mbfrancis wrote:No, but I think that unless you are simply finishing projects you've already done much of the work on, "finishing" an entire album (say >30 minutes of music) in a month repeatedly for most of us would almost necessarily require an abandonment of quality control (e.g., editing, polishing, getting feedback, tweaking, i.e., anything iterative). So it would become more an exercise in quantity vs any kind of attempt at quality. That's what I suspect some people are commenting on - give yourself more time and deliver better product, not just a bunch of first drafts.
Well, here's the things. Some of it is, in fact, finishing up projects that I've already done work on. This latest album, for example, is comprised of one track that was already finished and intended for publication elsewhere, and two tracks made from material that I'd sent to another fellow for collaborative work (which he never did, and after several years I took the material and re-worked it myself). As I said in my original post, I have a bunch of not-finished stuff languishing on my hard drive that I could (should) be working on.
But some of my work does not need much actual time to complete. My previous album,
I Blew It, is less about composing music like a Mozart might and more about seeing what happens when you plug various things together and run them through processes. The opening track has maybe four mixer tracks; one synth-drum channel, and three audio tracks that are being processed in different ways. In the case of that track, there's not much to do, once the processes are set up - just hit play or render and see what comes out. In a case like that, the first draft is pretty much the last draft. "I wonder what will happen? Oh, that's what happened." Done.
Different material has different standards for "finished", and in some cases, "rushed" is irrelevant to the primary point. You can argue that such procedural compositions are "too easy" or "not really music" if you like, but a blanket statement of "quicker=less good" operates on certain assumptions which may not apply. Spending more time on
I Blew It would not have given the album any significant increase in "quality".
So it's not like I'm attempting to create a dozen radio-ready pro-produced pop songs from scratch each month.
selig wrote:Sorry you took what I said the wrong way (or that I said it in a way that elicited this response).
Perhaps I've misinterpreted what you were saying, but in the context of a thread where nearly everyone but me is making concerned noises about speed vs. quality, it came off a bit condescending, i.e:
"Hey, if all you want to do is release stuff, why not just toss some half-baked crap out there and say 'screw it' to any standards?"
Do we in fact define "finished" and "released" differently from each other? Possibly. For me, it's not
worth releasing unless it
is finished (and reiterating the above: differing material can be "finished" under differing standards of polish or complexity). My hyperbolic statement about just releasing an album of one constant sine wave was just that, hyperbole: I could do it, sure, but it wouldn't really be worth the effort. (Besides, it's been done.)