So, I actually managed in the time I had to work on music yesterday between the end of work and the start of preparing dinner to get something fairly cohesive together. Still a few disjointed ideas, but given that’s now Friday afternoon, I will not in all likelihood get this track into what I would consider “finished enough” to be satisfied with it.

Part of this project is instilling discipline. Not only on the devoting work to making music, but just as importantly, an exercise in “letting go”. My biggest problems with trying to produce music in the past is I’m never satisfied with it, and keep tweaking it, adding things, taking things out, and then second, third, and fourth guessing myself. After hearing it a thousand times, and spending six months on a track, I get to the point where all I can hear are the glaring flaws and anything that actually sounds decent I dismiss as trite, tropish, and twaddle (alliteration aficionados assemble!). Then I get discouraged and don’t touch a DAW or a musical instrument for weeks or months.

By time-bounding myself in tight 7-day sprints for track production, I am forcing both the “work on something every day” ethic AND the “letting go” ethic. My goal is not to produce the next million seller banger (though I won’t complain if I happen to pull that off!), I make music for me, and I want to get better at it, for myself. I encourage others to come along for the ride through this blog, posting the tracks on SoundCloud, and talking about it with others, but it’s not a necessary component for success.

I want to look back at an end of year retrospective with 40 or more tracks. None of them need to be a deathless classic. I don’t even need to like all of them; there’s already one or two I tend to hit “next track” on when I happen to play them. I certainly don’t expect you to like all or even any of them. I hope when I look back, we’ll hear a definite quality improvement from track 4 to track 37, though.