thawkins

Yeah, I agree that these nice things like taking care of your gear, getting to know it better in bed, etc... it's for when you already have made room in your life for regular music making. Like if your back's to the wall and you want to get started having one or two hours of uninterrupted creative time per week, the most versatile and effective tool for this situation is a modern laptop and a pair of good headphones. Sure, it can be any other setup as well, but the main thing is to get into a regular routine and then step by step change things around, learn your mind and your gear. I guess that's the aforementioned perfection of the rice making across many years.

Yeah this stuff resonates with me a lot. What I like most is to play music, to be in the moment of creating something new and engaging in a jam session. Even better if that jam session is with friends, and the best if it's also got an audience that can appreciate it. However in order to get to a point where I am allowed or invited to play these jam sessions in clubs and event spaces, I kind of need to record them, polish, cut into listenable tracks - most of all I need to get my name out there so that I get to have the live opportunities. This is all good in terms of getting better at making music, but at the same time the productifying-marketing aspect is also really soul sucking and demands energy that would otherwise be spent on being creative instead. I am not having any illusions with regard to being able to live from my music, but I did like to play live concerts every once and a while. Although I would say again that if your problem is "step 0: finding time & motivation to make music in your off hours" then that's really far from "step 31232: making money off my music".

Paraphrasing a classic: time you enjoyed tuning your analog synth is not time wasted tuning your analog synth.

That everyone should become a rich tax evasion criminal in Thailand? You don't even sound happy living that life.

Yeah I feel that this type of approach sucks some joy out of it and turns music into yet another chore you have to schedule in your weekly calendar. I am not sure though how else to approach this at the moment, because I am afraid that if I stop, it'll be harder to get started again.

I feel like you're missing the point here. This thread is about "how to find time for making music" not "how to make lots of money from your music". Like, if you don't have enough time to devote to music, you are probably not going to have any music to sell anyway, so we need to solve the more important problem first.

A while ago I had this joke idea that you should treat music production like a gym. Start with 16x4 sets of techno beats, just open up a project, make a 4 bar beat, save the project, then a next different 4 bar beat. Get your APM up so your subconscious only has to hint towards "polyrhythm" and your fingers already do the motions and 2 seconds later (if Live has not crashed) you have a beat going. Take 2 minute break. Follow up with 4 reps of bass sound design, alternate between FM and AM synths. OK anyway you get the idea..

My suggestion is to trawl through some used gear listings and get something that you feel your heart connecting with that you can also use immediately as well.

I am kind of in the same place as you are - full time job and even though I work from home, I am a dumbass who spends probably way too much brain cycles doing work. The result is that I am really tired most evenings and well I also try to have a social life and family (no kids though, just a cat). On the other hand, I think music wise I am doing OK. I started doing WeeklyBeats in 2018 and since then I have kept up putting a track on Soundcloud each week. With @TubularCorporation we are also running a weekly livestream on Twitch and Youtube. I also go out in the real world once every 2 weeks to jam with a local guitarist pal for 2h where I play drums. All this still takes a good chunk of my time - let's say 1 evening 4h for doing the stream with setup-teardown and another evening making a track (4h again). Most weeks I will not get all the things done that I want, and this is probably just overly ambitious thinking on my part. Also, this schedule is probably only possible thanks to the pandemic killing off social life. ? That said, I have some practical suggestions for digging out of the hole and starting a creative routine. In your situation, the first thing what I would do is set some regular time each week (lets say 1-2 hours) for music. You could do it like weeklybeats, and set a target to make one new track each week. I think it's best to aim to create something new each week - either it is a finished track or a cool new Live preset, or you just take a youtube tutorial and try it out, or even just work on setting up your template project. Having tangible results to look back on to see "I did that" is a massive motivation boost, at least for me. Even if your result is just a single saw tone with a modulated filter, that's already great - you won this week's battle against fucked up time constraints and achieved something! Just like with hitting the gym or practicing anything else, you are not going to instantly win, but if you do steady work over time, you'll get there. 2nd thing - the project template. It's a reality problem that if you are struggling for time, you do not have time to reinvent your gear setup or whatever it is that you use to make music. So it's good to have your DAW project and favorite sounds set up in a nice sounding mix so you can get started quickly. Doing those livestreams I have everything set up to go, all I do is just open up the project and jam in some loops as sound check to begin with. Same with the video part. I never built that stuff from scratch, everything has evolved step by step by tweaking the mix and elements here and there. In my opinion, the main thing you first want to achieve is that you get a routine going that fits you. You should not feel bad that you are not creating amazing music off the bat, maybe you never will, but I have found that after listening to my own tracks from years ago, some of them occasionally are not dog shit. And since everyone's being philosophic, let me share a Bukowski quote.

The last time I went to search for this kind of thing I discovered that what I personally wanted would be something that implements the Mackie Universal Control protocol. Because that seems to be the industry standard for showing you different controllers and also automapping to DAW elements which is super important, if you do not want to spend ages trial and erroring your own. In the end I decided to get the 1st generation Ableton Push. This solution works for me because I am doing everything in Live nowadays.

Not gonna lie, I have a feeling that I should be doing exactly the opposite of what this list tells and I might end up with something really cool.

Ah whoops, the global re-enable button does the trick. Gosh boy it did feel amazing for 5 seconds to be all "guess you boffins did not think of this one!".

Ok Ableton heads, anyone know how to re-enable automation on the Scale MIDI device? I am on Live 10, maybe this killer feature exists on Live 11.

Thanks, great tips. I am sure I tried both feeding some clock signal into the Kastle and also some vocoder experiments. I must have been using it wrong because the results definitely did not impress me back then. I used it mostly as a noise source that I could mess around with using Live's autofilter and its own knobs. Maybe I will give it a shot again one day.

I came to post this here basically. Just like with any creative move, you're eventually responsible as an artist to make it sound good. Like if you sample, and it sucks and it feels unoriginal, people probably will not magically switch to liking the song more even if you can prove that you did it "by the rules". Sometimes it does feel like a sampled track done by a big name becomes greater than the original, even though it was just slapping 4-4 bassdrum and professional mixing-mastering on a track that was already 95% there. That's just tough luck really, and usually it still ends up with real music heads discovering and playing the original track. Oh and I personally am super exhausted of hearing Timothy Leary or Terence McKenna or whatever pseudo new age enlighted deep spiritual quotes on top of tracks. They work really well when used sparingly, but at this point it's like hearing the airplane safety instruction spiel before takeoff. This has 99% turned me off from listening to any modern psytrance, psychill and related genres.

That's a nice setup. I am curious how you use the Kastle. Mine is mostly used for filling space in my shame drawer.

Yeah with all things like this, if the person actually goes and pulls it off, it's really amazing and cool to see and I can totally respect that. On the flip side, you rarely see this kind of folk post on the internet, because they have just completely immersed themselves in their way of life and that does not include being online beyond the bare minimum.

It has never ever happened in history that someone makes cool music with something that is not meant to be an instrument. Anyway here's another toy:

[Silence falls upon the room] Choose your next action: [Stealth req not met] Sneak into the kitchen to make some popcorn. [Might] Piss in the Oberheim. [Dexterity req not met] "Hey any of you techno freaks every play a REAL INSTRUMENT?" [Perception] "Come on, if you argue with a chiptunes guy you its like wrestling a pig in the mud, except the pig will enjoy it." [Perception] "Come on, if you argue with a analog tube synths guy you its like wrestling a pig in the mud, except the pig will enjoy it." [Aphex Twin knowledge req not met] "You know AFX used a nanoloop on track X on album Y?!"

I really like hardware, but I have to also be honest with myself and see if I am spending more time fighting with latency/MIDI issues and other things that have nothing to do with the music and sound itself. Like it's great to have the physical piece of kit, but if I spend 10 minutes per project trying to troubleshoot stuck notes, whoops I turned my keyboard on and now it sent a program change messing up all my sounds, etc etc. it all adds up to a big grand total of wasted energy and frustration that does not need to be. Like these are not the kind of "good" technical limitations that force creativity in my opinion. Not selling the hardware anyway because I am a hoarder.

I remember paying something like 200€ for mine, so it kind of looks like I could sell it for more now. Kind of, because if I only had all the expansion cards it would be worth so much more or something. I guess I will give it a try to see how the licensing model works and how the thing itself compares to the real thing. Kind of suspicous about whether they really have the same logical engine in it somehow, or it is some cheap approximation.

Spending some days away from my home studio just on the laptop, now listening some Roland Cloud sound comparison and thinking about all the money I spent on a massive interface (several actually), a rack enclosure, cables, setup time, more cables, more setup time, because what I end up doing anyway is just using the presets to play through some Ableton Live effect chain. Live and learn I guess. That, and I did not know that you can just get the VSTs as a one time payment thing without sticking around for the monthly subscription. At least that is the impression I get. Has anyone tried out Roland Cloud yet? What's the catch? Cryptocurrency miners pretending to be bad FM patches?

Whooops, forgot all about this thread for several months it seems. I made a bunch of new music in the meantime, but I'll just post the cream of the crop here and if you like it you can find the rest on Soundcloud anyway. Big news is that Weeklybeats 2022 is on, and I have decided that this time I will try out my idea of just creating a bunch of small short songs that fit onto each other, forming a massive 2h or 56 minute collage by the end of the year. Here's a playlist that contains the 3 tracks so far: Weekly livestreams are continuing and each one feels better than the last (this might mean that a massive fuckup is incoming OR we have just finally arrived at the plateau of mediocrity). Yeah, this could be boring to listen to, but first ask yourself - can anything that shows a pic of a fully cabled up MPC1000 be bad? Obviously, no. (Even if I do mostly use it for MIDI sequencing (i.e. fingerdrumming some loops into Ableton)

My response was also meant to be a joke. ? I need to work on my posting skills.