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May Newsletter: Practicing
🕑 Added 2024-05-01 18:49:41 +0000 UTCOn our archive stream the other day, in response to a question about tips for beginner musicians, I said something about practicing what you’re good at to bolster your self-esteem, and then moving on to practicing what you’re less competent in. I think my own natural gift has always been in ‘intuitive discernment’ - in other words, being able to tell on a gut level what’s good and what’s bad. I have posts on forums from high school, back in the era where I’d bash out a song in a day and move on, where I’ll share a song and add the commentary, “everything here sucks except for the chorus”. My assessment then almost always matches my assessment now. I’ve always had a keen sensitivity for noticing something that sucks (to me, at least) and rejecting it. It’s like a hangnail or a sore tooth: that lousy line in a song, that transition from verse to chorus that just doesn’t work. Of course, it’s harder to find what does work - that’s more a matter of the grind, trying out many different options until one sticks.
But much of the music-making process exists outside of my sense of what works and what doesn’t. I’ve never had much (or any) patience for the technical aspect of creation - running scales on guitar, doing vocal warm-ups, reading through gear manuals to fully learn the technology I’m using. That sort of patience runs counter to that ‘intuitive discernment’. Playing a major scale is, naturally, boring. Warming up forces you to listen to your playing and singing in its roughest state, hearing all the cracks and missed notes; it’s hard to persevere through it.
And then, of course, there’s the task of sitting down every day to get some work done, which at some point along the road becomes necessary every time I make an album. The list of chores which require both technical patience and creativity grows longer: putting scores together to send to session players, finding synth patches to fill in MIDI parts, deciding on the exact arrangements of songs so that they can be mixed. On past albums, in the face of my lack of patience, my gut discernment would show its ugly side - drowning the songs in overdubs, rejecting mix after mix, and becoming very frustrated with myself and everyone else involved in the creative process. This album is unfolding quite differently: as I consciously practice patience, it slowly and steadily advances towards a finished, listenable state, with everyone in tow. There are far more days spent enjoying the work done so far and appreciating the quality of what’s already on the table, and far less hours spent in the misery of complete ambiguity, looking at songs with no road forward to completion.
I’m quite grateful for this change. All my previous albums have ended with me feeling like I couldn’t possibly do it ‘this way’ again, and proceeding to change my environment and my tools, instead of looking at my own internal processes and trying to rework them. There’s more bridges to cross in the coming months, but this method of building an album feels durable, a model I can return to without feeling immediate despair.
Ultimately, patience is a process of discernment, as well: having many impulses, and following only those which seem truly good. Learning to wait for the truly good is very difficult, feeling the rush of the accelerating heart, the swarm of nerves as instincts kick in to do something, now. Every negative emotion you’d set aside for later surges to the surface. The paradox is that it feels very bad, very unintuitive, to sit through it, until you wait it out long enough that the rush subsides and something new enters in. What enters in then is hard to describe - it’s like hitting the refresh button. Everything I thought had to be rejected no longer does; now, it’s all tools to be used, life to be lived. All I have to do is learn how to use those tools, and suddenly things will burst forth from them, wonderful and complete, all of their own accord.
Comments
very.happy.ben
I REALLY appreciate this newsletter, thank you!
Gabi Emerson
That's totally valid and honestly super smart! Thanks for responding 💜
Car Seat
Honestly, I don't go with fully analogue. I scroll through presets, find stuff I like and fine-tune it. No need to reinvent the wheel, I think.
Luka Buchanan
holy shit this is such incredible counsel and so valuable. thank you so much for sharing a small insight into your past and present process. hope it’s okay i’m going to go off on a bit of a self-involved tangent response… i see the value of both attitudes, and really relate to how unsustainable the more manic, cut and dry approach is. i’ve been trying to make my second (very bad shitty diy) album for 4 years using the same manic, made-in-a-day method that helped me get into music in the first place (one of the great benefits of the more unfiltered passion without patience). i have almost no technical skill and have musical dyslexia or something lol - i find audio interfaces impossible - Not conducive to Making Music hahahah but honestly running on that pure mania in the past has meant i’m still able to find a sense of personal meaning, do gigs, connect with and learn from other artists, share feelings - which is so special and cool. but it’s clearly unsustainable now that i want to make something different, and i’m realising i have learned zero creative patience, so the ‘grind’ has felt utterly unbearable and i’ve procrastinated and given up and started over for 4 years. it’s soo disheartening and i don’t know how to change! :’) i actually cannot comprehend how much patience and grind is required by fully-fleshed actual produced albums like csh… i totally get how unintuitive forcing yourself to grind patiently must be. it would be really really hard to deny that loud manic impulse in favour of patience, slow growing, etc. such a valuable skill though, and i cannot WAIT to see how this approach shines through the new album!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gabi Emerson
How do you personally as a musician get to the point of finding a sound you like on an analog synth? I know for me I can only get so far with my knowledge of what the different parameters do but once I step up to something fully analog like an ARP-2600 I feel like I'm just plugging things in with a hope that the sound changes and it's easily one of the most frustrating things I've ever had to do as a musician
MaeveDX
I was really happy to see this question asked on the stream, and I'm glad to see a more detailed response to it here. I'm a beginner musician myself and I definitely relate to a kind of impatience, wanting to rush to the end product and growing more and more frustrated when I hit creative block or things aren't sounding as intended. I remember you said once (I don't remember where) that it's important to really spend time on a project and get it to the best you can make it before releasing it, and I've always tried to keep that in mind. I dont think I've quite discovered what parts of making music are my strengths, but this newsletter has definitely inspired me to spend some time thinking about it. I'm very appreciative when you share advice like this, and I can't wait for the new album, just hearing you talk about the process makes it seem like it'll be a good one!
Enoch
Very insightful, some of this definitely speaks to me as an artist, even though I don’t work with music it’s still nice to hear. Cool to have gotten a nice post to read on my birthday, thanks for making the day a bit better.
Tal
this is so real and also why I haven't made much of my own music , patience lmaoo . super excited for new album tho!!!
moonscapes
EEEEEK so excited for y’all’s new album!! no matter what you guys put out it’ll be great. also so glad that you’ve been able to enjoy your songwriting process more :)
SoThis?
OMG TY WILL!! I was the one who asked this question the other day and I’m so glad you took the time to answer it. Thank you!! >3
Phoebe Frank
Lesson number 1: nothing stays but the chorus!
