One important skill I've found necessary in both music and my software career is dissociation. By that, I mean the ability to separate yourself from the work that you've created. It's natural to feel that what you have made is a reflection of yourself and your value, but it also leads to a lot of fear. In the music world, this manifests as a fear of releasing music and instead endlessly tweaking knobs and refining 4 bar loops; in the software world, I see it manifest in the form of not making difficult decisions out of fear of taking responsibility, due to the fear of failure of those decisions reflecting on you personally.
In leadership training sessions I've taken at Amazon and elsewhere, this attempts to get addressed by some bs "vulnerability" segment where the facilitator asks you to share something about your childhood that was difficult, or a time when you made a mistake in your life, something like that. Personally I just make something up or say something really generic here, which I assume many others do as well. I feel like a much more effective way to train this "dissociation" skill would be something like the Christmas Music approach. Music and art are deeply personal works; sharing something you've created to the world and getting sometimes harsh feedback (or, more likely, no feedback at all!) is a far better way to learn how to be vulnerable than a carefully chosen story from your childhood that makes you look like you had it rough (but not too rough). It's also more relevant since it's about making your output vulnerable, rather than your personality.
Musically, I have a bit of a fanbase now, which I still find shocking. But still, every time I release a new song and see the initial Soundcloud plays roll in my stomach goes into knots. Why aren't they liking it? Is this song way worse than my other songs? Did I release garbage and people hate me now? It's a very tough feeling to overcome.
The psychology of art is fascinating because it's a mixture of conflicting drives.
Caring about how others perceive your work helps incentivize you to get better and grind through all of the non-creative work required to get stuff in front of an audience. But it also creates anxiety that you'll be rejected by them.
Believing in yourself and the worth of your art helps overcome that anxiety and allows you to make authentic work that is personal in ways that resonate with others instead of pandering. But it also risks making you oblivious to actual useful critical feedback and can make you inflexible and unpleasant to collaborate with.
There is an interesting feedback loop between artist and audience. I think the best art comes from an artist intensely connecting with their own inner emotions in ways that reveal something meaningful and true to the audience. That level of vulnerability is difficult without external support, so it's incredibly hard to do that without an audience that it resonates with. It's like each artists needs to find their own local microclimate of the right fans in order to blossom.
Very well said. I used to attach my self worth to my release and if people didn’t like it I would feel it was a personal affront. Then I realized that
1) you can’t please everyone
2) if I put in the best effort towards the finished product that I really could see that the song was simply a creative journey I went on and it may not be for everyone but it was the best I could do with that idea.
3) acknowledgment of “The Muse”. Sometimes it’s there and things just flow out like magic. It feels like you’re a vessel of the universe. That is what makes music making fun and rewarding. The end product is usually better when this is happening but not always. Sometimes, though, you have to grind out a song and every step is hard and unnatural feeling. These sorts of projects can also end up great and that too is rewarding.
4) I’ve said this on hacker news before but it bears repeating- as long as you are putting in your best effort don’t make your music so precious. It’s just a song. Non musicians will either like it or not and not really care about how you crafted the song. They don’t care that you spent 30 grand to buy a vintage Jupiter-8 for all the keyboard parts. Use the gear you have that inspires you. Make music often and finish everything you start before starting something else. Forcing yourself to finish creates a habit of focus.
> In the music world, this manifests as a fear of releasing music and instead endlessly tweaking knobs and refining 4 bar loops;
This is pretty common, and I’d like to add that there are more reasons besides “fear” for endlessly tweaking knobs and refining four-bar loops. Fear is a good explanation, and it’s not a wrong explanation, but it’s only a part of the explanation and as I’ve gotten older I’ve placed less weight on “fear” as the explanation for these things.
“Practice makes perfect” is the old adage but “practice makes permanent” is a bit more accurate. If you practice a piece of music, but your technique is sloppy, through practice, your sloppy technique becomes more habitual and permanent. The same thing happens with songwriting and composition—you work on a four-bar section of a song for too long and that four-bar section becomes permanently engraved in your mind as the only section of that song, a single section that loops forever. At this point it’s not a question of whether you are scared to release music or whether you feel vulnerable. Your mind has simply worn ruts into the ground that pass through these four bars over and over again.
This is one of the many places you can get stuck in when writing music and it’s one of the more common. There are plenty of people who never even make it to the four-bar loop, just noodling on guitar over and over again against some backing track. There are plenty of people who don’t even make it to noodling, and just play scales or licks that they know, never making the jump from playing something they know to making something new. And then there are people who get stuck playing scales or chords in isolation, without even a backing track, because they spent so long playing without a metronome or backing track that their timing is just complete garbage.
There’s a technique to bust past the four-bar loop, however. What you do is you just bust past the four-bar loop immediately, as soon as you’ve written it. Don’t give in to the temptation to listen to it over and over again. You might think that if you listen to those four bars you might be able to hear what comes next in your mind, but in fact, the more you listen to those four bars repeating, the more your brain gets used to the idea that after you hear those four bars, you hear the same four bars again.
In short, what you have to do is write a B section to your A section as soon as possible and before you spend too much time listening to the A section. When possible, I recommend writing your B section before you listen to the A section even once. At least, I recommend that you try working that way. There will be problems with the A section that you want to go back and fix but you can do that later.
And once you get past the four-bar loop, there are other places to get stuck. Just like it is possible to tweak the four-bar loop over and over again, it’s possible to tweak the chorus, verse, bridge, intro, or any other part of a song over and over again. You can end up rewriting lyrics, adding and removing instruments, completely redoing the arrangements, etc. “Fear” is a workable explanation for why these songs don’t get released, but the fact is, you hear your own song often enough and you just have no idea what parts of it are any good. You have to move fast enough to keep a fresh perspective, but slow enough to work out the details of your song, and that’s a delicate balance.
One of the things I learned from an art teacher with a PhD that I met without taking their classes was the hardest thing for an artist to learn is "when is the project done?" It's on the same level in software of "good enough". It might not be perfect (by who's definition), it might be able to be refactored and more elegant, but at some point it has to be released.
In software, we have version 2.0 etc releases to keep the tweaking going. In music, there are remixes. In other art forms, the same artist can make new versions. Knowing that you can do that kind of reworking can help get you to accepting done sooner.
> Don’t give in to the temptation to listen to it over and over again. You might think that if you listen to those four bars you might be able to hear what comes next in your mind, but in fact, the more you listen to those four bars repeating, the more your brain gets used to the idea that after you hear those four bars, you hear the same four bars again.
You've articulated my number one challenge when writing music. I get stuck in the 4 bar loops and then later I get stuck with my first-draft arrangement where I just end up listening to the track in an unfinished state repeatedly rather than taking action to finish it. I basically procrastinate at every step.
> you hear your own song often enough and you just have no idea what parts of it are any good
Yep. Thanks for writing this comment. You've hilighted things that I subconsciously already knew, but seeing it made explicit like this reminds me I need to pay be paying more attention to these traps!
Absolutely, there are different reasons for it. Maybe a 4-bar loop is a bad example since, as you rightly point out, getting stuck in a loop is commonly due to lack of songwriting chops and is a more technical skill that needs to be practiced.
On music production forums I frequently see people comment that they've been working on a track or album for years, they're just trying to get it perfect before they finally release it, so they're constantly doing tweaking to what's already there. That kind of behavior definitely indicates fear to me.
I'm going to try this advice. I have a tendency to get stuck in the 4 or 8 bar loops quite often, yet in my head I don't seem to have trouble thinking about what comes next -- but once I get in the actual DAW or pick up a guitar I end up stuck in that pattern. Thanks for sharing, wish me luck ;)
If I would choose to believe that, there would still be that naggling doubt at the back of my mind. That doubt, no matter how unreasonable I know it is, can gnaw.
One important skill I've found necessary in both music and my software career is dissociation. By that, I mean the ability to separate yourself from the work that you've created. It's natural to feel that what you have made is a reflection of yourself and your value, but it also leads to a lot of fear. In the music world, this manifests as a fear of releasing music and instead endlessly tweaking knobs and refining 4 bar loops; in the software world, I see it manifest in the form of not making difficult decisions out of fear of taking responsibility, due to the fear of failure of those decisions reflecting on you personally.
In leadership training sessions I've taken at Amazon and elsewhere, this attempts to get addressed by some bs "vulnerability" segment where the facilitator asks you to share something about your childhood that was difficult, or a time when you made a mistake in your life, something like that. Personally I just make something up or say something really generic here, which I assume many others do as well. I feel like a much more effective way to train this "dissociation" skill would be something like the Christmas Music approach. Music and art are deeply personal works; sharing something you've created to the world and getting sometimes harsh feedback (or, more likely, no feedback at all!) is a far better way to learn how to be vulnerable than a carefully chosen story from your childhood that makes you look like you had it rough (but not too rough). It's also more relevant since it's about making your output vulnerable, rather than your personality.
Musically, I have a bit of a fanbase now, which I still find shocking. But still, every time I release a new song and see the initial Soundcloud plays roll in my stomach goes into knots. Why aren't they liking it? Is this song way worse than my other songs? Did I release garbage and people hate me now? It's a very tough feeling to overcome.