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> At some point I became a software engineer, had more disposable income, and had discovered the concept of modular synthesisers. Obviously this is a terrible c

> At some point I became a software engineer, had more disposable income, and had discovered the concept of modular synthesisers. Obviously this is a terrible combination. Good grief but this made me laugh. I partially fell down that damn rabbit hole myself, although managed to avoid modular thus far. I decided to get back into making music during the 2020 lockdowns, spent a lot of time kitting out my office to double as a studio. Spent too much time watching gear reviews on YouTube, and Studio Time by Tom Holkenborg (Junkie XL). Bought a Polybrute, and a bunch of second hand kit: couple of acid boxes, an old Akai sampler (actually two of them from which I built a single "monster" rig), a DX7 (which I can confirm is very hard to program, although Dexed helps), a couple of drum machines, and some other stuff. This is on top of kit I already owned. I also repainted and refloored the room, added 72 sockets, routed power cables around the walls, and fitted industrial cable conduit to route signal cables over the ceiling. I fitted floor to ceiling shelving around 3 sides of the room, and added guitar hangers to the fourth wall. I then fitted a 1200W equivalent LED ceiling light cluster for working, a few other LED lamps, and added a 57 metres (really) of coloured LED strip lighting. Bear in mind we're talking about a room that's 2.5m x 2.5m so it's possibly in the top 10 of the most excessively lit rooms in all of human history. And how many tracks have I finished since I started all this? None. Point 3 is, at least for me the single take home message I absolutely needed to read from this: > 3: You need to find ways to force yourself to finish things. Arbitrary deadlines are actually sometimes good. Number 6 is also an absolute gem: > 6: Making your own work is a good thing to do, even if no one else is interested in what you are making. To create is to be human Great article.

malthaus 4y ago
I feel you! Before lockdown i shared my home with some music gear; now I more or less have a bed in a music studio and my actual, finished musical output has approached 0.
justinlloyd 4y ago
I've struggled with releasing music for years, because the music, in my mind, has to be a finished product. Polished. Perfect. Flawless. For years I felt the same way about art too. I come from a video game background, and games have to be "done" before you start showing them off. Two things changed in my recent past: 1. Getting an art mentor who encouraged me to show off partially completed artwork, showing my working progress. 2. Joining a company where we encourage each other to show off our work that is incomplete, broken or "not even a functioning prototype" with no expectation of criticism or feedback other than an acknowledgement that you have progressed. And then in December of last year I resolved to release stuff, no matter it's state. Once a month I had to release a music track. And so far, I've done pretty well. I slid a little in March, and April came in a little later than I would have liked, but so far, it has been working out well for me. And yeah, number 6 is the gem. I've always held the belief "I create for me, even if nobody else is paying attention." So if I am creating for me, why do I care if it isn't ready to show the world? Just put it on a virtual shelf for display and be proud that I did _something_, _anything_.
wdfx 4y ago
I sympathise but also you have to realise that setting up the studio itself is a creative endeavour! I didn't go as far as you but I have definitely enjoyed the process of setting up my musical space so that it is ready to go ... But there is a conscious decision to be made to stop fiddling with the setup and just bloody use it!
jscheel 4y ago
Are... are we brothers? I too have stayed out of the modular world, but yeah, I feel you. I started back with music production a year or so before the pandemic, but things have gotten a bit... more... since then. Sitting next to my polybrute, neutron, crave, model:cycles, mpc one, microfreak, typhon, nts-1, keystep pro and 61sl mk3, launchpad pro, 828es, and an ada8200. Not to mention all the kontakt libraries and vsts on my hard-drive. You think modular is bad, just wait until you spend 3 hours comparing the sound of a mezzoforte staccato middle C played on a trumpet in 4 different virtual instrument libraries. I've finished some tracks, but definitely not enough. I've learned to just enjoy the experience.
_moof 4y ago
As someone who is prone to obsessing over gear I really appreciate Tom Morello's approach to it as an antidote. Way back in the '80s(?) his stuff got stolen out of his car, and since he had a gig that night he had to scramble to just get whatever shitty amp he could. He's been playing through that shitty amp ever since. His main guitar is still the Telecaster his roommate traded to him back then too. He says he used to obsess over gear and finding exactly the same tone as someone else, and then one day he just said, you know what, the tone I have is the tone I have, and I'm just going to make that mine. All that and more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpY4IIy6b98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpY4IIy6b98
leviathant 4y ago
>And how many tracks have I finished since I started all this? None. I used to give my friends grief over this! For most of my adult life, I've been making music - starting out on trackers, joining a punk band as a drummer (who had never played drums at that point), switching up to bass, and then due to life circumstances, moving to a smaller space in the suburbs and going back to electronic music. I made a little pact to myself that I wouldn't buy new equipment unless I recorded and released music, which not only worked out well for my productivity, but kept me familiarized with why I'd bought the gear that I had in the first place, keeping new acquisitions at bay. A buddy of mine who moved across the country has a pretty fantastic collection of music equipment, and we'd trade tracks now and then, and I'd harass him: "Have you written a single song yet, with all that gear?" Lately, I've taken a different view though. There's probably more content uploaded to YouTube in a single day than I could watch in my lifetime. While it used to be that "releasing an album" was kind of a special event, and that there were certain pipelines that could mean your weird side project landed in the ears of millions of people, what does a 'release' even mean today? If you find catharsis in endless noodling, or swimming in sound design, absolutely soak it up, and who cares if you never release it? There are people who spend hundreds of dollars on white noise generators because it helps them relax. When I got my first 'real' synthesizer, a Kawai K3M, I used to set the filter to sample-and-hold, run it through delay and reverb, and just let that burble on while I fell asleep. That's fine! Swinging the pendulum back to 'finish stuff' - a big thing that helped me was joining a band. When three other people are like "shut up it's fine, hit record" and then you do it, and then people buy it and don't complain about the little things you wish you could have done better, it really helps you emerge from that weird "perfectionist" bubble that solo musicians can fall into. Define a scope, fulfill that scope, come up with some cover art (pay an artist friend, use Photoshop, pay someone on Fiverr, whatever), upload it to Bandcamp, and tell your friends.
- chris_st 4y ago
  > There's probably more content uploaded to YouTube in a single day than I could watch in my lifetime. "500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide (Tubefilter, 2019). That’s 30,000 hours of video uploaded every hour. And 720,000 hours of video uploaded every day to YouTube. Wow. To put this into perspective, it would take you close to 82 years to watch the amount of videos uploaded to YouTube in only an hour. That’s a lifetime of watching YouTube videos." From https://www.oberlo.com/blog/youtube-statistics https://www.oberlo.com/blog/youtube-statistics

malthaus 4y ago

I feel you! Before lockdown i shared my home with some music gear; now I more or less have a bed in a music studio and my actual, finished musical output has approached 0.

justinlloyd 4y ago

I've struggled with releasing music for years, because the music, in my mind, has to be a finished product. Polished. Perfect. Flawless. For years I felt the same way about art too. I come from a video game background, and games have to be "done" before you start showing them off. Two things changed in my recent past: 1. Getting an art mentor who encouraged me to show off partially completed artwork, showing my working progress. 2. Joining a company where we encourage each other to show off our work that is incomplete, broken or "not even a functioning prototype" with no expectation of criticism or feedback other than an acknowledgement that you have progressed. And then in December of last year I resolved to release stuff, no matter it's state. Once a month I had to release a music track. And so far, I've done pretty well. I slid a little in March, and April came in a little later than I would have liked, but so far, it has been working out well for me. And yeah, number 6 is the gem. I've always held the belief "I create for me, even if nobody else is paying attention." So if I am creating for me, why do I care if it isn't ready to show the world? Just put it on a virtual shelf for display and be proud that I did _something_, _anything_.

wdfx 4y ago

I sympathise but also you have to realise that setting up the studio itself is a creative endeavour! I didn't go as far as you but I have definitely enjoyed the process of setting up my musical space so that it is ready to go ... But there is a conscious decision to be made to stop fiddling with the setup and just bloody use it!

jscheel 4y ago

Are... are we brothers? I too have stayed out of the modular world, but yeah, I feel you. I started back with music production a year or so before the pandemic, but things have gotten a bit... more... since then. Sitting next to my polybrute, neutron, crave, model:cycles, mpc one, microfreak, typhon, nts-1, keystep pro and 61sl mk3, launchpad pro, 828es, and an ada8200. Not to mention all the kontakt libraries and vsts on my hard-drive. You think modular is bad, just wait until you spend 3 hours comparing the sound of a mezzoforte staccato middle C played on a trumpet in 4 different virtual instrument libraries. I've finished some tracks, but definitely not enough. I've learned to just enjoy the experience.

_moof 4y ago

As someone who is prone to obsessing over gear I really appreciate Tom Morello's approach to it as an antidote. Way back in the '80s(?) his stuff got stolen out of his car, and since he had a gig that night he had to scramble to just get whatever shitty amp he could. He's been playing through that shitty amp ever since. His main guitar is still the Telecaster his roommate traded to him back then too. He says he used to obsess over gear and finding exactly the same tone as someone else, and then one day he just said, you know what, the tone I have is the tone I have, and I'm just going to make that mine. All that and more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpY4IIy6b98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpY4IIy6b98

leviathant 4y ago

>And how many tracks have I finished since I started all this? None. I used to give my friends grief over this! For most of my adult life, I've been making music - starting out on trackers, joining a punk band as a drummer (who had never played drums at that point), switching up to bass, and then due to life circumstances, moving to a smaller space in the suburbs and going back to electronic music. I made a little pact to myself that I wouldn't buy new equipment unless I recorded and released music, which not only worked out well for my productivity, but kept me familiarized with why I'd bought the gear that I had in the first place, keeping new acquisitions at bay. A buddy of mine who moved across the country has a pretty fantastic collection of music equipment, and we'd trade tracks now and then, and I'd harass him: "Have you written a single song yet, with all that gear?" Lately, I've taken a different view though. There's probably more content uploaded to YouTube in a single day than I could watch in my lifetime. While it used to be that "releasing an album" was kind of a special event, and that there were certain pipelines that could mean your weird side project landed in the ears of millions of people, what does a 'release' even mean today? If you find catharsis in endless noodling, or swimming in sound design, absolutely soak it up, and who cares if you never release it? There are people who spend hundreds of dollars on white noise generators because it helps them relax. When I got my first 'real' synthesizer, a Kawai K3M, I used to set the filter to sample-and-hold, run it through delay and reverb, and just let that burble on while I fell asleep. That's fine! Swinging the pendulum back to 'finish stuff' - a big thing that helped me was joining a band. When three other people are like "shut up it's fine, hit record" and then you do it, and then people buy it and don't complain about the little things you wish you could have done better, it really helps you emerge from that weird "perfectionist" bubble that solo musicians can fall into. Define a scope, fulfill that scope, come up with some cover art (pay an artist friend, use Photoshop, pay someone on Fiverr, whatever), upload it to Bandcamp, and tell your friends.

chris_st 4y ago
> There's probably more content uploaded to YouTube in a single day than I could watch in my lifetime. "500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute worldwide (Tubefilter, 2019). That’s 30,000 hours of video uploaded every hour. And 720,000 hours of video uploaded every day to YouTube. Wow. To put this into perspective, it would take you close to 82 years to watch the amount of videos uploaded to YouTube in only an hour. That’s a lifetime of watching YouTube videos." From https://www.oberlo.com/blog/youtube-statistics https://www.oberlo.com/blog/youtube-statistics