T w e n t y S i d e d

Like I said in the previous entry, this 30-day course involved doing 3 different projects. Each project taught a few ideas and required students to create a track that incorporated those ideas. So now it’s time for me to show my work.

Actually, it’s time for me to go on a series of meandering digressions about creativity and music, but I’ll post my work somewhere in the middle of it all.

Extreme Introspection

I used to share my music tracks on a regular basis. This was fun at the start of my musical adventure. I’d post something, and get a pat on the head from the public because I was doing okay for a beginner. But as time went on, two things happened:

1. As I spent more time with it, I could no longer justify amateurish work with the excuse that I was new.
2. I raised my expectations and thus became increasingly critical of my work.

I’ve had several fits of frustration over the last couple of years where I very nearly purged my Soundcloud account to delete all of my early tracks. My inability to improve has created this perverse hatred for my early stuff, as if the only way to get better is to bring up the overall average quality by destroying the worst bits. Yes, I realize this impulse is horribly vain.

(Strangely enough, Soundcloud seems to have solved this problem for me. Their shifting pricing plans led me to drop my subscription, which means my account reverted to a free account, which means I’m over budget in terms of upload time, which means that a lot of my early tracks are disabled.)

I have this terrible self-indulgent cycle I go through where I get frustrated with my work because I don’t sound like Armin Van Buuren or Deadmau5. Then I realize it’s completely unreasonable to expect to be able to create on the level of superstar artists, and even more unreasonable – bordering on delusional – to expect to be able to work on that level when you’ve only been composing for five years. And only part time. And you don’t even play an instrument. And your musical diet is fairly narrow. So then I give up for a few months. Then I hear something that tickles my brain and makes me want to try again. I’ve got sky-high expectations and rock-bottom skills, which isn’t really a good recipe for a healthy and rewarding hobby.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Music Class Part 2: My Tracks”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.