>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 mu

>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.