Not enough time for music? Bullsh*t
This post has been a long time coming & it’s time we had a 1 on 1 sit down.
I’ve been spending years telling you why you can make some serious strides in your music making. While many of you feel that initial boost of energy & motivation, a large percentage of you start telling me why you can’t do it. Since whatever you say to yourself & others ends up being the truth in your reality, it seems extremely counter productive to allow anything but thoughts of what is possible into your mind.
Your excuses are largely laziness. This is not to say that you are a lazy person in general, as many of you have very busy lives. Where laziness comes into play is in changing your routine & better managing your time for your creative endeavors. Let me explain..
Your brain is usually running on autopilot. 90% of the things you do today are things you did yesterday, and the day before. This of course includes breathing & heartbeat, but also includes very deeply ingrained habits. Your brain relies on these autopilot habits to conserve energy. Any type of new challenges that require a new set of thinking skills is going to be rejected pretty fast to free up energy resources.
Thinking requires energy
To think a new thought or to solve a new problem or to explore a new interest is comparable to getting an airplane in the air. You have to have a lot of consistent energy to reach a comfortable flight level. You often have to pull energy from other sources temporarily to get lift off. Lift off is when your new action becomes habit & gets added to your autopilot, requiring much less energy.
Making music is the ultimate process of repeatedly facing new difficult challenges that the brain doesn’t want to give energy to. Ever notice how much you want to take a nap or just gel out when you are trying to work on something new?
I assert that the real reason many of you start slacking or give up all together is that you haven’t put in enough consistent effort to change your current challenges into solutions on autopilot.
Why tutorials can be bad for you
You may think I am shooting myself in the foot here since I make tutorials for a living, but I see what I do differently. My true purpose is not to get you to watch tutorials or read my posts (although I appreciate both), it’s to empower creative people to find their spark & transform themselves into productive & successful music makers.
Tutorials can be the invisible enemy disguising itself as your friend, especially when you aren’t feeling confident in your current skill set. Instead of fighting through a track & learning from personal experience, you convince yourself that you are being productive because you are teaching yourself new tricks. Unfortunately, unless put to immediate use, you’ll forget 80% of what you watched.
To back up this claim, I have found myself watching some of my own tutorials to remember a technique I shared. True story! See, we only have a good memory of the techniques we put to use regularly, not the ones stuck in our heads dormant.
Remember, working on your song is an active experience. It’s putting something new into the world. Learning is very passive & it is taking something that already exists in the world. Can you see the major difference?
Opening your DAW and listening to your 16 bar loop for 20 minutes is NOT making music. It’s just procrastinating.
Your big excuse: not enough time
Well, of course you don’t have any time. You have a busy life & you are spending all your music making time doing 1 or more of the following:
1. Reading about making music
2. Watching tutorials about making music
3. Listening to music instead of making it
4. Staring at your computer screen
5. Listening to an unfinished idea on eternal loop, but not engaging further
6. Making more unfinished loops because it’s the only songwriting skill you have mastered
7. Succumbing to anything that makes for a good distraction
These are some of the things you do & then complain that you put a ton of time into your craft & get nothing out of it. Duh!
You have plenty of time, what you don’t have is the willpower to get off of autopilot and start using your brain properly.
Forward momentum
I don’t care how little time you claim to have. If you perform even 10 minutes day of pushing your song forward, you will finish music. Can you turn your loop into an 8 bar song arrangement today? 4 bars? 2 bars?
Just start with the intro & add at least 2 bars of music every day. Need to learn something? Great. go directly to what you need to learn & immediately apply it to your 2 bars of music goal for the day. If you do ONLY that, you can make at least 1 song every 4 months.
As a nice side effect, every time you solve a production problem while creating, you will be sending it to the autopilot part of your brain. That means it will take less brain energy every time you perform the task.
All it takes is just 10 minutes of actual work. When you close your song session, it will be at least 1% further than the day before. That is enough. You always have time for what is important.
Making time
Yes, I know, there are only 24 hours in a day. Yep, I totally get this. Here’s the thing, who’s life is it? If it’s not yours to control, then who? You need to take that power back. I’m not saying neglect your family or your job. I am only asking you to evaluate your non-essential time.
How much time do you really spend on the following:
Facebook/twitter/G+/instagram/Pinterest
Your mobile phone
Television
I’m going to bet that if you were to take a notebook & for a couple days write down every time you stop doing one thing and start another, you would be shocked how much time is wasted. It’s pretty easy to do. Part of your list might look like this:
9am wake up
9:20 get out of bed, go to restroom
9:25 drink a glass of water
9:26 check email
9:40 check facebook
10:30 answer phone
11:05 eat
11:35 check email
11:44 check facebook
12noon – check today’s To Do list
and so forth…………
Your day might be drastically different, but this information could be life altering.
Batching
Is there something you do every day? Sometimes 5 or 6 times a day? I bet it breaks your focus & takes you a good amount of time to get back into your groove. Is it possible to batch your email & Facebook to just 10-15 minutes once in the day time & once a night? That alone can give you up to an hour of productivity a day.
Do you spend a lot of time in the kitchen preparing food? Is it possible you can prepare certain foods all on 1 day that you can enjoy for up to a week? I personally cut up a weeks worth of salad stuff & put them into plastic containers, so every day it takes no more than 2-3 minutes to make a salad. I do this for steamed veggies,rice or beans as well. Huge timesaver.
Take a look at what daily errands you might be doing that can be batched into just once or twice a week.
Welcome back to your music life
As I said from the beginning, your excuses are bullshit & the solutions are plenty. There are really only 2 things left to do:
1. Create time
2. Create your own dent in the universe.
Happy music making,
Jason
With that said, if you are benefiting from these posts, you will absolutely love my 2 bestselling books:
The Mental Game of Music Production
The Process for Electronic Music Producers
You can also Check out the: Ableton Courses & Instruments
If you are looking for personal guidance with your music production or Ableton, you can set up a free chat with me to go over exactly what your best next steps are to create the best music of your life. If it seems like a good fit, we can move forward from there. https://musicsoftwaretraining.com/private-coaching
Happy music making!
Jason
Nice article, Jason! Nice!
Jason,
what about Mixing your song?
Today in the industry if you dont got the “right loud sound” you dont even excist.
most of the time im spending of how the hell i will sound professional! this is where my time waste.
Great write, thanks!
I wanted to make the Groove Armada Beatport Remix Contest since the day it started and I made it these two last days!The whole song! I mean, it’s not gonna be Ibiza’s 14 anthem but it’s a 5 minute song and it sounds better than anything I’ve done before so 100% agree with you. True wisdom up here!
Yeah Jas!
I’ve noted that in recent weeks my mental capacity is diminished by the time I get home in the evening. My job is mentally challenging so I’m pretty drained come the end of the day. But after having my evening meal I do go into my studio what I try to do is what I call training sessions with things I’ve learnt or things I’d like to incorporate into my music productions. So when the weekend arrives I try to put my learning down into something I’m producing.
It doesn’t always work but that’s how I’m trying to manage my time with a heavy work schedule and demands. I would gladly give up work and spend my time doing music because I know that is what I’ve been created to do and some day soon I hope to be doing that!
Great article!
Thanks for the comments Claudio & Cecilia.
What I find is that repetition will turn mentality fatiguing things into automatic things that not only require less mental energy, but also just feels like the right thing to do in the moment.
Yep – Jason’s blogs about the adventure of producing ones own music has become a constant companion to me and is main reason for me not having thrown the towel.
This and many other of his blogs entail really good thoughts about the general approach of electronic music production (or better: making music in general…) which I can recommend to everyone struggling with getting stuck,frustration and hurdles – inconveniences that everybody encounters sooner or later along the way.
This blog here is about lack of time – If anyone thinks that lack of not havig the right (expensive) gear, production techniques/skills, music theory or talent in general is preventing him/her from success or progress – I can recommend to visit the archives:
– Why I started making music
– Improving music results by getting out of your own way
– A simple but rarely used songwriting &
arrangement technique
– Make Music Now
– Ghost Tracks
– Most important Habit for Finishing Songs
– Is buying new equipment a benefit or a distraction?
Big Thanks to Jason for sharing experience,thoughts,advice – all of them helpful and constantly motivating. “Do the best you can, then let it go”
Cheers – Tobey (always staying tuned, never givin’up….)
You forgot one VERY important thing. You imply it, but you don’t address ways the new composer
can address this most important factor. It takes a good percentage of one’s brain power, too.
That necessity is” focus”. Focus is also perspective. One needs to be there at tge get-go and has nothing to do with laziness. A brain needs to juggle a few balls to make music happen. This ability is
always different as a person’s perspective comstantly changes. The books are great. Without the knowledge the brai gets overloaded and can’t focus or get’s sidetracked. You get the point. 😉
Since I have turned from techno and house to drums, guitar, bass and vocals, I have a liked the depth of the program abilities. I haven’t hit a slump yet on creating new music but I have had to discipline my time with the program so I can stop getting lost in the rabbit hole. Explanation? I would get a good groove going say for 12 bars but at the end of the night it would still be 12 bars because I was screwing around with the infinite mixes of effects and filters and….well you know what I’m saying.
Time management applies to making time to make music on and off of the program.