When Do You Know A Track Is Finished?

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Are you one of those perfectionists that has a hard time finishing a project because they feel there’s always one more detail that needs fixing? I’ve published a few posts with tips on how to finish tracks, but maybe you’re still spending countless hours on minor tweaks. You’re not alone. I’ve long been like that too, but with time I’ve learned to find a happy balance between embracing my perfectionist side and staying spontaneous.

bridge-593148_1280I remember seeing a very inspiring video about Fellini, who felt that the only art possible was that which emerged from spontaneity, not from trying to control the uncontrollable. In other words, if you try to control your initial impulses, you might ruin what your instincts had naturally proposed. Overworking your production, after all, often comes from being excessively concerned with others’ feedback, but that’s completely out of your hands.

For all you know, people might love the exact things you were trying to suppress.

Here’s where it can become a problem:

You’ve been adjusting (and readjusting) the same project for months. Each time you listen to your track, you hear some new detail that you’d forgotten about or hadn’t noticed before.

This might be because:

You’re spending too much time on your track in one sitting. If you spend 4 hours in a row on a track, you’ll lose the perspective you need to hear things properly. I’ve stressed this before, but I always recommend taking tons of breaks, and to space out your sessions too. Letting your project sit for a few days before opening it again can really help. A week is even better. Months can do magic.

Your listening environment might not be perfect. This is why listening outside can help you figure out what needs tweaking. Try to always refer back to tracks that you know sound right, and insert your track into the same playlist. You can then put your player on shuffle to discover if your track sounds like it fits in.

But remember: achieving perfection is an illusion. What you hear on the 1000th listen is only what someone who has been listening to a track on non-stop repeat will hear. The chances are very low that anyone on earth will listen to your track as much as you do. And even if they did, by that point there’s actually a mental mechanism that kicks in, where people’s brains will adapt their perceptions to the track so as to accept it as it is. This might be a bit hard to swallow at first, but it is factual.

poteryTo cite a good example, every time I play live, I’ll spend innumerable hours preparing my sounds in advance. But then as I’m juggling with them live, they’re only being played for a few minutes each. The ones I think don’t sound so great are often perceived as really cool by the crowds. People will think that the sound, as they heard it, was made that way for a reason. They’re not totally wrong. You’ve created your music in a specific environment, and that is how your music sounds — there. Even if you get a mastering engineer to look over it all and make sure it sounds right, it’s honestly very rare that they’ll adjust more than 3 or 4 things at most.

Which is all to say that spending countless hours on that snare just might be a bit overkill.

In conclusion, you never really know if your track will be done. It is just a matter of accepting to move on and leave that track living it’s own, watching where it will end and accomplish. Go focus on the next work. You can always leave a track sleeping for a few months and get back to it later. That is always a way to see what’s left to be done.

SEE MORE:  What Is A Mature Sounding Track?

Where to Get Fresh New Ideas for Tracks

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Jazz drummer in a nightclubOne of the questions I used to get the most from my students was how to come up with new ideas when making music. Unlike with jazz or rock, the options for creating electronic sounds are limitless, and so the range of electronic music genres and sub-genres is vast. Because of this, it becomes particularly easy to get lost in the innumerable possibilities and directions your music could take.

 

For many, just the pressure of trying to come up with new ideas can generate a writer’s block. And asking someone like me for tips on where to start could also lead to more questions, since I’ve developed my own ways of approaching the process over the years. With that said, I’ve personally found it essential to bear these 3 things in mind:

  1. Music is a shared experience. The more you live your music, the clearer your ideas get.
  2. Your experience of the music may not be the same as the listener’s. Let go of your desire for people to “get it,” and accept that they might see or feel something you don’t.
  3. Creativity starts with embracing the endless recycling of sounds and ideas. Don’t think you’ll reinvent the wheel, if you know what I mean. Expectations kill creativity.

While you might have an intellectual understanding of the whole process of making music, there’s another dimension, that of intuition and feelings. So this involves two things:

  1. Jamming. Play with gear, softwares.
  2. Recycling. Inspiration from other songs, samples, presets, artists.

Everyone’s different, but if you think of bands for example, they jam together for a while until they uncover an idea they like. Then they will nail it down or record it to make it into a song. But before they can get there, they need to just let loose, go wild, and explore. In jazz, it’s well known that the masters would play for hours on end in little clubs, pushing themselves beyond the point of exhaustion until they reached a level of pure creativity, discovering new paths that they never would have found in a short session.

Basically, your brain needs a little push. You can’t just sit there and think you’ll have something fresh and innovative by opening your DAW and tweaking for 30 minutes. It demands patience, and giving yourself the permission to get a bit wild and break your own rules.

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Many people find that jamming isn’t really their thing, and they’ll get great ideas if they already have material to work from. This is why sampling has become so popular in the last 30 years. Musicians take something they love, and then change the context to give it a whole new life. Using other people’s music can a bit of a legal nightmare though, so thankfully, as you know, there are tons of options out there — but maybe the best way is to learn to make your own sounds.

 

Fact: Doing arrangements in your DAW isn’t really “playing your music.”  Have you developed the skill of playing it?

This is why learning to jam can be really useful. But how do you do it?

Try this simple exercise:

  1. Open any soft synth in your DAW, and pick a preset or make yourself one.
  2. Write a few few notes, but keep it simple. Play it in a loop.
  3. Play with the parameters and record everything. Also, record the midi in case you’ll be changing that.
  4. Listen to what you recorded, isolate the best parts, and then jam over it some more.
  5. Repeat.

That’s it. You’re jamming. You have no idea how many people don’t realize how easy it is until they try it. And how fun. Just do it and PLAY your music.

On a final note, remember that inspiration also comes from listening to music, and lots of it — whether it’s music in the genre you want to make or something completely different, since you can translate ideas into your own world. One thing people sometimes forget is how listening to music with friends or in another context (walking, driving, commuting) can be especially useful, since it provides perspective on how the sound feels when doing daily activities. Ideas will then sprout.

SEE MORE:  Recycling Your Tracks Into Fresh New Ideas