Approach to creating music: Breadth vs depth

[bwbbd]

Hello everybody! This is my first post here, so I might as well introduce myself also (skip to the next paragraph if you want to get straight to the point). My name is Leon, I live in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. I started out with Reason around 2005 ish, but worked inconsistently, every now and then, so I can't say I have 17 years of experience. I was more consistent during 2008 - 2012, and from 2019 onwards I feel I am finally getting a rhythm going on. I can't say for sure what style I am producing, but my main musical heroes, among others, are (earlier) Death In Vegas, Massive Attack, Trentemoller, Apparat, Moderat, Jon Hopkins.These ones are my main sources of inspiration and the ones I look up to. Glad to be on board, and nice to meet you all. I hope to be as active as time permits.

I recently got into a debate with a producer friend of mine regarding different approaches to music production, quality/quantity wise. I hope to open up a discussion here and exchange opinions about this. What do you think about making as many songs as possible, that are good enough (quantity) versus doing songs that are "perfect" (to whatever your standards are at that current point).

1) My stance is that doing as many songs as possible will help you in the long run. Having a finisher mentality will help you, instead of just getting stuck at the 16-32 bar loop. I understand the philosophy behind moving on if a song gets stuck at some point, because it can suck the fun out of making music if you grind at whatever place you are stuck in, but for me it ended up in just amassing loops over loops and not having a final result. Once I set myself a goal of finishing 16 songs (limiting myself to one device or module in Reason for each one) and kept pushing through the hard times, even though on several occasions it was extremely frustrating, I did manage to break through on several occasions and finish 4 songs, with many more to come, which is a huge deal for me. I even managed to make a whole track using nothing else but noise oscillators from Thor!

My reasoning is that even though the quality of the sound design, arrangement, you name it, might not be the best that you can do when making those songs, it is still better than nothing, and after finishing a certain number of songs you will get better at everything related to production. My aim now is to make 'decent' tracks/presentable ones, tolerating imperfections (from limitations of skill) and not worrying about them as long as they are not blatantly obvious or hurt your ears/ruin your mood. I am working towards having enough songs in order to fill up a live set to play when the times will permit, and replace those in time as I get better at my craft.

2) My friends' stance is that one must move on if a song does not 'click' while creating, and while working on it you must make the individual tracks sounding as good as possible before adding other stuff to the song. He does not agree about letting small imperfections slide as he thinks that this is setting a low bar for quality, and if you're doing so you are just developing bad habits in this regard. He firmly believes that if a song does not click and if you grind at it for weeks usually it will turn out to sound like shit. He did acknowledge that he did this in the past a couple of times but now he is not doing it anymore. From my point of view he is in a good place now musically as he seems to be a music making machine, and I'm nowhere near his level, so I'm seeing this grind also as a phase.

On the other hand I am sensing some sort of unhealthy perfectionism in him. He believes that when it comes to making music you have to bring something original to the table in order to be successful, or break boundaries. That is true, indeed, but I think that you can only get to your level of true originality, expressing your truest self musically, only by exercise and creating lots of duds in order to get b]there[/b].

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While I agree with him and his viewpoints I don't think it will work out for me at this point as I feel I need to have this quantity approach for a while until I get some confidence, as all those years without finishing songs have eroded mine. think it's just a matter of personal fit after all, because just moving on hasn't gotten me any results, and maybe there is no one size fits all solution to this. Or I might be just plainly wrong.

From what I feel the main drawbacks of each approach in particular seem to be (unhealthy) obsession when focusing on finishing a track no matter what, or perfectionism (not the good kind) when moving on to another track when you feel you're stuck on the current one.

I feel like there would be much to add to this subject, but I'll try to keep short now, maybe add in in the thread later on as the discussion progresses. What are your thoughts on the above? Might there be also another approach that I'm missing?

[WarStar]

Great topic!

I came up with a little a system that has greatly helped me. I called it the A to Z method lol

Basically, I went with the idea of 30days in a month and how can I maximize being musically productive in those 30 days. Also I didn't want to get stuck in the loop abyss lol so I wanted to come up with a way to just stay in the creative mindset and not over think the process.

With 26 letters in the alphabet I thought why not a song or at the very least the makings of a song for each letter which would roughly come out to each day in a month and it would give me a couple days off here and there in 30 days..

So with day one I name my session file the month I'm in, so example now would be January 2022_Song A.. I give my self one full charge on my laptop to get as far as I can on the basics of this new song which comes out to roughly 2 ½ hours. From there my goal is to get a decent 16 to 24 bars of good groove and basic parts, ie drums, bass, leads, and accent parts. The first 16 bars are a front of verse and back of verse and the additional 8 bars are for chorus. I try to get it arranged as best as possible without any thought to any mixing decisions cuz I'm really just trying to stay in the creative mindset. I try to make fairly quick decisions on melodies and the basic parts. I use factory drum kits and Subtractors default bass patch and find a handful of synth patches that keep me inspired on the leads but I try not to go fishing around for the perfect patch at this stage. Then I'll add some claps and some basic one shots to keep the groove going so to speak. Now once my charge on my laptop gets to 10% I save my progress and turn it off and forget about the song. The next day I do the exact same thing but name that song "B". By the end of the month if I've had managed my time lol I'll have 26 decent skeletons of potential songs I can come back to and finish. Then at this stage I go through all 26 and pick the ones I like the best which typically has been around 10-12 and then I start working on finishing the arrangement of the song, again not worrying to much about mixing decisions only focusing on arrangement. I try to make fairly quick decisions on finishing the arrangement as well so lots of "add bars" and "remove bars" edits and experiment with arrangement. And as the first stage goes I give my self one full laptop charge while working on arranging songs. If I feel I've kinda hit some indecision on one song I'll just save my progress and open up another song Ive picked to finish and start doing some arrangement to that one. Again trying to stay fresh creatively. At this stage too I'll find myself writing a few more melodies sometimes or adding to the bassline or changing Drum patterns for a break or just a change of groove but again trying to stick to quick inspiring decisions. When my laptop battery gets to 10% I save and shut it down.. now I've found this arrangement stage I'm doing with the songs I've picked typically lasts a week to two weeks depending on time management. But once I feel the songs are all arranged the way I want them too then I move on to the finishing and Mixing stage. At this stage I also start finding patches and drums and bass patches that really fit the vibe of the song as well and replace some of patches and drums I've already used. ThenI try to make quick decisive mixing decisions here as well. At this stage is where I start to sound check the songs in my car and on my phone speaker. I'll also start naming the songs.. once I get all the songs mixed and am happy with arrangement still then I'll move on the mastering but only once I'm satisfied with all my results thus far..

So with the A to Z stage and the arrangement and mixing stage I'm looking at roughly 2 months and the mastering part is pretty quick...

So since October to present I've finished 22 songs and haven't posted them to any platforms yet but man it feels good to finish songs and force myself to stay the creative mode and the end results are something I'm really satisfied with..

Anyhow, that's my little system that works for me...

[QVprod]

I don't fully agree with either position. I agree that if you're working on a song and it's not clicking, you should move on, but perhaps you may come back to it later and have fresh ideas for it. Sometimes it just doesn't happen. Trying to force it won't give the best results. At the same time, trying to perfect every sound in the writing process before finishing the song is likely to have you stuck anyway as you''ll lose inspiration in the process. If you find yourself never finishing then, yes some type of personal discipline or challenge might be helpful.

That said, everyone's individual process will differ. In my case where I often make tracks for other artists aside from myself, it's a combination of both. The core of that song is definitely being finished, it has to click, and I don't have time to be perfect on the sounds, especially if the artist is sitting in the room with me while I create. This usually happens in under an hour or 2. But that also also comes with experience in finishing songs. You get a good idea of where things go and sometimes your initial "finished" song is a skeleton that's mostly done.

[avasopht]

It's all about balance.

Sometimes go for quantity. Sometimes got for quality.

That way you can take advantage of the best aspects of both ideologies.

I learned a lot in the Reason 5-minute challenge.

In fact, some of my best tracks came about in quick 5-minute bursts. At other times I've found magic in a track by layering and layering, and then removing what is no longer essential, and then ... ... I'll realise that I get the best sound from just two of the instrument tracks. Because of the interplay between each track and how they drew inspiration from what came before, you can end up with music you'd never have dreamed of making while bouncing off of your own vibe in the same way that a band does.

[WarStar]

I'll add that the more you finish songs the better you get at finishing them.. I guess it goes without saying practice makes perfect. I've also noticed for myself that the more I do this the easier it is to make good decisive decisions with writing and arrangement.. and with my experience I'm finding that the vibe and groove has also improved just simply because I'm getting more practice at it and decisions I make are more helpful, enhancing and more quick than before.. but as was already said everyone's process is different but I will say the loop abyss is real and for me that was the whole point of coming up with my own system

[Timmy Crowne]

There’s an old saying:

‘That which you need most will be found where you least want to look.’

I’ve found that to be true. Whatever is your predisposition, there is a lot to gain by stretching yourself right to the brink of your comfort zone. Since you mentioned that finishing tracks has been something you don’t generally tend to do, you might want to go hard in that direction for a while.

I’ve done it, and I learned a lot about my process and my psychology. My insecurities led me to feel that I was an imposter unless I made something that was more complex than pop tracks. I was squeezing the life out of my songs because I wanted them to be “perfect,” which to me meant having a bunch of different elements all routed through a bunch of effects. Nothing wrong with that, but I can’t say all that stuff made the songs any better. I just wasn’t comfortable letting a song be simple. I was being guarded and defensive through the use of layers and effects. Ultimately, this led me to finish very few songs.

I think that we electronic musicians put tremendous pressure on ourselves to be “artists.” It’s like we have to break the mold and be experimental, or else we’re posers. There’s no reason why that should be true. Music served a pretty simple purpose throughout history: enrich the community’s experience. People wanted to hear music when they gathered for festivals, weddings, funerals, worship, rites of passage etc. The people wanted to hear what they expected to hear. It’s okay not to be novel: A 12-bar blues song is exactly how it should be, even though it has the same progression as thousands of others.

Today we have so much choice at our fingertips, we can get a little reluctant to use tried-and-true drum patterns, chord progressions, or song structures. We don’t want to sound like ‘that crap on the radio.’ Well, at least they’re pumping it out!

[rcbuse]

I'm in the quantity over quality camp, at least on the first pass.
I'm not someone that can spend 3 hours straight on one track, I need to switch it up.
Forever I had the habit of working on something for 60 minutes, not liking it, closing the app and it was lost forever. I would also get stuck on the details, searching for some 'better' sound.

I had to make some rules for myself.

1) ALWAYS save the file, no matter how bad I think it is at the time. Save as YYMMDD BlahBlah.reason
2) Spend 2 minutes setting levels so the track is bouncing in the ballpark of -16db so all the tracks have a constant loudness.
3) ALWAYS save the mp3 with the .reason file.

These rules resulted in a growing log of tracks, some shit, some good. But at least they exist instead of nothing. So now I can go back and listen to a playlist of them and hear something I completely forgot. Then if I feel like polishing it up, I can make a few notes on what needs to be different, load it up, make those changes, save as YYMMDD BlahBlah MkII.reason, export mp3, and hear it again next time around.

These rules also let me to work quickly, if I spend 20 minutes on something and its not moving, just save, start again.