Tell me about your music. What your excited about and what your struggling with at the moment.
Musician content is too small here on lemmy I feel. So let's get to know each other a bit.
Currently in a rut with recording new music. I have a collab with a guitarist friend and we have 9 unfinished songs that have been sitting for almost a year now. Home ownership really did a number on my music-making time. There’s just always something to do or something to fix that I can’t find the time to dedicate a couple of uninterrupted hours to record music. Compare that to 3-4 years ago where I was able to release 2 albums and 2 EPs in a span of 3 years.
On the other hand, I'm looking forward to acquiring my own 8-string guitar soon so I no longer need to rely on collabs to get guitars on my music. I'm primarily a keyboardist and I make prog/industrial music.
Home ownership is a fantastic achievement. It's an unattainable dream for most. I'm sure in time the music will flow again once you're settled.
I've got a buddy who has about an album's worth of pretty killer songs dangling. He's got instrumental demos done. His collaborators are mostly not doing anything. He's a little discouraged so he's not really doing anything now.
I mention it because I'm one of his collaborators, but my stuff was done early. I can't do anything else until he's ready for the final shape of things. I hate to see him all sad over it because I think he's great. I think he should ditch his collaborators and just make the music.
Are the collaborators all vocalists? Why not suggest for you to finish off the tracks with him?
Two are vocalists, one dark trap producer making a beat for a genre crossover, a rapper that works with that producer, a drummer (neither of us are very good drummers) which he may just get a hired gun to replace because that guy is flaky, and a mandolin player who is collaborating on a different genre crossover. My dude has range and is just out here doing whatever ridiculous thing he wants and I support that shit.
If he needed guitar, bass, upright bass, a bunch of brass, or a couple of woodwinds I could have helped. In fact, I played one of the guitar parts on most of them (he played bass and the other guitar on all). Bass and guitar are done. A lot of vocals are done. Drums are currently scratch made with ezdrummer.
When he's tracked fully I'll be helping him mix. He'll give me a rough pass so I can see what he's envisioning and I'll rerecord ant guitar parts that need it or double track anything needing thickening, then give it a final pass before it goes off for mastering.
I run an amateur early music group, we play at reenactment events.
I'm working on my sight reading, but I feel like that'll always be the case. I'm pretty decent at the soprano and tenor recorder in the keys of C, G, and F so I need to work on more keys.
I'm decent at picking out a tune on my lute, but I need practice on playing the bass notes simultaneously when reading notation, and to just improve on reading French tableture in general.
I'm always excited to try new things; we've got a few vocal pieces that we're picking up soon.
Wow that sounds like a lot of fun. How many reenactment gigs are out there? Ive never been to one. Are they happening all the time or is it'll a seasonal thing?
It's a blast! It's a bit like the folk music side of classical.
As an amateur I mostly play with friends at reenactment events, probably one every month or two. There are frequently balls with period dancing for which we play the music, usually whatever the dance master/mistress chooses.
I play with a few people who get gigs everywhere from colleges to Renaissance fairs, many have day jobs and supplement with music. There's a pretty big crossover with people who play Celtic music too, so Irish bars are another place that some folks play.
Struggling: I want to make synthwave, but I'm having a hard time engaging with theory of synthesis, and without that I feel it gets boring quickly. I've put our several slop units of content tracks, It's probably the closest I ever got to sticking to a genre or direction ever, and it would be a shame if I couldn't stick with it again.
I'm an amateur hobbyist and not a real artisté and have no intention of being professional. I'd still love to collab or even just talk to someone who is somewhere at least near my level maybe so I could learn from them without feeling like I'm just in the way and speaking a totally different language. I'd like to think I can bring spontaneity to the table if nothing else, I've never struggled with coming up with chord progressions or melody lines / riffs over them, it's coming up with good ones that's hard haha 🤣
Excited: Got my first ever acoustic guitar. Been trying to learn songs from "The Last Of Us Part II Covers and Rarities" album. They seem fairly easy to play and something about acoustic seems more engaging than electric, it's probably the novelty, but maybe if I can stick through this I can get started learning that again too. Wish I could sing.
Have you heard about syntorial? It's pretty good to get you rolling. It gets pretty advanced too. I never finished it but it taught me a lot. Red means recording has some great vids on the subject and learning how to use the dirtywave m8 tracker (headless) really helped me dig in to synthesis also.
If you don't intend to go pro. Don't worry about releasing too much. Even if you did want to go pro getting ears on your music is an up hill battle anyway. So don't let that stress hold you back from the fun of it.
I've always felt that if it sounds good on acoustic THEN it will sound good on anything. There is no where to hide on acoustic. Good luck on your journey.
Thanks! I know about red means recording actually, love his vids! Got drawn in by him making stuff on the Teenage Engineering thingie.
Don't worry about releasing
Oh that's not an issue for me personally. I always release basically everything. I share with friends and acquaintances kind enough to humor me, and some of them actually give me some good feedback too, especially in terms of being able to convey ideas and moods primarily, like if what I wrote sounds sad but I didn't mean it to be that's pretty good to know etc. In a stupid bruteforce way it helped me understand (ab)use of intervals in a scale can become a vehicle for emotion.
For what it's worth I think releasing hundreds of bad tracks rather than 10 good ones helped me grow massively because I could come back to what I used to do and reassess it with a new lens after every new track. It helps to find direction too, in my humble opinion.
I started by just pressing buttons. I was a chimp with a machine gun, the machine gun being knowing how to pirate VSTs and Kontakt libraries etc.
Then I was very poorly aping artists I liked and making some pretty awful exemplars of genres, trying to follow convention, but not quite able to actually pull it off where like i'd try to make trap - but nobody would actually be able to immediately recognize it as such, and I knew it just didn't sound right, but eventually I got to where I feel like I can express myself both in terms of genre convention and mood a lot more clearly, though far from ideally tbqh.
I do feel like releasing gets harder though because as I grew so did my standards, I'm not one of those pros that sits there tuning a kick or actually understanding what a compressor is (lol) beyond that if a sound don't come through you slap it on, but that you can't slap it on everything.
Even if you did want to go pro getting ears on your music is an up hill battle anyway.
Yeah, that I heard. I can't even imagine what it must be like to wrestle with rejecthub and so on and try to make it as an internet artist without connections. The only time I could get an audience to even consider it was when I was shilling it in my YouTube videos alongside my OF lmao. It felt pretty gross (the shilling, I mean) but at least it got me >10 monthly listeners for a bit, even when I was leveraging an existing audience it was tough.
These days I don't really seek an audience, some of my music gets like a 100 listens on SC, but I assume that's primarily bots harvesting training data, there's probably a correlation to the genre tags that lures them in. On Spotify i don't even bother looking, it's like 1 or 2 listens which I think is me and my gf probably haha, bless her.
Still, having a genre probably helps build a style where an expectation is set and fulfilled/exceeded, seems like the prerequisite for any more naturally acquired audience, but even if I can't get an audience with that, at least I know that I can make a style and stick to it too. It's a challenge, y'know? I want to prove to see if I got what it takes to stick to one thing and stay creative within it's confines for a bit, rather than being the normal amateur of drifting between things at random.
I do like improving though. I wish I knew someone who was into music like me IRL so I could ask to collaborate, I think just seeing how other people do stuff in the moment or seeing them iterate on ideas through their exports and being able to work with that (and not like, in a YT tutorial) would be so useful, probably. There's probably all sorts of things that I don't know I don't know that it would benefit to know I don't know, and maybe eventually to know!
I've always felt that if it sounds good on acoustic THEN it will sound good on anything. There is no where to hide on acoustic.
Actually I think the reason I like it more than electric is that it feels so forgiving haha, I used to get so frustrated trying to play any rock songs because that palm muted distortion sound is very important for rhythm and even though I got somewhere with it, I could never do it consistently, on acoustic it frankly feels like muting is pretty binary. I'm sure I'll find acoustic licks to whoop my ass for me though and make me drop it in despair, but as long as I have fun along the way, I guess that's ok.
Good luck on your journey.
Thank you for sharing advice and your experiences, sorry if my reply was too long. Good luck to you too!
Used to make some weird music, it was mainly for my ears and some one else’s the other person is gone though and I stopped. Now if I try pick it up again it just feels like I lost all the progress I made in learning and all my creativity so I stopped.
Sorry to hear that. I think once you've got a work flow down creativity flows easier. Often times I get stuck because I don't know what my next step is. But then I break it down and try to do things in a logical order.
Like write some lyrics about a topic. Then what song do I want this song to sound like. Try to match it, make mistakes, they turn out kinda cool. Badaboom a week later Ive been creative the whole time.
Oh I just don’t see a point in making art anymore. I know there are methods I could use to just create music, but the joy is gone so I just don’t have the energy.