Okay, quick show of hands. Do any of the following describe you?

• You’ve been working on your record for over a year, and you’re feeling stuck.
• You’re creating your masterwork. It’s special, and it needs more time than average records.
• You’re into your 25th round of mixes. They just need a couple more tweaks!
• You keep hearing different ideas for what the left-hand could be doing in the piano part in the verse of this one song.
• You can’t release this album yet. It’s not perfect yet. But it’s really close!
• You keep thinking you need to change little details. Then a week later you’re changing them back.
• You’ve been working on your record so long that you’ve lost all perspective, and you have no idea how anything really sounds any more.

Does any of this sound familiar? If so, take heart: you’re not alone. Knowing when a recording is done is probably the single hardest aspect of producing records.

Now that we all have computers, recording has become to a large degree untethered from constraints of time and budget. We can just keep opening our sessions and tweaking things, in the comfort of our homes, for free and forever. On the (tremendous) up side, this is a truly revolutionary case of putting the means of production squarely in the hands of the proletariat. We all now have access to virtual studios in our laptops that can turn out results that twenty years ago you needed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear to make. Not to mention total recall on session files and mixes. It’s amazing.

On the (also tremendous) down side, if you don’t have well-developed production instincts, then every song has the potential to be a never-ending rabbit hole of infinite choice. And this is bad, for a bunch of reasons:

• On a purely aesthetic level, I have a strong belief that the strongest recordings serve as snapshots of where the people who made it were at in their lives at a specific moment in time. If you work on a record for too long, you can lose that all-important feeling of zeitgeist.
• You can destroy an interesting recording by over-analyzing it. This is a deceptively simple concept that some people fail to grasp over their entire careers. Read this paragraph again.
• Related: if you keep going back and endlessly revising things, you run an ever-increasing risk of polishing out all the quirks that made your recording unique and interesting. You know when you hear some shiny piece of crap on the radio and it’s so perfect that it’s completely soulless and devoid of any human connection? You don’t want to make that record.
• Your best work is always going to be in front of you. You have to believe that; it’s the essential definition of what it means to be an artist. So, given that: the more time you spend endlessly reworking the record you’re currently working on, the more you’re depriving yourself of the chance to move forward and discover what’s in store for you next. And why would you be purposefully depriving yourself of the chance to progress as an artist?

I sense you nodding in agreement; these things are all indeed bad. So, how do you avoid them? That’s next week’s article. See you back here then!

{ originally published at Pyragraph }

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This is just a quickie. I was thinking today about a conversation that I was having with an artist friend of mine, and I wanted to muse on it for a second.

My friend was frustrated. He’s highly talented, and his songwriting has been getting really strong, and his performances are becoming highly compelling. And yet he feels like nothing’s really clicking for him, like he’s spinning his wheels, like he can’t get traction for his career.

And: I hear this all the time. The basic line of reasoning is “I’m super talented; so when are things going to start happening for me?”

But here’s the thing: in the music marketplace, highly talented is the bare minimum. It’s not the destination point – it’s the departure point. It’s your ticket to entry.

There are millions and millions of highly talented independent artists.What makes one person rise above is all the rest of the non-musical stuff. The grind. The work. The hustle.

So: are you talented? Are you the best person you know at what you’re doing? That’s great. That’s a good starting point. Now get out there and hustle and start creating your success. Because no one is going to do it for you.

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Today I’m going to go on a mini-rant for a moment. Thanks for bearing with me …

More times than I can remember, I’ve been talking with an aspiring artist about the process of recording, and they’ll assert that their vision and priority for their record is that “it has to sound like my live show.”

I just want to take a moment to say: that’s totally not true. Who said that? There isn’t a rule anywhere about that. Especially because your live show is probably just you and an acoustic guitar. And that would be a boring-ass record. Second most boring: you and your acoustic guitar at the front and center of a minimal guitar-bass-drums arrangement. I’m sure you know great players. But everyone’s heard that record about a thousand times. And we don’t need to hear it yet again.

Unless you’re making a live record, “I want my record to sound like my live show” is an apples-to-oranges comparison. A recording is an opportunity to write your feelings on a large screen. It’s a chance to use a much bigger and more ambitious sonic palette than you would have access to in a typical live situation. (See also my previous post on differentiating yourself in the marketplace via sonic adventuresomeness.) And, most importantly, it’s a chance to make a statement.

And, really, do you want that statement to be, “I have such a low opinion of my audience that I want to make sure they can connect the dots between my live performance and my recorded output in the most reductive, literal, obvious way possible?” Geez, I’d hope not.

Give your audience a little credit. And give them a treat when they take your record home. Take them on an adventure. Give them something special to form a bond with, not a reconstruction of what they just heard you do on stage. Take the conversation to the next level.

Rant over. If you have a recording you’ve made recently that has adventurous leanings, share it with me; I’d love to hear it!

{ originally published at Pyragraph }

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