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content/music-making-week.dj

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+title = "A week of making music"
+id = "doc?20250925-music-making-week"
+updated = "2025-09-25T22:57:00+02:00"
+tags = ["all", "shower", "music"]
+
++++
+
+About a week ago, I was in a Discord chat with a couple of friends, and we had a conversation about the process of _learning to do art_.
+I mean art in the widest sense of the word: _art_ as any creative work that allows you to express emotions, reflect your human nature, paint a picture of your culture.
+This includes illustrations, music, photos, writing...
+
+Hell, even code could count, if you treat programming as an art form more than a form of engineering.
+
+The points we went through, roughly speaking, were that you need to be _making_ art to learn to do art, and that you need to make _bad_ art to learn your art well---because you learn from your mistakes.
+
+In the middle of the conversation, something spurred me to think about my pet hobby, electronic music production.
+
+{.chat}
+> *me:* i SERIOUSLY need to get back to making music, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN THIS LAST TRACK WAS A YEAR AGO\
+> ![screenshot of my file explorer showing the date 2024-08-28][pic:01K60DHWNAEWV8FR8XT4X0DRET]
+
+I mean, it can't have been a year, right?
+Have I really not released any music _in a year_?
+
+
+## It really was a year
+
+Well, no.
+It's not like I haven't been making music _completely_ throughout that last year.
+
+On occasion, I would fire up [Bitwig Studio](https://bitwig.com) (good DAW!) and fiddle around with writing _something_.
+In 2024: a little in September, October, November, then once more in December, and January 2025... and then, silence.
+Until April, where I started a couple projects that never went anywhere, but then went silent once again.
+
+Now, this isn't surprising [if you take a look at my release cadence](https://daknus.bandcamp.com).
+For the past three years, I've been releasing one track per year.
+
+I excused myself that I just didn't have enough time to make more music.
+I said to myself that back in my school days, I had more time to play around with music after school.
+
+Those were excuses, I know, but I believed in them pretty strongly.
+
+
+## Skill issue
+
+There's another thing that compounded the problem.
+
+Out of the 153 Bitwig project files I've accumulated over the past five years, I have released 18 of them.
+That's like, a 12% success rate.
+
+Even last year, I started 18 _new_ projects, while releasing only [_one_](https://daknus.bandcamp.com/track/dissociation-rebirth).
+That could've been a whole album, had the overall success rate been higher.
+
+So, why was it that bad?
+
+I think it's down to a few things.
+First, I've been noticing a steady decrease in fresh music ideas flowing into my head.
+My past method was to just kind of... wait until I come up with a cool melody, chord progression, or drum pattern in my head, and try to make something around it.
+
+The problem is that this process is inherently _very_ lossy.
+I'm not good enough with instruments and effects to effectively recreate all the sounds from my head exactly.
+
+In addition to this, my musical imagination is very volatile.
+The moment I start fiddling around in the DAW, I recreate the core of the idea, and forget about the rest---that same [rest of the fucking owl][pic:01K616CGN7TEM3VKZ5NQ9M6QDB] that can make a song feel truly _magical_.
+
+The fact that I use the playback looping feature of my DAW doesn't help this.
+I don't currently have a better way to iteratively create nice-sounding instruments, and looping results in the idea getting stuck in your head like an earworm, erasing anything that came before it.
+
+---
+
+I don't know that there's anything I can do to help the looping issue, at least for now.
+Fixing it would likely require learning to play an instrument, then recording myself play, and assembling a song out of that.
+But learning an instrument is, how to put it... erm, _difficult_, and isn't going to fix the broader issue of me not finishing songs.
+
+You can work within the limitations of looping.
+It _will_ influence your musical style, but that's okay.
+I can tell you of [many](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidgdQ3gNLo) [great](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsiaG7dSXVQ) [songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPL5Hkl11IQ) [whose](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0nh3_m-VmM) [styles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjOzJFyRE78) [are](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK1mLIeXwsQ) [very](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q12YnJ_9y4Q) [loop-oriented](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odeHP8N4LKc).
+You don't have to be making jazz to make good music.
+
+What I _can_ work on, though, is my musical imagination.
+It would be nice to be able to fire up the DAW and come up with something workable in a short amount of time.
+
+And in addition to that, finishing things.
+Like, _really_ finishing.
+Not dropping.
+Commitment.
+
+
+## The exercise
+
+So, during that conversation, I came up with an idea: *I'm gonna be making music for a week.*\
+*One song a day.*
+
+A week being a short enough time commitment, that it's easy to just _do it_ without even considering pulling out.
+An afternoon being somewhat short, but long enough that I could just kinda jam for a bit, write something short, and forget about it the next day.
+
+And you know what? It worked!
+
+I started writing music again.
+I wrote 7 songs.
+They're short, but I like them.
+Some, I'd even be down to listen to on an album---and I'd like to polish them up and release them, some time next month.
+
+
+## Takeaways
+
+A reflection I've come to is that, actually...?
+This is probably how most music artists operate!
+
+As a programmer, I toil every day at solving interesting computer problems.
+A coding puzzle a day keeps the bugs away, so they say.
+I program every day, solving different problems, working on different projects.
+{-Never finishing them, of course.-}
+And that's how I become a good programmer.
+
+So it's natural that, to become a good musician, you write a song a day, and you become _good_.
+You end up having songs to release albums with.
+
+If you write a song every month, you end up with 12 songs in a whole year.\
+If you write a song every _day_, you end up with at least 365.\
+Multiply that by that initial 12% figure, and you can see how much your output would increase.
+
+Having 365 songs ready means you have a lot _more_ ideas to pick from and explore.
+And that's how great albums get made.
+It feels liberating to have come to this realisation after trying to figure out a way to _convince myself to release more music_ for so many years.
+
+And like, _of course_ it works that way.
+If it works that way with programming, why wouldn't it work for anything else?
+
+But, if you haven't done this sort of thing before, it isn't obvious at all.\
+School doesn't teach this. (I know, "what the fuck do you mean school doesn't teach this," but you know it's true.)
+
+What's surprising is _just how insanely effective_ the music-making week has been.
+Out of the 7 songs I've written, I consider a whopping *3* of them good enough to be released to the public.
+That's way higher than that initial 12% figure!
+
+It could be that I just got lucky, but I think there's something more at play here.
+
+I believe the cause for this to be that I had to *finish* the songs within the same day I started them.
+Had I not needed to finish, had I had the possibility to scrap a song and let a day go to waste, this probably would not have happened.
+
+The fact that I had to come up with a reasonable structure, involving a build-up and an ending, also helped develop my skills around that.
+In the past, I would often get stuck at the phase where I had a loop, but didn't know what to do with it.
+
+The time pressure forced me to start thinking about structure, and helped me figure out a few nice ways to start, develop, and end a song.
+
+---
+
+Another incredibly cool side effect---which _may_ only apply to experimental electronic music, but is worth mentioning---is that after this whole week, I have 7 whole songs I can steal from in the future.
+
+Take the music, [paulstretch](https://sonosaurus.com/paulxstretch/) it to hell, add spacious reverb, and boom---an atmospheric soundscape, just like that.
+Crank up the tempo, add an amen break, play with the sample's pitch, and you've got yourself a jungle track.
+
+You can make _instruments_ out of your songs.
+Samplers today are kind of insane, and you can do all sorts of wack shit with them when it comes to sound design.
+
+---
+
+An interesting idea that didn't go anywhere: I also asked my friends for prompts.
+Words, images, stories to write music about.
+
+It didn't go anywhere because often times, electronic music is a bit too abstract to even relate to words.
+It plucks at my heart strings, but I can't translate it into words and back.
+
+There are also concepts I don't really map well onto melodies just yet, because I haven't interacted with them enough.
+I got a prompt "steampunk," but didn't do anything with it, because I don't really consume enough steampunk-themed works to have a good frame of reference of it in mind.
+
+[Sometimes it works][page:music/dubio.tree], but not always---and _sometimes_ is a P < 100%.
+Guess we just got a bunch of bad rolls this time around.
+
+---
+
+And finally, I wouldn't be done without mentioning the confidence boost.
+
+It feels genuinely great to have made so much music that sounds listenable, in such a short period of time.
+
+Finish your works.
+You'll thank yourself for it, and you'll feel great on top.
+
+
+## Caveats
+
+This type of exercise won't work as well for everyone.
+
+I'd like to mention here that when I started, I was not totally incompetent in making music.
+I've been toying around with it for over 8 years at this point.
+I mean, [this](https://daknus.bandcamp.com/track/dissociation-rebirth) was my last track at the time of starting this exercise.
+
+If you're just starting out, 7 days will likely not be enough.
+If you don't know _anything_ about the thing you're willing to learn, the beginnings are going to be _very_ difficult.
+It's gonna suck.
+
+I feel like _trying_ and committing for that initial time period though, will be enough to tell you whether you want to continue or not.
+
+I know I want to :3
+
+
+## Can I have a listen?
+
+No.
+
+...but you should [subscribe to my blog via RSS](/feed/all.atom), to know when you can!\
+I'll be sure to post an update.

static/css/doc.css

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