Finishing tracks: Something that helped me

[musikmachine]

Many reasons, both noble & profane!

Procrastination. Indecisiveness. Distraction. Not having a deadline looming.

Wanting to follow a new path. Creativity taking over. Getting lost in the moment. The muse!

The usual, plus a few somewhat unique to me I suppose...

Actually, I do strike a balance between purely creative endeavors & more the mundane "maintenance" chores.

I tell you, one of the worst wastes of time is having to troubleshoot & document the troubleshooting. What a pain! Glad I'm finally doing less of this now.

If you can recognise why then you can do something about it but boy the extent to which those things can impact the whole process is ridiculous.

I barely wrote anything down before now i'm much more goal oriented and it's working. Being much more organised help especially when things go wrong or get stuck. Also breaking things down into smaller chunks makes them less overwhelming.

Just about finished my second track in 6 months and it's over 9 minutes long and i think it's turned out quite well. I had some issues with Live crashing but i worked through it, turned out the beta was more stable but typically i'd have given up due to frustration or procrastination (you have no idea how many archived unfinished projects reside on my harddrives and a large part of the reason for that is moving the goalposts ).

It's really important to have an end in sight even if it means writing the end of the track! It's like putting a full stop on the sentence instead of a question mark.

If i get stuck i use a track as a guide or pick elements from two or three that i like. this also seems to help keep me on track but i allow myself some scope to change things but i pretty much use everything i start with unless something's not working.

[musikmachine]

I'm practicing finishing work now. It's a painful lesson in how bad I am/how hard it is to record guitars/bass/drums and get it to sound anything other than mushy crap soup.

Electronic music? I've got tons of finished enough/pretty cool but could be mixed a lot better stuff.

But at least you've got tons of finished stuff. Which way do you do it; after finishing the track or as you go?

[musikmachine]

Along the same lines check out The production game by Mike Monday, same guy who does SNFF. You don't have to watch all the videos, just check out anything that applies cause i think he's done about 50 now.

http://mikemonday.com/category/the-production-game/

Totally brilliant and a great inspiration. Mike have excellent taste and skill in music and I'll enjoy listening to his experiences of music making as much as listening to his tracks.

Time to think of quantitative goals. The quality goals are already clear to me.

Thank you for the link musikmachine!

Yeah they are good. A couple really helped me, the options paralysis one and why do you procrastinate.

I think if you want to make it as a music producer you have to focus on quantity as much as quality but maintaining both is the tricky part.

Something i realized a while back and helped me was that i don't like all the music by all the artists i listen to, some albums i only like 2-3 tracks but others won't like the same three tracks or hate the whole thing so don't agonize over whether people like or not. They are just doing what they're doing expressing themselves and releasing music!

[oblique strategies]

Also breaking things down into smaller chunks makes them less overwhelming.

Yes, very useful in breaking through inertia.

I think this wonderful video, wherein Minilogue outline their process, is a good example of organizing creativity into discreet steps.
https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/minilog ... -possible/