How can you start a song while stressed out?

Disclaimer: this post is based on reflections resulting from the COVID pandemic.

Every other day, I exchange a few words with artists I know—friends, label partners, people I like, or anyone who wants to connect. I believe during these times, it’s important to keep social contact to divert our attention away from the madness, misery, or other constantly emerging concerns.

How can you still make music with everything going on?” someone asked me today (and last week). I did a workshop for MUTEK and the main question was similar, something like “where do (music) ideas come from?”

Both answers overlap, in a way. If you think about where ideas come from, (let’s call it “inspiration” if you want), it can strike at random moments. For some people it’s in the shower, others while commuting, or doing yoga…etc. Basically, 90% of the time it’s happening somewhere else, rather than when you’re making music. Hence the importance of taking long breaks when you make music, and by breaks, I mean, leave the studio, go out and do something else. Your mind is still making music, but the space you create for yourself to think, will create space for you to solve problems.

I don’t know about you, but my mind is pretty much always making music, in some way. I’ll be washing dishes or walking my dog, and there goes my brain, creating patterns, imagining song structure, paying attention to ambient noises and figuring out how to translate that with a synth. So, whenever someone asks me where my ideas come from, it’s a bit tricky to give a definitive answer, because the source of some ideas emerge a long time before I sit in front of the computer. The thing is, once I sit in front of the computer, it’s like whatever I have been thinking about vanishes..I’ve forgotten everything and there I am, thinking what now?

The first good habit of sitting down to make music starts with the commitment to a 5-minute session.

The existentialist question(s) of “why make music?” sometimes strike me during this pandemic, and hard. Why am I making this? Who am I reaching out to? Why, why, why?

The answer to everything can be resolved in the 5-minute commitment. If you’re someone who’s interested in meditation, we say that the hardest step to meditate is to just sit and start. It’s the same for music making.

Another part of this challenge we face is the isolation. Most artists feed themselves events to get inspired. Now touring is hard, and that cut-off happening cold-turkey was a mental challenge. Having the resilience to be able to continue making music after months is another obstacle in-itself, as this is something that’s not only demanding, but also unusually frustrating.

If you watch that movie about The Doors, they go in the desert and try taking peyote for a spiritual experience. A lot of artists in the ’60s and ’70s had a breakthrough moment where they wanted to go beyond the rock-and-roll lifestyle to seek out answers about their life, their art, and to open new avenues of creating. There’s something that makes me wonder, when I see artists calling their art meditation or such, if there’s some sense of integrity towards the commitment of what they want to translate. Is the song just another new take on something they did before or is there a real interest to do something meaningful?

I’m sharing this because if you hit a wall with the music making, it might be directly related to a part of yourself that is either hungry for something more, or experiencing revulsion towards the repeating patterns that aren’t providing answers to your current needs. One doesn’t need a change but if your drive to create has hit a wall, then perhaps it’s time to try something else. Because you are an artist and we create just like we breathe.

How to reinvent yourself artistically has been covered on this blog in the past, as well as how to start a new song. I’m not going to cover those again, but I can share how to approach music in these difficult times, when facing stress or a feeling like abandoning it all.

What are you listening to? Connect with the new audience.

A lot of artists find inspiration in clubs and touring. Without that kind of energy in context, it doesn’t mean that music is dead, it’s just transposed. It’s been really difficult to explain to people that have never been in club to relate to the experience of loud music because that same music, out of context, is often very bizarre and sometimes, pointless. But there are other options. You can make the same kind of music for when these events will return, but you could also take the time to make music that is not aimed at those contexts. What makes an artist mature is the depth he/she has. If your music is one-dimensional, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Many of the best artists will have different monikers to explore other avenues and I would say that it’s strongly encouraged to work on different types. Start by listening to a lot of music, perhaps more than you usually do.

Focus on the effortless.

Effortlessness seems to make some people feel uncomfortable. There’s a general attitude out there that great music was made through countless hours of work. Well, yes and no. If you think that you need to work a lot to sharpen your skills, yes, that demands resilience, motivation, curiosity and a lot of discipline. That is where the hard work is. But to record a song…this is where you put to practice your acquired skills and when you compose, that should be effortless. The whole aspect of post-production, editing, arranging endlessly and click-click-clicking your music to perfection isn’t, in my book, the real deal. It’s the rabbit hole of perfection grasping attempt that kills the original, pure and raw idea. I’m more interested in ideas than perfect production. In many cases, over-produced music ages really badly.

To get into “effortless music-making”, prepare for future projects by sketching out a lot of ideas, but mostly musical ones without much of anything supportive. Start a lot of projects, make loops and motifs, build presets, macros, collect some as well. A part of that means to also put away productivity and focus on spending time making music and not finishing anything. Think of guitar players who just play with their guitar without making a song. They’ll just play whatever they just feel coming.

Collaborate, talk, and connect.

How much time do you spend talking about your music? I don’t mean plugins and techniques, but ideas, emotions, and what you are trying to share. Do you reach out to other artists and share how you feel about their music or what it gives you as imagery?

Talking about music in general is pure fuel for imagination. The idea of putting words to the abstraction of sounds is a way of getting closer to understanding techniques and helping you having more precision on whatever you want to do. If you can explain it, you’ll understand it more. Plus the idea of sharing with another artist is a way of also getting technical feedback on parts that remain obscure and confusing.

One of the things I used to do, and still love doing, is to invite a few people to share our favourite music of the moment with one another, listening actively, commenting, getting lost in it. This is for musicians, quite a critical activity as the idea of how others perceive music is a very essential understanding of what people are looking for in the music, just as much as what is the music they’re willing to listen and share. This should fill up your references and study for future projects.

Making a collaborative playlist on streaming sites allows you to be also more connected. That’s the beauty of streaming even though it gets a lot of hate. Plus in time of Covid, this is possible even remotely.

Purpose, Passion, and Your Natural Gift

Maybe you’ve been using music as a way to get through the pandemic—you wouldn’t be the only one. When the pandemic first took hold, I started getting an unusually high number of requests for mixing and mastering. I saw about 25% more work than I would have in the similar time years before. At some point, my work load doubled. Mainly because everyone is making music right now that there are less things to do.

One question that I’ve encountered multiple times keeps coming up—is there a way to turn my hobby, what I love doing, into something that can be my day job? Can you really make a living as an artist? Many of us chase the idea of finishing a song, releasing an album, and seeing out there online with other artists we love. There must be some money coming back from that which would support me day-to-day, right?

Sorry, but the truth is money that comes back from sales, streaming and other exposure is really low.

So how can one make money then and making a living from a passion?

I fumbled upon an interesting article based on a study that you’ll find more happiness if you chase your purpose rather than your passion. It’s also quite known that making your passion a job can also kill it. I’ve been a musician full-time, run a label and tour…I can tell you that if you find yourself making a bad investment, it can completely scrap your career that you’ve been building for a decade. It hasn’t happened to me, but I did see a scene I was relying on, die out after a long stretch of golden years. What followed that genre wasn’t inspiring to me, and I never felt like jumping on the bandwagon like most of my peers did. Instead, I went low profile for a while, got some random jobs that could pay the bills and with some distance, I can see that I learned a lot from doing something else than just making music all day. You can lose perspective of yourself, of your direction, of your initial vision.

Maybe you’ve already seen or read about it in this blog, but I started 2020 with a challenge of making one track per week for the entire year. I thought initially it could be a good way of attracting people to what I do while learning more about production, revise/reinvent my own method and of course, hatch a bunch of tracks to release, eventually. That experience really brought me back to circa 2006-2008, when I was producing madly and had a lot of releases. Some people had been saying they wanted me to do techno like back then, but I felt that what was said then didn’t need to be said again, and wanted to bring something new to the table.

Adding this challenge alongside my daily work almost burnt me out, which is a really bad thing to happen if you’re an artist. With that in mind, I started dosing my music making and other insights came to me:

  • How to efficiently do I know my tools to do exactly what I need to be doing.
  • How to quickly spot obstacles and know the technique(s) to overcome them.
  • Know my limits, both creative, personal energy, and also technically.
  • Try to identify things I don’t know and not overlook them.
  • Remain humble.
  • Know what I love doing and/vs what I do best.

Just looking back at the last few weeks, there are a few things that became clear also—if you start doing something in order to get attention, you’ll get tired of it quite fast, especially if the reaction doesn’t meet your expectations. In my case, I quickly saw (I had foreseen it!) that after the 8th week, people didn’t really care anymore about the music posted. I sort of stopped posting and decided to share to a handful of people who I knew would listen. Eventually, I started making music for myself alone and even stopped uploading them on Weeklybeats, the website of the challenge. What’s pretty fascinating is to look at the first 8 tracks and what I do now and it’s completely different. Stuff I do for myself is purely experimental, either incredibly weird or very repetitive as I made some sonic moments for my loft, to be played on my Sonos.

How is this bringing me closer to my purpose or to my passion?

It’s not a secret that I found my passion many years back when I discovered I’m pretty solid teacher. Now it pays off. To teach, you need to know your craft inside out and be able to explain it properly. So exploring different techniques and reverse engineering music that I and others love is a way to teach people who want to know. This is why our coaching group is precious; we are collectively trying to understand certain techniques. What’s amazing about music is, you can understand a technique, teach it to 10 people and all of them will apply it in their own way, which will make 10 different results. The funny thing though, is that 50% will not like not being able to do what others can already do; which is a topic I work a lot in coaching: control.

Anyway, if what you do best might not be music-related, is there some hope? Well, maybe more than you think, if you have a bit of imagination. Here are a few other types of work that are more relate to music that you might think:

  • If you’re good at writing, you can work with artists on their bios, press kits, song descriptions, online presence and so on.
  • Graphic design is often a skill musician have. You have no idea how many designers are also musicians and in a world where image is crucial, you could really find work in the music industry for sure.
  • Web skills? There are so many aspects that you can tackle that as well.
  • Gear skills? If you have electronic based skills, maybe you can help assemble gear such as modular who come in kits and need assembling.
  • Networking is your thing? You have no idea how we need people that can connect people all together or create bridges between parts who need one another.

You might be thinking that musicians have no money to pay anyone, so how can that generate anything? If you’re really good at something, people will want to pay. Maybe not much at first but if you do a great job, it eventually it gets noticed. When I started this site and full time services, it started slow and I did a lot of free work (or highly discounted). I took a lot of time to build relationships with clients, and eventually happy clients referred in others. It became my purpose to make sure my clients can grow at what they do, both with the music making but also as artists that can shine in their community.

This is why I took a bunch of people under my wing with the idea to push them as if they were me. What can I do for this person that can make a difference in their career? Is it teaching them something? Is it connecting them with promoters or labels?

That’s when I understood that another skill I personally had is networking and establishing contacts. I’m a natural social butterfly at events and that is something that can pay off on the long run, especially in what I do.

The pandemic affecting events is making it really difficult to not only make that happen effectively, but also for the global inspiration to make music. Being in isolation confronts you to make music based on memories without having much (or any) of a chance to test it on a crowd…forcing you to do what you love and to simply be patient.