You produce a track and after a while you think “Hmm, that progression isn’t right,” or “That melody need some work.” So you fiddle with it but nothing seems to gel. Here’s the thing: it doesn’t sound right because you have listened to the old version so many times that it’s become an ear-worm. Everything you try, even though it might be “better,” just doesn’t work. It’s so frustrating.
I recall the physician Edward de Bono, the lateral thinking bloke, saying that the creative process is like pouring hot water on a jelly (bare with.) The channels (ideas) that form get reinforced by more hot water. You end up going down the same creative paths when you’d really like to explore the undissolved, unreachable parts instead.
Enough of the jelly metaphors but you get my drift.
This is precisely why I try to work faster these days.
If I’ve listened to a track to death, there’s no way I can even pretend to be biased about it (not that I can ever be anyway). I usually have one solid mix in me (meaning that redoing it from scratch ends up with the same or similar result), so for better or worse, getting the song onto the timeline is a matter of doing it before I get sick of the song entirely and trash it.
Spending too much time tweaking is just a dead-end road. My MO is that if it’s good, it can be worked on, but if it genuinely sucks, it should probably be scrapped. Trying to polish a turd isn’t fair for anyone, and it’s really hard to build something you hate from absolute scratch anyway.
For a more professional producer who’s job is to make new music, this seems like a problem. But for a hobbyist, why not just take a break?
I find that just doing something else for at least a day, or listening/watching other people make music I create myself a new metaphorical bowl of jelly.
I say be proud of what you make, even if it’s varied. And shut out the trolls that try to tell you it’s bad…
I find a lot (A LOT) of value in just putting projects away for a long period of time and coming back to them. I find I need to get a song completely out of my brain to be anyway near objective about it. Once I get the basic idea down, I feel safe putting a song in the drawer for weeks or even months. It should be long enough that something about the track surprises me when I come back to it.
I used to spend way too much time trying to make a song “better” (read: fix whatever didn’t work for me) and end up never really satisfied wit it anyway…
The last couple years, I haven’t found the drive to release anything new, so I have stuff that’s been sitting here for a while. From time to time, I take a listen to whatever’s “almost finished” and the selection happens naturally. What sounds “OK” ends up half-forgotten in a folder.
On the other hand, it’s a great feeling listening to something and your reaction is “wow, this is good, I should really finish it”.
My problem is that I feel morally obliged to finish a project when I’ve invested time and effort in getting so far with it. I also think that you learn a lot more by finishing a track, something I try to do as often as possible. Personally, I’m never satisfied with anything I complete but at some point you have to call it done and let it go, otherwise you’d go mad.
Didn’t someone once say that art is never finished, only abandoned? (Leonardo da Vinci, I think. He knew a thing or two about creativity, I recall. )
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