only weeks eh? let’s talk years…
i get so f****ing critical about my music sometimes and i stifle everything that i try to write. i will start a song, spend a little while on it, and then i will get COMPLETELY overwhelmed with the task. i will get overly critical about every aspect of it and decide “this is shit, nobody will ever want to listen to this”, and it ends up crippling my ability to focus or care about writing music anymore for the time being.
there are so many aspects to songwriting
the technical aspect where you wonder if you are up to par with your peers … but then you wonder if it matters … ?? i have never been a person to use the effects column in trackers very much (too lazy to learn), so i have always wondered if my technical skill is sucky compared to other tracker people. but now that we have vst’s and dsp’s and automations, a lot of those take the place of the effects column and you can actually do things more efficiently, so now i don’t regret not learning those (although i’d still like to learn what a couple of them do)
there’s the creative aspect, when you are trying to write the chord progression and melody for your song… and you are wondering, “is this going to sound too much like that other person’s song?.. does it matter ?” , and then i get into this whole thinking of the structure of music and listenable-ness vs. complexity. if i go and listen to most of my favourite pop tunes, they’re all pretty simple with a lot of them having similar transitions between chords that are “pleasing to the ears”, you all know what i’m talking about – beautiful music is mathematical, i guess … and there are only so many of those certain transitions that are MORE pleasing like that than others, to me at least… so my struggle is to find some of these chord progressions that sound beautiful like that for my own music, but don’t sound like all the ones somebody else has already written. but the problem here is you can get into some abstract shit, chord progressions that don’t sound as pleasing — this is not what i want for my music either, because …
when i listen to what i consider “good” music, something goes off in my head, a little place that i call “selection”, it usually happens about the 4th or 5th time that i’ve heard a song, it will be new enough to me to be interesting, but familiar enough for me to know how the song goes – this is kind of the meaning of life to me, i guess… it creates this atmosphere in my head where the current songs i am listening to mesh with all the other events of my life, events of the day and places i have been, things i have experienced… for example, listening to a new song for the 1st time on sunday night, liking it… listening to it 3 or 4 more times sunday night, once on monday morning… so now i am familiar with the song, and then drive to work on monday morning and listen to the song again while i watch the sunrise – bam, peak experience right there … i will remember this for the rest of my life, and i try to create these moments as often as i can ( i did it just this morning actually with a song by eisley called “telescope eyes”… never heard of the band till last night but now i like em a lot) sometimes i will have a string of songs all in a row , 5 or 20 over a period of a few weeks or months… but then sometimes i will go for months and months without finding any new songs like this… sometimes because i just don’t have enough time to go search for new music …
but the problem is that only certain songs can do this for me, it’s not like i can listen to a shitty song and get the same experience … so my goal is to make songs like this …
ramble ramble, if you are still reading this, you are probably wacked out. i don’t know how i changed the topic like that
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