Charting a course

I have been making music since 2009. My goals have always been extremely lofty whether it’s to get a release on a legendary label or produce a viral bootleg. But without being able to measure progress of my own production, these goals are aimless pipedreams untethered by reality. One and a half decades later, my goals are quite different. I feel old, weathered, and unswayed by changed trends or aesthetics. My goals are different now, though no less lofty, as they have entirely turned inwards. I am no longer interested in appealing to some panel of taste-makers or gaining clout in an internet producer cabal. Instead, my only goal is to create orignals and bootlegs that are good enough in my mind to be side-by-side with my own library. I have a large collection of tracks that amount to an excellent source of reference: the pinnacle of dance tracks. These are tracks that I know intimately well and judge to be nearly perfect both technically and musically. So my aim is to build a series of my own productions that can stack up to my own taste.

As Blink 82 would say, I’ve been here before, a few times. But I don’t know that I have ever taken and followed through with my own advice to myself. So what is different now? Well, potentially nothing. It’s possible I could continue doing the same things I have always done and nothing could change. Or, I could deliberately take my own advice and put aside all other interests. I make music for fun but I desire some level of personal achievement. And this has always been a balancing act where I expect some amount of satisfaction from results without putting in too much effort because then it would be more like work and less like fun. But then I don’t get a sense of achievement and I don’t seem to achieve results. Thus, I am stuck in a loop of personal creative purgatory.

The new plan final vFinally final

Keeping with lyrical references, I got new rules I count ‘em:

1. DO NOT start new tracks. I have hundreds of unfinished projects. I started most of them because at some point I had some creative idea that was so worth pursuing, I sat at my computer for at least a few hours trying to translate it from my head to speakers. It’s a valuable skill to find the nugget at the center of an idea and find the best way to present it.

2. Frame a vision for each track

• 2a. Find a similar reference track and analyze what it does
• 2b. Chart the reference in a spreadsheet tracking the elements, when they are added, when they are removed, final those reference track’s “moments”. Learn how they work. Learn why they work. Replicate them in the arrangement for my own track.
• 2c. Build a blueprint for the technical aspects. How loud is the reference? What is the dynamic range and contrast? Use tools like spectrum analysis and oscilloscopes to achieve this.

Stop.

Segment improvement. Blueprints can only be followed a step at a time. This is enough for now. I don’t need to architect the hypotheticals. I should be iterative and revisit these steps once I am following through with these two steps. I will screenshot my analysis to document that I am taking these actions and I will write my own reflections on personal feedback and insights.

More to come…