Writing tunes

Psyfi - yer dead right mate. When I started this thread I had worked myself up into something of a frustrated lather (as you may have guessed)

Funny thing though, since I started working on the OOOD remix I'm full of it again. Nothing like modernising a bit of old fashioned goa to get my motor running :)

Of course, now your remix has raised the bar I'm going to have to get my finger out or risk looking like a total chump :D
 
when times are tough I think.........

Someones got to defeat chEEsE!!!! :D

BE A CHEESE DEFEATER!!!!!! :smoke:
 
bit late but very glad i found this thread.
seems that the hours (hours? years more like) spent crashing around trying to come up with/finish a tune with limited success is an experience shared by quite a few of us. glad i'm not alone on this one. getting closer though.....any min...er....month soon...... :sob:
 
yoleus said:
seems that the hours (hours? years more like) spent crashing around trying to come up with/finish a tune with limited success is an experience shared by quite a few of us.
Click to expand...

Just keep at it. I know it can be really frustrating at times. Depressing, even. Spending all this time, money and energy and not getting a sound you are satisfied with. Truth is, most of the records you probably compare your own music to are made by people that were once in the same position as you. It just takes a hell of a lot of experience and time.

Nothing is more important than experience. Just keep banging away at it, improving with each track/mix until you can get some sort of satisfaction, then strive to make it even better!
 
Yeah, what Ott said. I find it works best for me when I already have a bunch of sounds I made before and I can just concetrate on making the tune. As soon as I have to leave the arranging and go into sampling or synthesizing for to long it brakes the focus. It works fine on those rare occasions when I instantly get what I want from the synth but mostly I just end up pissed, close logic and go do something else. I still haven't worked out how to build a library of sounds where I can actually find the samples I've done previously. A naming convention would probably help too :) Its much easier writing posts about these things then actually doing them...
 
nik said:
when times are tough I think.........

Someones got to defeat chEEsE!!!! :D

BE A CHEESE DEFEATER!!!!!! :smoke:
Click to expand...

My gruyere is very, very, frightened... it just sits in the fridge sweating, afraid to come out... "Don't play that nasty music again!", it pleads, "The strange noises scare me!" :crazy:

Hmm.... on closer inspection I think the sweating is more down to the fridge having been switched off for the past couple of days...
 
i suppose you would if you were afraid that you're not cool enough!!!!
HAHA!!
 
Duly noted. My problems, however, are many...
Firstly bored with my sound, always sounds like me.
Bored with psytrance, but lacking the talent to do anything more challenging.
No time. Seriously no time. Maybe three or four hours a week to devote to music, or more if I am into it. Which I never am...

I think I've admitted to myself (*I think I have...) that I'm never going to be any good at this music lark, so much better to devote myself to the career that pays the bills, and my little girl, who's far far more important than anything. For the moment I'm happy with that :)
 
Oh I long ago realized I'm never going to be any good at this music business. I know I'm probably never going to release an album. That isn't why I do it. I just have fun making tunes just for me, and enjoy trying to improve on them.

It's funny, people see you have a home studio and expect to hear what you have released and what music you are trying to sell and what genre market you are trying to corner. It is a bit tough explaining you just buy all this because you enjoy making music, which seems to be a completely foreign concept to many.

If you take a more relaxed approach and just make music for you, I think you'll find you have a lot more creativity than you could possibly imagine. It is really easy to get stuck on "Ok, what can I make that people will like" or "Will this sell?" or "Is this marketable?" Those questions will just bring you down. Do whatever you want and if it isn't "marketable"... there is something wrong with the market. :D
 
I take your point R but for I've gone past the point of playing with music for the sake of it - I bought my first synth in 1984! so I'm pretty burned on it as a leisure activity :)
Not a problem though - I'm perfectly happy about it all, and who needs another paunchy middleaged psy producer? Really?
:runsmile:
 
I'm not sure I articulated myself quite well. I see what you mean by being past the leisure stage.

The point I was trying to get across, albiet poorly, is that if you are bored with your sound I think that if you open your mind and focus instead of what the results will be but on the 'now' and creating whatever you 'feel' during the time you sit in the studio, you'll find yourself much more receptive to alternative creative ideas and able to get new ideas flowing and break any kind of stagnation.

At least that is the approach I've taken, so take it with a grain of salt :lol:
 
It's art, and it comes when it comes.

At the risk of sounding pretentious (who, me? ;)) as long as you put as much passion as you can muster into what you do, it will end up good from someone's point of view. Obviously with a full-time job and a child to bring up your time is limited, but think of it as a canvas... even if you only get to put down a brush stroke a day, as long as you put as much of yourself into it as you can give - it'll be worth it.

Don't stress the production side of it, for a start... the reason that so much trance sounds like generic cobblers at the moment is because poeple are focusing far too hard on 'how does it sound?' to the detriment of 'how does it feel to listen to?'.

At the moment, I'm doing more in the way of guitar-driven stuff than electronic music, partially because I'd been letting my playing go fallow and partially because I'd spent almost all of the last two years concentrating so hard on getting a technically 'good' (subjective at the best of times) sound that I'd forgotten how good it feels to just sit down and play - as a result of this I've been coming up with melodic ideas left, right and centre, and importantly, having fun doing it.

Also for the first time in a while I've been able to listen to trance in context and enjoy it, as opposed to obsessively analysing it (which led to me starting to get pissed off with trance).

Once you've found a way to be creative while having fun, the tunes sort of write themselves - especially if you take Ott and Posford's advice about building a sound library when you're feeling in a creative mood.

Don't sweat it - if you build it, they will come! :D

J.
 
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