Musical Nausea

hi music makers,

I'd like to discuss a topic which bothers me particularly and I'm sure some of you can relate to this. We all have our own way to deal with music making but we're all more or less made the same way and I guess we all reproduce some schemes (which, to some extent, you could probably find in any creative process).

So, when I make music, and more precisely when I'm delivering efforts to get a track from a first idea to a "finished" state, I come across different phases. First I believe in it strongly, then most of the time I tend to have a phase where I doubt about it and have problems hearing it as a whole ; that grows on me slowly across a couple of days and if it comes up well, I finally identify where I have to put my effort to make more out of it, which leads me to the more difficult phase : getting in all those details which give the required depth to the thing, keeping in mind it also has to sound cohesive throughout. Sometimes it works better than other times, but if I succeed in doing that I get my track finished.

The thing I want to discuss comes right after that and for some reason I experience it even more those days. After getting a track finished, I went through so much focus on it that one day after that I can't hear the track any more without tons of self criticism. I literally get disgusted by it, and it doesn't sound as a whole any more. With some tracks, the time passes and at some point I'm able to enjoy it again, sometimes even fully (but sometimes not).

Can someone relate to that or experience it with some variations? I'm interested to know!

Haha, yes, been having that problem too, but so far it has always gotten better with time. I just have to take a break for a few weeks, after that i hear it for what it is, because I'm less used to hearing it.

yeah this happens to me a lot...i think it's just a case of over playing and over criticising your own work to a point that you grow to hate it....this is why i hardly ever go back and change a track once it's "finished" coz i really can't be arsed to get into it again and I've moved on...lately I've been finding that just doing stuff really slowly helps....like do some beats one night then maybe go back a week later and do the bassline or whatever, then a few days after that some pads or something until the track is pretty much done... then leave that for a while, come back with fresh ears and tie the thing together into a finished tune. sometimes I'll think right, I'll work on that tune later...fire everything up, play what I've done so far back and instantly get annoyed with it and think it sounds shit. this is when i would have used to scrap the whole thing and start something new, but lately if i start getting annoyed or whatever i'll just switch off and leave it for a few days, even weeks until I'm really in the right creative mood to move the thing forward. not conducive to getting stuff done particularly quickly but you can't force creativity.

lately i like the stuff that i do when im not trying to do stuff. every once in awhile something just happens and i dont know how i did it and i definitely couldnt repeat, but i like it better than anything i could do in a trying hard mindset.

trying and trying hard are sort of stressful and frustrating, and lately i figure i don't like having those feelings cause everything except creating my fantasy dream world is like that. in short, i dont want all my art to be tragedies so i move toward better estates or at least i hope to. maybe thats where set and setting come in.

Ear fatigue + creative process cycles are somewhat of a bitch. I've been fortunate lately in leaving work think it's a pile of crap, then coming back the next day and being pleasantly surprised by what I left behind. The below list has a definite truth to it:

I think when you make something you should put in 'in a drawer' for a couple weeks and then listen to it again with fresh ears to see how it holds up. That's a common practice among writers but I think it makes sense for musicians too.

And when I'm working on a tune, I work on it in chunks with days in between so I get some distance while I'm working on it. I think that might address your problem.

We're obviously all going through this and I think it's necessary. To me the message we're getting then isn't that very mean "this is shitty" like it appears to be but more like "dude step back from this tune, do something else, another tune maybe, I'm just exhausted right now!". I'd say the more time you spend on only one track the more time you have to spend away from it. Focusing for days on only one project at a time isn't a good idea anyway imo!

I like this thing wise man once say:

There was a pottery teacher. He had a new project for his class.

'For this term I am going to split you into 2 groups, group A & group B' he told the class.

'group A are being marked on how many pots they can make, group B on how good their pots are, the group that wins will be crowned the best group!'

So group A set about making tons of pots & group B started trying to make their one amazeballs pot.

At the end of the term, and the unveiling of each team's score. Everyone was amazed to find that group A's pots were of a higher quality than group B's. Because they made, made mistakes, made more, made more mistakes, learnt from them.

So yeah, maybe leave the one amazing tune & make loads of shit and practice being a musician ..

Soz if OT a bit but you made me think of it

nice to see everyone seems to be more or less in the same boat. I was just surprised to notice that I've felt like that more than before with my tracks lately. this coincides exactly with the time I changed my work flow completely, letting the computer on the side and starting with hardware only. I guess it has mainly to do with the fact I tend to produce more repetitive tracks and it ends up in more ear fatigue. As I became aware of that I started to make something some of you speak of : taking more pauses between the different sessions of making the track, and generally working on some different parts / sounds in each session. That's a nice formula really. Now I have to learn not wanting to hear the track compulsively after it's finished - so far I couldn't prevent myself from doing that and in the last couple of listening before I give up and give the track a pause, this "nausea" grows.

  On 12/30/2014 at 1:11 AM, lala said:

I like this thing wise man once say:

There was a pottery teacher. He had a new project for his class.

'For this term I am going to split you into 2 groups, group A & group B' he told the class.

'group A are being marked on how many pots they can make, group B on how good their pots are, the group that wins will be crowned the best group!'

So group A set about making tons of pots & group B started trying to make their one amazeballs pot.

At the end of the term, and the unveiling of each team's score. Everyone was amazed to find that group A's pots were of a higher quality than group B's. Because they made, made mistakes, made more, made more mistakes, learnt from them.

So yeah, maybe leave the one amazing tune & make loads of shit and practice being a musician ..

Soz if OT a bit but you made me think of it

nice analogy and I'm sure there's truth to it but imo it also depends on to what extent group A has to be quick because at some point producing with the only idea of doing it fast might also result in bad results. But yeah putting some limit to the time you spend on a track is a good idea. What I try to do is to estimate when "i'm bored of making the track" (sounds familiar, doesn't it?) and then choose a day where I have all my time and decide this is the day I'm finishing the track. Most of the time this ends up in some intense work session where I spend like twice the time I thought I would need because there's always something more to polish. But at the end of the day I'm finished and I've the feeling I put everything I could in it. how "accomplished" the track actually sounds is another story but it's a good way to go anyway imo

  On 12/30/2014 at 11:24 AM, Antape said:

nice to see everyone seems to be more or less in the same boat. I was just surprised to notice that I've felt like that more than before with my tracks lately. this coincides exactly with the time I changed my work flow completely, letting the computer on the side and starting with hardware only.

I would say that this is an indication that overall, you are happier with the work you are creating now.

i'm (usually) never satisfied with my music... but on the other hand i'm also, rarely satisfied with other's people music too. bach, beethoven, mozart are usually flawless. some other 'classical' composers are good too. out of electronic music composers auteche are imo sometimes to usually flawless, murcof sometimes, afx sometimes to rarely, others meh...

edit: i'm talking about what's behind music not (just) about technical side of if