ground work like chopping up loops in recycle, as that takes less focus.

We're getting our stuff played at a concert in 3 weeks and I think we're a bit short on tracks, so I'm busting my ass off right now trying to put something together. I've finished one track, my friend has got another ready, but since you can't rush creativity it's hard to just put a lot of stuff together. So far I think we've got 1½ hours of material, but we still need 30 minutes more!

Earlier this evening I was bored so I made this.

The track itself doesn't really make any sense, and I wanted to a beat to it but I gave up and decided it could work as an intro of some sort...*mumbles*

  Fred McGriff said:

i feel like i'm doing shit that's already been done.

I used to be like that about 2 years ago and it severely hindered my productivity. I'd start a tune and give up quickly because I wasn't making anything unique. I eventually came to the conclusion that it doesn't matter and stopped caring about the "uniqueness" of my music. So, now i don't censor myself and make pretty generic music....and now, I actually have lots of fun making music and am more productive. Stop aiming so high and make music for the sake of making music. If you can't do that, then you're better off selling your gear.

  Jubal said:

data addiction > music making

buy a synth and all your downloading problems will go away

you're just getting old

I've made 26 albums in the past 3 years.

  Invisible Sandwich said:

I've made 26 albums in the past 3 years.

hi aaron

  HYPERFUKBOT said:

  Invisible Sandwich said:

I've made 26 albums in the past 3 years.

hi aaron

  Invisible Sandwich said:

I've made 26 albums in the past 3 years.

If that were true then it wouldn't remotely be cool.

I've made 3 years in the last 26 albums.

I've eaten 260 meals while listening to 3 albums in the past 5 years.

  Promo said:

If that were true then it wouldn't remotely be cool.

Not only is it true, it's also remotely cool.

I didn't say all the albums are good. There's probably about 10 I still like to this day. It's all practice really. The more you do it the better you get at it, just like playing an instrument or a sport or fucking a black chick.

I'm really hyped up about getting my new laptop into place in my studio, I've got make space for it though and I've been busy (I live in this shitty 17th century house where rooms weren't designed with logic).

There is one song that is like a masterpiece... its metal+electronic music craziness like better then smegma, however my laptop crashed when there was only about 3 bars left of the song, and all i have is a wave output...

I can't figure out what to do about those 3 bars, the song is like so perfect that if I blagged the last 3 bars it would be very noticible