“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe
writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”
- Steven Pressfeild
This quote perfectly describes WHAT we should be focusing on to make the most progress with our music.
Coming up with new ideas, arranging songs, capturing killer performances and getting a great mix are extremely important… but they all tend to come together pretty easily with the right process.
Believe it or not... making music isn’t the hardest part of music production.
The most difficult part is: showing up consistently.
How you deal with the ups and downs of your inspiration and your wavering quality judgments about your work will ultimately define your level of success.
However, with a creative system you can leverage:
1 - Consistency
Again, taking action consistently is the MOST important part of producing music.
Whether you’re trying to increase your musical output, learn and refine various skills, make better quality music, finish better mixes…
It all depends on you TAKING ACTION.
No amount of information or tutorials is going to make your music any better. No one can truly teach you how to make YOUR music.
There’s no formula “out there” for YOUR art.
True progress hinges on YOU gaining knowledge and experience from your own actions!
2 - Quality through quantity
Many of the greatest artists of all time created their legendary music releases through a process called: curation
This is the secret behind some of the world's BEST music.
For example Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones in “Thriller”. The number 1 selling album of all time!
Straight from Quincy’s mouth:
"The making of Thriller in a little more than two months was like riding a rocket," Quincy said, "Everything about it was done at hyperspeed. Rod Temperton, who also co-wrote several of the album's songs, and I listened to nearly 600 songs before picking out a dozen we liked."
Or Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works 85-92”
This is undoubtedly one of the most influential electronic albums of all time. It commonly makes it on all sorts of top 10 album lists.
The keyword here is SELECTED.
If you know anything about Aphex Twin (Richard James) you know that he’s released a TON of music. In 2015 he posted 268 tracks on Soundcloud under a bunch of different aliases.
And when you look at the story of some of history's most celebrated composers (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven) they were also some of history’s most consistent and prolific creators.
All these great works were curated from a HUGE amount of song ideas. The “cream of the crop”.
I distinctly remember legendary Rick Ruben saying that he regularly suggests that artists write 2.5 times the amount of songs that they intend to release.
3 - Maintaining objectivity
A major problem we face as music producers is losing objectivity in our work.
We tend to listen to our music WAY too much and end up getting lost in rabbit holes and changing insignificant things that the listener won’t even notice.
Plus it’s a recipe for disaster in terms of losing inspiration for our music.
Think about this: If you were to take your favorite song of all time and listen to it:
- 5 times in a row…
- 10 times in a row…
- 100 times in a row…
You would slowly start to hate your favorite song!
Yet we do this with our own music ALL THE TIME
You can’t expect to make the right decisions for what your music needs if you’ve lost all sense of what quality is.
PLUS what is the entirety of the creative process but a fantastic and wonderful succession of DECISIONS?
Also hyper focusing on the wrong ideas can lead us to waste precious time “polishing turds”. Some ideas are just plain better than others!
The only way to take consistent action, achieve a massive amount of output all while maintaining your objectivity is with a well-oiled creative system.
Imagine having a process to just create freely but still consistently get projects past the finish line?
However, a lot of artists reject systems thinking in fear that it’ll formulate their music…
I agree! There can’t, and should never be a formula for music… or any art form.
The system is for YOU, not your music :)
Check out what my student Matt French is saying about the Workflow Wizardry system from Meta Mind Music:
"Went from not touching a DAW for 17 years to releasing an album I recorded and mixed myself in 2021... so on that trajectory I guess I win a plaque this year?"
Yes, he does deserve a plaque. And you do too!