Music takes a long time to make. But we are always stuck in a single moment of time.
It’s like painting a picture but you have to decide the color of each pixel, in order, and you can’t go back for any do-overs. That would require the painter to have the entire picture fully formed in their head so they could “look” in their mind’s eye as they go.
The experience would be less that of a painter physically applying paint to the canvas - and more like a programmer executing a script to get a result.
For most of musical history, “composers” (songwriters/producers/arrangers/etc) have had to imagine the songs in their heads. It’s a little bit like painting one pixel at a time, except instead we compose one note at a time.
Rock bands avoid this because each musician just focuses on their own part. I deal with drums you deal with guitar etc. But that was a fluke - other than these collaborative songwriting situations, music is written “pixel” style.
And we are stuck in one moment, one pixel of time.
Recording Songs Solo
I have so many ideas kicking around - songs written, but not recorded.
Like here, I just dug out one random example - this is a piece of a song I’ve had kicking around for about 6 months if not longer (note: volume is quiet on this)
and here’s another one lol, some -00s decade math style:
There are so many songs floating around in my life… At this point, I know that I have a record’s worth of material in this style. It’s somewhere between indie rock, math rock, and with some electronic influences.
I just gotta make the music!! But the hard part is coordinating everything - learning parts, recording, production, artwork, it has all been overwhelming in the past.
I think now I am getting better at handling the process. It’s less about the fun crazy energy of making music, and more about the slow and difficult mental task of organizing the logistics of making music. Logistics might be the real key for the whole thing.
We Don’t Do It Because It Is Easy - We Do It Because It Is Hard
One part of what makes music so beautiful is specifically the fact that it is so hard. In making music, we challenge ourselves to become better people.
I know now that it’s important to stay optimistic. It’s just a matter of starting and pushing forward and basically figuring it all out as you go because there is never a clear path towards a big goal.
Making music is a worthy challenge for us all.
