Average time spent on a track

Hello, I am relatively new here. I have been producing braindance for a little over 2 years now, and I am at the point where I need to start producing a shitload of music to satisfy the demands of my own ego, my fans, and my label. However, I have a problem. It takes me so long to write a track. We are talking >60 hours per track. I am a very busy student so I don't have much time to produce, so a track can take anywhere from 2-5 months depending on how much detail I put into it.

Those of you that do braindance full time, how long do you spend on a track? And how long have you been producing to get to that point?

del dot

www.d3l.in

i can't fathom spending 2-5 months on a track, unless it was one of those things where i wrote a core bit and left it on a shelf to fill out later.

methods, technique etc. is always evolving. i won't be the same person in five months, and me(now) would fight with me(+5 months). it'd be a mess. fighting over the microwave... no, there's enough of me in here already. best to try and bang it out in a session or three

most likely your problem is perfectionism. let go of some of that (but not all!) and transmute it into quicker track turnaround.

2-5hours

never enough

usually about 6-7 hours / track... i tend to lay down an idea quickly, export it from a DAW (this is the doom of any productive session for me), listen to it occasionally (ok, compulsively) for a few days, then go back and add new ideas. after that i usually call it done so i can get another idea out.

  On 4/5/2011 at 12:26 AM, luke viia said:

usually about 6-7 hours / track... i tend to lay down an idea quickly, export it from a DAW (this is the doom of any productive session for me), listen to it occasionally (ok, compulsively) for a few days, then go back and add new ideas.

God damn, this is the bullshit that happens to me every time. Unfortunately with me, I usually can't find new ideas I like enough for it, so it just dies completely and I am left with 1000 half-baked songs.

Taking two to five months on a track is fine. There is so much music out there that it's pointless to even attempt to put something out unless it's the absolute best you can make it so it has a chance of standing out. Try working on multiple tracks at a time (if you haven't been already doing that).

Most of it starts in a 1-2 hour session, then it sits around for awhile till I decide I want to finish it. Really depends on the track but unless I'm doing something incredibly tedious maybe 3-4 hours with some extra time for mixing if I decide to take a second or third pass. However that doesn't really take into account the times I open a WIP and jam for a bit, maybe tweaking one or two things along the way.

I tend to swing back and forth between starting tracks and finishing them. Unfortunately I tend to be lazy about finishing stuff if it means a lot of tinkering so I try to aim at getting a track to a 'jamable' state in the first session and bounce a rough take to listen to which keeps me motivated to finish good tracks, and helps me let go of the weaker ones.

I used to try and finish stuff before moving on, but I found that they would mutate too much along the way and I'd lose sight of something solid I had at the start or worse overwrite it with a hasty ctrl-s.

i disagree that crafting songs is pointless without perfectionism. i have never thought of each of my tracks as necessarily NEEDING to be the best i could possibly do - sometimes it takes the courage to admit that a track isn't going to turn out how you initially thought. hopefully you'll try again, do something different and keep gaining experience and get better at whatever you're trying to do.

then again releasing music has never been my favorite activity. what's mine is mine

Usually a couple of weeks to a couple of months.

  On 4/5/2011 at 12:46 AM, luke viia said:

i disagree that crafting songs is pointless without perfectionism. i have never thought of each of my tracks as necessarily NEEDING to be the best i could possibly do - sometimes it takes the courage to admit that a track isn't going to turn out how you initially thought.

This. While I'm all for being a tough self-critic & always trying to improve, I think a lot can be learned from doing a whole bunch of little experiments & one-off ideas, as opposed to just taking every track & trying to make it some really slick sounding masterpiece. Needs to be balance between the two.

I can't get round to writing a track without going through a whole series of experiments first, they're an incredibly important part of the process.

Months.

That doesn't even include recording any acoustic instruments.

That being said, I'm always working on several tracks simultaneously.

3-6 hours depending

10-15 hours

I guess something like 20 hours and more. but most of my tracks get worked out few months (2 or 3 maybe) before I really finish it.

  On 4/5/2011 at 1:33 AM, Wall Bird said:

Months.

 

That doesn't even include recording any acoustic instruments.

 

That being said, I'm always working on several tracks simultaneously.

+1. Making a song isn't really a project of "Ok I'll start and finish this in a linear fashion, if I spend 5 hours a day I'll be done in a week". I have to wait for the inspiration, fuck around with the track a little bit at a time and see what comes out.. then spend ages getting the sound right. Noisia spent one night on diplodocus and 6 months on the tide. That's just the way it is, some tracks magically manifest overnight but, for me at least, the majority are challenges if you want them to sound great.

Of course, people have different types of intentions with making music, some people are better at making fun music while some want to be the next mozart..

Making a song with a few melodies and beats is easy but I can't listen to it after the initial phase of "hey this is kinda cool" because it usually feels less lovingly crafted than if I listen to a track that I know I worked really hard on, that magic never goes away.. and I'm really picky with the sound. editing samples, shaping the sound the way you want it etc, like a beautiful painting, it takes time. Coming from the art world before I got into music, and living by Picasso's words "A painting is never finished, only abandoned", I believe the only limit to how good a track can become is the time you spend with it.

Of course, it's shitty when you got 500 WIPs just lying around in the DAW, but it's worth it every time I really nail a piece of a track i would've given up on earlier. Most of my tracks have been unfinished bullshit and at some point I just thought "enough". I used to just want to upload and be done with it as soon as possible, but now, when I get tired of working on a track, I leave it in the DAW for some other time.

The average time is hard to tell, I alternate between month-long periods where I don't make any music at all, and then get this creative surge and work on tracks for days on end. It takes time, much more than I expected when I started making music, but there are worse ways to spend time than making music.

One month per track. But that's concept to mix to master.

two-four hours.

I take about a month or two with anywhere between 3 and 10 tracks getting actual attention at any given time. It usually goes like this:

-initial session, writing the first section or two

-adding a little more

-open it up, listen, no idea how to continue x20

-finally get inspired to continue and add next couple sections, tweaking previous ones and altering mixing all the while

-possibly more listening/doing nothing sessions

-several tweaking sessions, usually involved newly learned techniques

-final mixing

-done

shortest time spent on a finished track was 20 minutes, longest was about 3 months (~10 hours a week)

a few hours.

  On 4/5/2011 at 12:26 AM, luke viia said:

usually about 6-7 hours / track... i tend to lay down an idea quickly, export it from a DAW (this is the doom of any productive session for me), listen to it occasionally (ok, compulsively) for a few days, then go back and add new ideas. after that i usually call it done so i can get another idea out.

This exactly for me. I used to bang out tracks in a couple hours and never revist them for the most part, I'd render out 1-2 tracks a day for weeks on end and put together an album, i have about 13 full-length albums like this. Now I realize how unfinished and bad some(most if not all) of these tracks are, but I do still listen to them on occasion. Now I take way too long just listening to them and end up putting really only about 5-10 real hours into a track but I think about them for a long time before I decide what to do next with them. I'd say my first phase was along the lines of building up chops for different techniques, my whole philosphy was this: Make a track, try something new each time, if it sucks then too bad, next time you will do better and learn from this. I very very rarely rendered out a track more than once. What I do now is a culmination of certain aspects of these experiments that I really liked, it still is pretty shitty music as I didn't really learn the discipline of spending time on a track and getting my mixing techniques down, but they are definitely better overall and I still feel like I am true to my roots and my core beliefs on my style of electronic music. Focus has shifted basically, but I still fall back to the techniques I learned in my early creative phase, i wish i could be as prolific and still have the discipline of what I am doing lately, this will hopefully be the next step for me, but I'm too ADD now to just focus on music when I am in front of a computer.

HAHA LOL nice avatar

im currently trying to finish tracks from 4 months ago but it seems to suck very hard to get in the same mindset again, it will probably end up crap anyway

best tracks are usually made in 7-10 hours in a bender afterglow state of mind