SunkLo wrote:I'm hoping that doing a bit of pre-grind in the form of sound design will reduce the urge to bail.
Okay, this is really really huge. I am going to grant that some parts of production are just hellishly boring, complex, tedious, repetitious, and no ifs and or buts, you kind of have to slog through them.
BUT
Most of what you are doing is supposed to be fun. Like look dude, there has never, ever in the history of humanity been so much music produced. When I started with electronic music in the late 90's it seemed that there were a lot of people into making music. But now, it is seriously like totally ridiculous. You could produce the magnum opus of the century, and have it sit on SC with like 200 listens. I hear so much good shit on sc, it is redic. And then some kid on SC buys 100k listens, and gets deals, haha. But there is NO worldly reward for making music, and there is a lot of pleasurable stuff in the world to do besides making music. A career is one, gaining a higher degree or personal independence through the acquisition of capital and useful productive skills, pussy is awesome, video games are so good they'll rewire your neurology, there is so much music it seems you could listen to good music 24/7 and never listen to the same song again.
So making music has to be the reward in of itself.
And it sounds like maybe you are not liking making music all the way through the process. Like you can make good music. But why would you, it is just work, right?
I feel like you haven't caught the bug. The bug is fucked up. It is like, it is all you want to do. An aside, everything I ever say, it is not ego aggrandizement, I'm just saying things how I see them. But I've caught the bug. I wake up with the day befores music running through my head. In a literal way. If my track is going good, I'm feeling good, if it is fucking up, I'm feeling bad. But it is just so important to me. I do family stuff, which is far more important, time with my girl is just like fireworks, just explosive good times. Making music is fun, but making humans, I don't know, you've just got to try it. But, the music making, it is all I think about (I took a year off too, to assess the political situation of the world, and kind of figure out what is going on, I'll give you the short version - we're fucked).
But what I'm trying to say though, is once you really start going, you kind of just develop your way, your groove, or as the professionals would call it, your practice. Your practice, what ever it is, and it likely will be unique to you, will be what motivates you. You've got to find a way to have fun doing it. AND that might mean you make stuff in the wrong way, or that doesn't have proper power transfer, or that is just wrong in any number of ways. But fuck it, it is you. You're the decider. You decide what is fun, what you want to do, what is important, how far you want to perfect songs. You decide. Like I know you're an audiophile, and that can cut both ways. In can be great in that it elevates your practice, it causes you to rise to higher and higher degrees of audioperfection. But, it can cut against you in that you don't want to even make music if it is not going to be up to your standard, which, truss brub, is totally dumb! Haha, it is a taste thing, but a producer having fun, vibing, just really getting into it is way way way more interesting than perfect sounding shit. I mean there are teams of engineers and mix engineers that get paid stacks of cash, with equipment roughly equivalent to the cost of an aircraft carrier, to make sound perfectly. You are not going to beat them. But honestly, the one thing that you can beat them at is being SunkLo.
So you like starting songs, and you hate finishing them. Okay, start a bunch of songs. But if that leaves you unsatisfied... then you've got to figure out ways to make that later stage fun. How to have fun with it. For some people that is gear. Look at paradigm, there is a dude that just said fucket with the software, yes I can achieve results, but I don't enjoy doing it. He completely switched up his musical practice, and is now all hardware. And we can tell he is flourishing. He is doing his thing now.
So that is the thing, find the thing you like to do and do it. You're talking about front loading your design process, I think that is a good idea, it works great for me (although, I don't actually like working that way, so mostly I don't), and for a lot of people. I think it is great that you are trying to find strategies, techniques that work for you.
THAT IS IT. You're doing it, you're trying to find ways that work. And that is where you need to be, in a meta mode, where you are thinking about how you make music, and what works and what doesn't work. You know, maybe preloading isn't right for you, so after you try that for a while, and your not getting a great ROI, you know, ditch it and move on, try something else. Just keep going until you start to find things that are clicking for you. Maybe find 5 kind of discrete ways of working, or segments of working, put them together and you've got the SunkLo sound, you know.
Don't forget, there are always going to be slogs. Like if you're all hardware, playing your instruments and tracking it might be all vibey performance goodness, so there is a lot that is fun, but you know, wiring up your studio might be a pain in the ass, or doing maintenance might be a bitch, so there is going to be work in everything. That is a moral battle. And I think you'll start to win that battle more as you mature. I've told you before, my health is not so great, sometimes it looks like the song I'm working on might be the last song I'll ever work on. This is our chance. We're alive, and it is short. This is our time to do things. There's this Polish girl over in the snh, CH3, she's got my favorite sig, "Some things are not important", there is an awfully lot of stuff in music making that isn't important. I'm always trying to get you to lower your standards with the things that are barriers to you actually making work. It is more important to make the work than have it be perfect.
Again why TUNA! is important, you just crank, and crank, you know, and you forget songs, you forget the songs you made 2 weeks ago! All that anguish, invention, all of it, it is forgotten, added to the stack, so many times over, it kind of desensitizes you those pernicious little hooks that keep you from moving forward in music. You just crush them. And as you take that full arc, or at least a good portion of it, as you arc it over and over, you start to wear that groove in the latter half of the song making process, the difficult part. You start to make discoveries in how you can work on the backside, how to have fun back there. Or things that you can do on the front side, that will make the backside better, or easier, or more fun.
I don't know dude, epic waffle, one for the ages. I'm really psyched that you are exploring other ways of working. But my caution for you is don't put too much effort and energy into a way until you know that it will really work for you. So like, don't spend a year making samples, only to find later that you like designing your sounds in situ. So do like some sound design, maybe some sample digging. Enough to make a few songs with, and try it out. See. If it doesn't work, move on to the next technique.
Anyway,
