The journey with making music has been… anything but straightforward. Lol.
Sometimes, it takes forever of messing around to come up with anything decent. Others, one shot, and something dope forms in under a minute...
It’s nuts to think of how much time has been spent fumbling around with various processes, chasing my tail, banging head against wall, lost in abyss of tweaking details that never amount to much… then there are those moments of flow when things just click and I’m left almost dumbfounded and don’t know what to do cuz it’s come so easy and really doesn’t need much else.
Granted, zooming out, it’s apparent that all that time invested in different skill sets ended up contributing to a greater competency & fluency - just as the micro-management of learning grammar, words, and everything from a technical piece-by-piece approach when taking on a new language eventually solidifies in the neural networks and you can start speaking it without having to think about all the components. Leveling up from the “conscious competence” to “unconscious competence.”
I still struggle with the creative process though… ’what to make, why, what to do with it…’ all these logical questions of the mind wanting clear, solid purpose that really just end up interfering with the flow and take the fun out of it as getting all serious. Like, what to do with this beat…?
I’d started it as opening an Ableton template with intent to test out a bunch of different tape emulation & Fairchild compressor plugins; choose a drum pattern in XO at random, switch up the samples with click of a button… it kinda worked, so just tweaked a few things in the chains already setup in the template, and BAM. So fast & easy that after spending weeks on most of my projects, it’s almost unbelievable that this could sound as good as it does with such little effort. But now what? Spend a ton of time trying to make a fully-arranged song out of it, even though I don’t rap or have anyone to rap over it? Just leave as is - go the route of Dilla, who’d made a TON of simple, short beats without needing to make it any more complex than that? Carry on with this type of approach, seeding a bunch of ideas into a queue to possibly come back to later?
Trying to “figure out” these answers or make decisions with the mind only seems to be eating away my time that could be better used elsewhere. So… just letting it be. While sharing informally here as an exclusive for this small audience. Maybe someday, something will actually come of it and y’all will have gotten the sneak early preview. Or maybe just be part of this small few that ever does listen to it.
In any case, i enjoyed putting this together as got a real nice classic hip hop crunch & swagger. Hope you enjoy it too… 🍻
