I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.)
Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio.
If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surge of energy running through your bones when making the music, why would anyone else feel anything? Mixing and the music sounding "professional" is completely secondary. Even detrimental a lot of the time, to be honest.
Applies to many other things than music as well. I don't any great technology comes out and about without that loop, either.
Justin Vernon disappeared to a cabin in Wisconsin for months, where he wrote and recorded one of the greatest and most popular folk rock albums of all time.
I actually thought about that while writing the original comment as well. For Emma, Forever Ago is one of my all time favorite albums, good example of raw emotion with no need for any bells or whistles.
The big thing there is, that he already was a professional musician and completely inside a creative scene before leaving for the cabin. (DeYarmond Edison was the band he was in before Bon Iver.)
But yes, things were going way sideways for him, liver issues with mono, so he went to process whatever was going on and had been going on in complete isolation. (Although for the next album, he actually set up a whole "creative commune", a new band around Bon Iver instead of it being just himself, and so on. And I think you can hear the colors he wanted back in the music from it directly.)
A lot of examples of artists going into bouts of isolation, but almost always coming into it from an intense experience. So, the two don't have to be day to day intertwined, although for Techno specifically it's usually the case.
What marketing department? For Emma, Forever Ago was initially self-released and got noticed, then an indie record label signed Justin Vernon to distribute the album with an official pressing. The story and the album and its success all predate any marketing department's involvement.
The stories around how music is made is a very under-considered aspect of the listening experience. Oftentimes those stories are not strictly true, but contain a kernel of truth, and it's the most compelling version of the story that ends up sticking.
How often do you listen to a song and think of these stories in your head? When you listen to the Beatles are you seeing Paul McCartney singing? I think for many people the answer is yes. These things (the story and the music itself) become connected and the story provides the context within which many people enjoy the music.
I'll admit this is a bit disappointing. I'd like to think that any piece could stand up on its on merits without some lore being required to appreciate it. But I have relented to the idea that this is just a very human thing. We do it with everything as it's just the way most of us are wired.
Could great works substitute for having a scene? After all, writers have been inspired by Dostoevsky without being part of the same scene as him, and often without being part of a scene at all.
"Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people."
The author does mention that part of the process is collaboration with other musicians. It seems by setting their "chores" they are increasing their immersion.
I don't think this is about becoming a great musician. Maybe that comes later. As the title suggests, this is just about becoming a musician in the first place.
As a piano player who's been noodling around for a few years, trying to learn to write original stuff and not making much progress, something like this is probably what I need.
> If there's no surge of energy running through your bones when making the music, why would anyone else feel anything?
There have been thousands if not hundreds of thousands of albums released under contract that the artists were not really into, yet listeners discovered them and were incredibly engaged with.
I'm thinking right now of the endless list of utterly mid jazz fusion albums (eg. on Columbia Records) that came out in the 78-88 period. Retrospectively the artists have said they hated the music, hated making it and didn't like the results, but there were plenty of people who loved it. I am sure there are other blobs like this. Now, the artists might be lying, or might have forgotten how they felt about it at the time, but that's what they say ...
So yeah, you don't need a "surge energy running through your bones". Sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn't.
This lines up with my own experience with writing and (more recently) blogging.
You get over the fear of writing by doing a LOT of it, until you get to a point where writing a story or blog post stops feeling "special" and becomes just another thing you do. Each individual piece of writing stops feeling like an important work of art that you must get right at any cost, and becomes more like doing the dishes or taking out the garbage.
You can then separate the act of creating from the act of curating and editing. I regularly cut thousands of words from my writing before I share in public. I regularly throw away (well, archive) fully written drafts because I don't like them. A few years ago, this would've been unimaginable. Today, it feels like part of the process.
At some point, you gain confidence that you'll always have another story, another blog post, another poem inside you. If the current thing sucks, you just write another thing, and another, and another, until something clicks. It's freeing.
IME when creative work starts feeling like "just a job" is EXACTLY when it also becomes most fulfilling and satisfying.
The meaning of this is dismayingly slippery. You're presumably being creative and enjoying it, for all this "just a job".
> Routines might be a better name, but I like how action-oriented and well defined "chore" sounds.
The article's use of "boring" is somewhat misleading too, I think. It's trendy to say that being bored is good, but really that's always about enjoying patience, not about experiencing drudgery and having a miserable time.
I've heard this sentiment repeated and I believe it, but at least the purpose of my own blog is to communicate insights I've had. I almost make a point out of not blogging unless I feel that I have something truly interesting to share. It seems that flipping that around would come at a price.
Come think it, I feel that I have on the other side of this many times: I read a post or watch a video that opens up something in my brain and I get a sort of crush on the author. I read everything they write or watch all their videos. For some authors, I retain interest. But for others, where it seems like they produce regularly in order to maintain the frequency, I lose interest.
> I've heard this sentiment repeated and I believe it, but at least the purpose of my own blog is to communicate insights I've had. I almost make a point out of not blogging unless I feel that I have something truly interesting to share. It seems that flipping that around would come at a price.
That's where the editing and curation step comes in, at least for me. I write a lot more than I publish. If my writing:publishing ratio ever became 1:1, I'll stop publishing things that are interesting and insightful (well, interesting and insightful to me personally; other people might judge my writing differently).
Sometimes what works for me is to write something and let it sit in my drafts for a few days. Then if I read it back and still find it worth sharing, I polish it and hit the publish button. If not, it goes into a folder called "Retired" in my Obsidian.
I’m a performer, not composer, but what OP describes is very similar to the routines performers do: technical exercises, rhythm section chores, improv, current pieces, etc. Reps are the only key.
Like with so many other artistic things, people can have very different workflows. Some people need to produce a lot of material, consistently, and then filter out. Stephen King is known for having such a workflow. Others will only produce when they find the motivation, and can go for long periods without producing anything.
A lot of my hobbyist musician friends were way more prolific during covid. The extra time seemed to have unlocked their ability to be way more creative to de-stress. I myself had a burst of activity recording music and improving my guitar technique for a couple of years.Sadly it dipped again post covid. However, more recently I'm trying to find a middle ground with AI cutting corners with the boring repeatable stuff of audio engineering and shifting focus to the creative and the technique. Feels like things have turned the corner here and I can get a pretty professional mix out quick without sacrificing my creativity. I love that middle ground where AI is truly helping me accelerate my output as a hired gun that mixes my sound while the calluses and note selections/ arrangement are all mine.
One challenge I've always had with having many concurrent project tracks is how to name them so they are distinct in my head. I made instrumental music so there's no lyrical line to hook into. Using "created at" datestamps for filenames is not great, but neither is obscure codenames.
I also make instrumental music, and I have this same problem. What I do is: find a word or phrase that matches the rhythmic phrasing of my main melody. That becomes the working title.
An example is how Paul McCartney’s original title for “Yesterday” was “Scrambled Eggs,” since those words fit naturally over the start of the melody.
You can follow the "correct horse battery staple" method the author referred to in the article. Another handy tool is a BIP39 seed generator (https://iancoleman.io/bip39/), but use the generated seed as a small pool of candidates that might catch your fancy. "hockey rival" or "pepper garment" or "frozen artwork" could be project names.
I’ve been a recording musician for 28 years. Making music a boring chore is not the answer. The best musicians do two things: learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity and second, understand music theory in depth for when that fails and you get stuck.
> learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity
This is all pretty vibe-y but I think that might be what the post’s author found the ability to do and is trying to teach? TFA links to this other post in a similar vein: https://commoncog.com/get-numb-get-good/
I think it's more of a psychological trick for the author, and it would probably work for me as well. Some people are incredibly good at doing what they consider fun. Others have a hard time turning off the analytical/anxious brain and will never do something unless it's an obligation.
For me, I'm much better at getting bike rides and runs in if I'm training for something, so I "have to" do my saturday long run. Others would do this "fun" (hobby) stuff without prompting but have a very hard time doing their chores.
The joy of participating in music, to me, is one of the few domains where we can still, to an extent, hide away from the relentless enclosure and commodification of every facet of our existence in the name of capitalist value extraction. Imagining oneself as an assembly line in order to rush past the experience of the creative process and arrive as quickly as possible at a finished artifact — to me this is an act of submission. It is accepting that one's market value as a musician, as measured by the number and popularity of commodities they produce, is of vastly greater importance than the depth and quality of their musical experiences, than any joy, pleasure, satisfaction, connection, growth, expression, or catharsis they experience through their participation in music.
I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
> I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
It depends what your goal is - if your goal is to have an enjoyable hobby, then yes, it's probably missing the point.
If your goal is to have the best outputs, then that might involve a different creative process.
If your goal is to make (good amounts of) money, then the popularity of your music is actually important. Writing music that will be popular is a skill in itself, which is probably a different skill to just writing the music that you find the most joy and satisfaction in writing. Writing music that brings you joy and hoping others find the same joy in it might work, but I suspect the musicians making the most money are often working hard to write what the market wants/accepts rather than just what brings them the most joy. There will be exceptions to every rule however.
My consternation comes from the fact that we seem, culturally, to have arrived at a place where we value the creation of music (or rather, musical artifacts) in the service of gaining something (fame and profit, primarily) over enjoyment of the experience of music.
> But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
It’s perfectly fine if _your_ point in playing music is rooted in some flavor of anti-capitalism and your intrinsic joy of your creative process. _His_ point was to write an album during a sabbatical. He succeeded and then some!
I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.)
Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio.
If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surge of energy running through your bones when making the music, why would anyone else feel anything? Mixing and the music sounding "professional" is completely secondary. Even detrimental a lot of the time, to be honest.
Applies to many other things than music as well. I don't any great technology comes out and about without that loop, either.
Justin Vernon disappeared to a cabin in Wisconsin for months, where he wrote and recorded one of the greatest and most popular folk rock albums of all time.
I actually thought about that while writing the original comment as well. For Emma, Forever Ago is one of my all time favorite albums, good example of raw emotion with no need for any bells or whistles.
The big thing there is, that he already was a professional musician and completely inside a creative scene before leaving for the cabin. (DeYarmond Edison was the band he was in before Bon Iver.)
But yes, things were going way sideways for him, liver issues with mono, so he went to process whatever was going on and had been going on in complete isolation. (Although for the next album, he actually set up a whole "creative commune", a new band around Bon Iver instead of it being just himself, and so on. And I think you can hear the colors he wanted back in the music from it directly.)
A lot of examples of artists going into bouts of isolation, but almost always coming into it from an intense experience. So, the two don't have to be day to day intertwined, although for Techno specifically it's usually the case.
Most likely he made the album normally and the story about the cabin was made up by jimmy and bob from the marketing department.
What marketing department? For Emma, Forever Ago was initially self-released and got noticed, then an indie record label signed Justin Vernon to distribute the album with an official pressing. The story and the album and its success all predate any marketing department's involvement.
The stories around how music is made is a very under-considered aspect of the listening experience. Oftentimes those stories are not strictly true, but contain a kernel of truth, and it's the most compelling version of the story that ends up sticking.
How often do you listen to a song and think of these stories in your head? When you listen to the Beatles are you seeing Paul McCartney singing? I think for many people the answer is yes. These things (the story and the music itself) become connected and the story provides the context within which many people enjoy the music.
I'll admit this is a bit disappointing. I'd like to think that any piece could stand up on its on merits without some lore being required to appreciate it. But I have relented to the idea that this is just a very human thing. We do it with everything as it's just the way most of us are wired.
Did he not listen to music made by others when he was isolated in the cabin?
Could great works substitute for having a scene? After all, writers have been inspired by Dostoevsky without being part of the same scene as him, and often without being part of a scene at all.
Close contact between exceptional individuals is one of the main values of having a scene.
Which great writers are you thinking of here? True outsider art is very rare afaik.
"Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people."
The author does mention that part of the process is collaboration with other musicians. It seems by setting their "chores" they are increasing their immersion.
I don't think this is about becoming a great musician. Maybe that comes later. As the title suggests, this is just about becoming a musician in the first place.
As a piano player who's been noodling around for a few years, trying to learn to write original stuff and not making much progress, something like this is probably what I need.
> If there's no surge of energy running through your bones when making the music, why would anyone else feel anything?
There have been thousands if not hundreds of thousands of albums released under contract that the artists were not really into, yet listeners discovered them and were incredibly engaged with.
I'm thinking right now of the endless list of utterly mid jazz fusion albums (eg. on Columbia Records) that came out in the 78-88 period. Retrospectively the artists have said they hated the music, hated making it and didn't like the results, but there were plenty of people who loved it. I am sure there are other blobs like this. Now, the artists might be lying, or might have forgotten how they felt about it at the time, but that's what they say ...
So yeah, you don't need a "surge energy running through your bones". Sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn't.
This lines up with my own experience with writing and (more recently) blogging.
You get over the fear of writing by doing a LOT of it, until you get to a point where writing a story or blog post stops feeling "special" and becomes just another thing you do. Each individual piece of writing stops feeling like an important work of art that you must get right at any cost, and becomes more like doing the dishes or taking out the garbage.
You can then separate the act of creating from the act of curating and editing. I regularly cut thousands of words from my writing before I share in public. I regularly throw away (well, archive) fully written drafts because I don't like them. A few years ago, this would've been unimaginable. Today, it feels like part of the process.
At some point, you gain confidence that you'll always have another story, another blog post, another poem inside you. If the current thing sucks, you just write another thing, and another, and another, until something clicks. It's freeing.
IME when creative work starts feeling like "just a job" is EXACTLY when it also becomes most fulfilling and satisfying.
The meaning of this is dismayingly slippery. You're presumably being creative and enjoying it, for all this "just a job".
> Routines might be a better name, but I like how action-oriented and well defined "chore" sounds.
The article's use of "boring" is somewhat misleading too, I think. It's trendy to say that being bored is good, but really that's always about enjoying patience, not about experiencing drudgery and having a miserable time.
I've heard this sentiment repeated and I believe it, but at least the purpose of my own blog is to communicate insights I've had. I almost make a point out of not blogging unless I feel that I have something truly interesting to share. It seems that flipping that around would come at a price.
Come think it, I feel that I have on the other side of this many times: I read a post or watch a video that opens up something in my brain and I get a sort of crush on the author. I read everything they write or watch all their videos. For some authors, I retain interest. But for others, where it seems like they produce regularly in order to maintain the frequency, I lose interest.
> I've heard this sentiment repeated and I believe it, but at least the purpose of my own blog is to communicate insights I've had. I almost make a point out of not blogging unless I feel that I have something truly interesting to share. It seems that flipping that around would come at a price.
That's where the editing and curation step comes in, at least for me. I write a lot more than I publish. If my writing:publishing ratio ever became 1:1, I'll stop publishing things that are interesting and insightful (well, interesting and insightful to me personally; other people might judge my writing differently).
Sometimes what works for me is to write something and let it sit in my drafts for a few days. Then if I read it back and still find it worth sharing, I polish it and hit the publish button. If not, it goes into a folder called "Retired" in my Obsidian.
I’m a performer, not composer, but what OP describes is very similar to the routines performers do: technical exercises, rhythm section chores, improv, current pieces, etc. Reps are the only key.
Like with so many other artistic things, people can have very different workflows. Some people need to produce a lot of material, consistently, and then filter out. Stephen King is known for having such a workflow. Others will only produce when they find the motivation, and can go for long periods without producing anything.
In the end, whatever works for you.
A lot of my hobbyist musician friends were way more prolific during covid. The extra time seemed to have unlocked their ability to be way more creative to de-stress. I myself had a burst of activity recording music and improving my guitar technique for a couple of years.Sadly it dipped again post covid. However, more recently I'm trying to find a middle ground with AI cutting corners with the boring repeatable stuff of audio engineering and shifting focus to the creative and the technique. Feels like things have turned the corner here and I can get a pretty professional mix out quick without sacrificing my creativity. I love that middle ground where AI is truly helping me accelerate my output as a hired gun that mixes my sound while the calluses and note selections/ arrangement are all mine.
can you say a bit more about how AI is helping you mix?
do you tell it "make the bass louder", or does it actually listen to the audio and goes "hmm, too much highs on the pad, let me turn them down a bit"
One challenge I've always had with having many concurrent project tracks is how to name them so they are distinct in my head. I made instrumental music so there's no lyrical line to hook into. Using "created at" datestamps for filenames is not great, but neither is obscure codenames.
You can always go full Danger and just title tracks with the time you finished them at
I also make instrumental music, and I have this same problem. What I do is: find a word or phrase that matches the rhythmic phrasing of my main melody. That becomes the working title.
An example is how Paul McCartney’s original title for “Yesterday” was “Scrambled Eggs,” since those words fit naturally over the start of the melody.
You can follow the "correct horse battery staple" method the author referred to in the article. Another handy tool is a BIP39 seed generator (https://iancoleman.io/bip39/), but use the generated seed as a small pool of candidates that might catch your fancy. "hockey rival" or "pepper garment" or "frozen artwork" could be project names.
I’ve been a recording musician for 28 years. Making music a boring chore is not the answer. The best musicians do two things: learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity and second, understand music theory in depth for when that fails and you get stuck.
> learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity
This is all pretty vibe-y but I think that might be what the post’s author found the ability to do and is trying to teach? TFA links to this other post in a similar vein: https://commoncog.com/get-numb-get-good/
I think it's more of a psychological trick for the author, and it would probably work for me as well. Some people are incredibly good at doing what they consider fun. Others have a hard time turning off the analytical/anxious brain and will never do something unless it's an obligation.
For me, I'm much better at getting bike rides and runs in if I'm training for something, so I "have to" do my saturday long run. Others would do this "fun" (hobby) stuff without prompting but have a very hard time doing their chores.
I find something quite bleak about this.
The joy of participating in music, to me, is one of the few domains where we can still, to an extent, hide away from the relentless enclosure and commodification of every facet of our existence in the name of capitalist value extraction. Imagining oneself as an assembly line in order to rush past the experience of the creative process and arrive as quickly as possible at a finished artifact — to me this is an act of submission. It is accepting that one's market value as a musician, as measured by the number and popularity of commodities they produce, is of vastly greater importance than the depth and quality of their musical experiences, than any joy, pleasure, satisfaction, connection, growth, expression, or catharsis they experience through their participation in music.
I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
> I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
It depends what your goal is - if your goal is to have an enjoyable hobby, then yes, it's probably missing the point.
If your goal is to have the best outputs, then that might involve a different creative process.
If your goal is to make (good amounts of) money, then the popularity of your music is actually important. Writing music that will be popular is a skill in itself, which is probably a different skill to just writing the music that you find the most joy and satisfaction in writing. Writing music that brings you joy and hoping others find the same joy in it might work, but I suspect the musicians making the most money are often working hard to write what the market wants/accepts rather than just what brings them the most joy. There will be exceptions to every rule however.
I absolutely agree.
My consternation comes from the fact that we seem, culturally, to have arrived at a place where we value the creation of music (or rather, musical artifacts) in the service of gaining something (fame and profit, primarily) over enjoyment of the experience of music.
> But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.
It’s perfectly fine if _your_ point in playing music is rooted in some flavor of anti-capitalism and your intrinsic joy of your creative process. _His_ point was to write an album during a sabbatical. He succeeded and then some!
It's now even simpler to "become a musician"; just enter some text and press "generate".
No further need to learn to play like these crazy guys: https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=973