Getting Better Made Me Slower

When I started making music I finished things constantly. They were bad, but they were finished. I would open GarageBand, mess around for two hours, export something, and send it to a friend.

Now I know considerably more about production and I finish almost nothing. I have a folder of eight-bar loops that I am fairly sure would be good tracks if I ever went back to them. I have not gone back to them.

This is apparently a common thing, and I have thought about why it happens.

Taste moves faster than ability

The usual explanation, and I think it is right, is that your ear improves faster than your hands do. You start being able to hear that your hi-hats are lifeless a long time before you can do anything about it. So there is a stretch — and it can be years — where you are good enough to know your work is not good, and not yet good enough to fix it.

When I was on GarageBand I could not hear most of what was wrong with my tracks, which meant I was happy to finish them. That ignorance was doing a lot of quiet work.

Judging ideas before they exist

The specific way this ruins my sessions is that I now evaluate an idea about thirty seconds after having it. I will lay down a bassline, listen back twice, decide it is derivative, and delete it.

The problem is that thirty seconds in, no idea is any good. Ideas are not good when they arrive. They become good after you have arranged them, put them next to something else, and lived with them for a bit. Judging them at the loop stage means judging them at exactly the moment they are least able to defend themselves.

The version of me on GarageBand did not do this, because he could not tell the difference. He just kept going until there was a track.

Finishing is its own skill

The thing I underestimated for a long time is that deciding a track is done is a completely separate skill from making it sound good, and it does not improve on its own. You only get better at it by finishing things.

Which is an awkward loop, because the whole problem is that you are not finishing things. You get better at finishing by finishing. There is no way around that except to lower the bar for a while and accept that the next few will be worse than you would like.

What actually helps

These are the things I have found genuinely make a difference, as opposed to the things I read and nodded at.

• Arrange before you polish. Get a bad full-length arrangement down before you fix a single sound. A finished bad track can be improved. A perfect loop cannot, because there is nothing to improve it into.
• Give yourself less to work with. One drum kit, one bass sound, a time limit. Most of my unfinished projects died from having too many options, not too few.
• Do not start with the drums. I could spend an entire session on a kick, and often have. If the kick is the first thing I touch, nothing else gets made.
• Separate the sessions. Ideas on one day, arranging on another, mixing on a third. Trying to do all three at once is where the judging-too-early thing comes from.
• Finish something you do not care about. The pressure comes from the idea being precious. Take a loop you are lukewarm on and finish it as an exercise. You will learn the arrangement muscle without risking anything you like.

An hour a week

I should be honest about the scale I am working at. I have a full-time job and I get maybe an hour a week in Ableton at the moment. I am trying to increase that slowly, but I am also wary of turning the one thing I do for enjoyment into something with targets attached.

An hour a week is not enough to brute-force your way out of this problem. It does mean the constraints matter more. If I get an hour, I cannot spend it auditioning kicks. So in a strange way the lack of time has been better for my finishing rate than any amount of discipline was.

I still have the folder. But it is growing more slowly than it used to.