Your Musician's Faults

It can be seen as a negative way of viewing things, but yeah I suppose finding out what are your own faults or lacks are as musicians is a good way to improve yourself.

So here are mines (un-exhaustive list) :

- I'm not good at using reverbs. Really have to work about the way the sounds in my track are organized into a sonic reverberating space

- Some of my sounds are still very weak. I need to give them more life

- I tend to make the parts of my songs too short because I'm afraid of repetition, but the result sometimes brings the impression I don't give enough time for the music to "surround" the listener

haha I wanted to list just two of them but a lot more are coming now. Though I don't want to bore you + I can keep them for later. Anyway it's a pretty good exercise to lie them down

your turn !

I'm not satisfied with the bass sounds I usually come up with, and making a decent 5-minute track out of a good 10 second section still doesn't come very easy to me (I get the feeling everyone else can build up a track quickly out of a main idea). Also, sometimes I get the feeling my music sounds a bit too childish and inconsequential.

  On 3/26/2012 at 12:02 AM, kokeboka said:

I'm not satisfied with the bass sounds I usually come up with, and making a decent 5-minute track out of a good 10 second section still doesn't come very easy to me (I get the feeling everyone else can build up a track quickly out of a main idea). Also, sometimes I get the feeling my music sounds a bit too childish and inconsequential.

I personally can't. And I don't think it's a thing you necessarily have to do

if find it hard to make complicated drum patterns, which affects my music so i'm not making drill stuff i make my own kinda thing, which isn't bad.

bad into negative.

I get frustrated at myself really easy.

My guitar riffs are too sexy, my MPD drumming has too much groove, every time I have a new idea I end up recording a new song to 90% instead of finishing the last two dozen I want to complete.

i loop everything because i'm too lazy to just play it

i arrange/write on the fly so there' not much thought put into my songs

i also have a habit of making really simple and repetetive drum patterns because i really don't pay that much attention to them

i'm also very sloppy and i rarely fix things later

i rarely finish anything in general

i enjoy process of creation most of all and rarely care about the finished product (if there is any)

i really suck at this, i think

I don't understand chord progressions.

*heads to musictheory.net*

I have never ever been totally happy with anything I have ever done, I don't know when to leave a track alone or when to add more and I hate doing everything myself.

Plus everything else that everyone has already mentioned and a further list the length of a giant horses cock.

Uh...maybe not being able to see my faults could be a fault.

Whenever I'm working on something, it either feels totally right or I know how I can make it feel totally right & just have to wait until I'm in the proper mindset for beats/melodies/weird fart noises/etc. It's only once something's a few years old that I might listen to it & think "damn, what was I thinking there. Totally wouldn't do that the same way".

I guess what happens is I only work with sounds that appeal to me & figure out how to make them do whatever I want, but over time tastes change & what I might have been really digging on in the 7th grade no longer does it for me.

That said I still like pretty much all of my old music except some of the stuff from college that sounds rather embarrassingly OMG JUST DISCOVERED IDDUMZ

I feel like I suck at everthing but just push on until the track is done.

I also hit the wall in terms of arrangement rather frequently. D:

This is why I've departed from the DAW workflow as it really doesn't allow for improvisation in song structure.

My biggest flaw by far (certainly over the last couple of years) - Laziness ...

This has pretty much been my workflow for ages now -> Get home from work. Boot up Buzz. Look at the empty machine view screen. Sigh and close it again. Rinse - Repeat.

mix downs are probably my least favourite thing in the world. always feel like I'm totally clueless and just bluffing my way through. never ever happy with any mixes of stuff I've done, and any that are good is a complete and utter fluke.

I'm really bad at "letting go", far to much of a control freak for my own good sometimes. For example, made this Reaktor patch the other day, a sort of semi random glitch beat generator. was spitting out some really cool sort of Richard Devine type sounds. But rather than just recording that and using it in a track, I had to go through and trim, crop, edit, process each individual sound and get just super OCD about the whole thing, spend ages resequencing it all and basically just waste a load of time in order to satisfy my ego :(

I can get frustrated very quickly. if I'm working on trying to get a snare drum to sound just right in a track or something, tweaking and fiddling and so on, can never get it quite right and eventually I just get really pissed off, shut down computer and storm off in a tantrum.

I'm terrible at finalising things. Calling something finished or making any sort of final decision. I always feel as though with a little more time, or a little more consideration, something could be improved.

basically, I'm a sucker for the law of diminishing returns, and super OCD about everything :/

  On 3/26/2012 at 12:16 PM, mcbpete said:

My biggest flaw by far (certainly over the last couple of years) - Laziness ...

 

This has pretty much been my workflow for ages now -> Get home from work. Boot up Buzz. Look at the empty machine view screen. Sigh and close it again. Rinse - Repeat.

This sounds pretty familiar to be honest, I know a load of people who've gone through this sort of thing. more often than not though it's not laziness, just that you don't get the same thrill from that setup anymore. It's pretty funny how exciting and inspiring a new approach to music making can be, and how much fun it is playing around with a new sequencer or something. Maybe it's just worth trying a couple different programmes, or even an old 4 track or something. Just find a different approach to music making that gives you the same thrill as you undoubtedly had when you stated using Buzz.

Boy, it seems like we all have some collective flaws.

I get very impatient with music, even more with my own, not allowing it to, as described, "surround the listener".

I have close to a 100 project files lying around, over 50% things I said I would "get back to in a few days". It can be everything from almost a full track to one bit of sound.

And what I believe to be my biggest flaw:

I am too easily drawn away from projects. I can be incredibly dedicated to a track for days, pretty much not opening another project in the process, then my mood changes, I hear a specific record that takes my mind in another direction and then I'll pretty much just leave the project to rot until I dig it up again.

It`s hard for me to keep it simple.

I get really worried that my music never has a lot of impressiveness to it. Like, I put a lot of work into cutting and sequencing my drums and sequencing melodies and such but I feel like I'm missing something to make my music "cool"...

Finishing tracks let alone doing anything but wanky jams on whatever toys I fancy playing with at the moment. When I try to make a track anymore it ends up feeling really forced.

Also:

- Making drum sounds that don't suck

- Coming up with non-derivative variations of patterns

- "Production", e.g. using EQ, compressors, etc.

Also hearing a lot of myself in the above posts, just too lazy to even quote them. lol

Too much aimless playing and jamming instead of practice that's focused on improving technique or knowledge.

  On 3/26/2012 at 11:55 AM, slightlydrybeans said:

This is why I've departed from the DAW workflow as it really doesn't allow for improvisation in song structure.

This is why I don't use trackers much anymore, except on handheld/mobile devices.

I just use Reaper as a beefy ass tape recorder.

  On 3/26/2012 at 2:20 PM, TechDiff said:

This sounds pretty familiar to be honest, I know a load of people who've gone through this sort of thing. more often than not though it's not laziness, just that you don't get the same thrill from that setup anymore. It's pretty funny how exciting and inspiring a new approach to music making can be, and how much fun it is playing around with a new sequencer or something. Maybe it's just worth trying a couple different programmes, or even an old 4 track or something. Just find a different approach to music making that gives you the same thrill as you undoubtedly had when you stated using Buzz.

Sorry to bogart the shit out of this thread but there are two excellent points here. Not only that what seems like a flaw can actually be a good thing: your gut is telling you to try something new. But also that changing things up frequently can be really refreshing.

Coincidentally my current setup is centered around an old 4-track :)

I tend to stop after I get a few minutes into a track, even though sticking it out and getting to the end often yields better and more satisfying results.