Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.)

Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio.

If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surge of energy running through your bones when making the music, why would anyone else feel anything? Mixing and the music sounding "professional" is completely secondary. Even detrimental a lot of the time, to be honest.

Applies to many other things than music as well. I don't any great technology comes out and about without that loop, either.

This lines up with my own experience with writing and (more recently) blogging.

You get over the fear of writing by doing a LOT of it, until you get to a point where writing a story or blog post stops feeling "special" and becomes just another thing you do. Each individual piece of writing stops feeling like an important work of art that you must get right at any cost, and becomes more like doing the dishes or taking out the garbage.

You can then separate the act of creating from the act of curating and editing. I regularly cut thousands of words from my writing before I share in public. I regularly throw away (well, archive) fully written drafts because I don't like them. A few years ago, this would've been unimaginable. Today, it feels like part of the process.

At some point, you gain confidence that you'll always have another story, another blog post, another poem inside you. If the current thing sucks, you just write another thing, and another, and another, until something clicks. It's freeing.

IME when creative work starts feeling like "just a job" is EXACTLY when it also becomes most fulfilling and satisfying.

I’m a performer, not composer, but what OP describes is very similar to the routines performers do: technical exercises, rhythm section chores, improv, current pieces, etc. Reps are the only key.

Like with so many other artistic things, people can have very different workflows. Some people need to produce a lot of material, consistently, and then filter out. Stephen King is known for having such a workflow. Others will only produce when they find the motivation, and can go for long periods without producing anything.

In the end, whatever works for you.

A lot of my hobbyist musician friends were way more prolific during covid. The extra time seemed to have unlocked their ability to be way more creative to de-stress. I myself had a burst of activity recording music and improving my guitar technique for a couple of years.Sadly it dipped again post covid. However, more recently I'm trying to find a middle ground with AI cutting corners with the boring repeatable stuff of audio engineering and shifting focus to the creative and the technique. Feels like things have turned the corner here and I can get a pretty professional mix out quick without sacrificing my creativity. I love that middle ground where AI is truly helping me accelerate my output as a hired gun that mixes my sound while the calluses and note selections/ arrangement are all mine.

One challenge I've always had with having many concurrent project tracks is how to name them so they are distinct in my head. I made instrumental music so there's no lyrical line to hook into. Using "created at" datestamps for filenames is not great, but neither is obscure codenames.

I’ve been a recording musician for 28 years. Making music a boring chore is not the answer. The best musicians do two things: learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity and second, understand music theory in depth for when that fails and you get stuck.

I find something quite bleak about this.

The joy of participating in music, to me, is one of the few domains where we can still, to an extent, hide away from the relentless enclosure and commodification of every facet of our existence in the name of capitalist value extraction. Imagining oneself as an assembly line in order to rush past the experience of the creative process and arrive as quickly as possible at a finished artifact — to me this is an act of submission. It is accepting that one's market value as a musician, as measured by the number and popularity of commodities they produce, is of vastly greater importance than the depth and quality of their musical experiences, than any joy, pleasure, satisfaction, connection, growth, expression, or catharsis they experience through their participation in music.

I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.

I'm trying to take this approach to learning, through the web app I (and Claude have) built https://www.asmusictheory.com/tools/sight-reading-speed - depending on the subject, I've created tools that function as little mini games, and have added test cards with spaced repetition for helping to fix knowledge as I gather it

It's now even simpler to "become a musician"; just enter some text and press "generate".

No further need to learn to play like these crazy guys: https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=973