by Andanté » 08 Apr 2012 10:14
Oooh. I didn't know there was one of these. I was looking for tutorial threads around here.
Anyways, well, uhm...
A major problem that's been haunting me since I started making music (and I'm sure everyone gets this problem, albeit in not such an extreme way) is confidence and direction. A lack of it.
I've never really had much as far as self-esteem or confidence goes - Not in the sense of being shy, or anything, but at the end of the day I feel helpless, and there seems to be so many things that I just can't do. Since I was young, I've always been good at only a handful of things - I'm really intelligent, and I'm a bit better than my peers at (some) sports, and, of course, playing musical instruments. I don't really have talent though, and even though a lot of people say I'm talented at certain things, the harsh reality is that I need to work hard to be good at something. Anything. I've never had a moment that I remember where I learnt something, or did something, and it just clicked, and I thought ''Hey, that's what I need to do, and it'll be perfect''. I've always needed to work hard and learn everything about something before I even attempt to give it a go and try to succeed, whether it's a subject or topic at school, or a hobby or sport, or just some random skill.
It's bad enough when it's an uphill stuggle learning anything new, and before I started producing music, I didn't have any hobbies - All I did was go to school, talk to friends and play on the PC. Eventually, though, I stopped pushing myself entirely - There were some things that I simply could not do, for some reason or another. I'd get As and A*s in most subjects, but in some I'd fail outright, for reasons that I, my teacher, or anyone else can't really explain. Skills that my friends would pick up in a few minutes would still be impossible for me to learn after weeks of practise. My life became either a case of staying inside my comfort zone and drifting along, without ever really pushing myself and being happy with what I was good at, or hitting a brick wall whenever I tried the smallest thing. By the time I discovered DAWs such as FL Studio, I gave up caring, really, and realized that my whole life would need to be spent inside my comfort zone. Combined with the horrible depression that I've had since living memory (that's only gotten worse when I discovered that there were people my age, and even younger than myself, pushing themselves and becoming really good at something, whether it was music, acting, or academia) my life felt meaningless, and I felt pretty much worthless. There's not much point in anything when the only thing you have in your life is 'having fun', which for me, just meant playing computer games.
When I discovered FL Studio, and the amateur music communities that use it, I was overjoyed. I've always loved music - I'd listen to it when I was gaming, doing homework, watching TV, anything. I listened to music for 5-6 hours a day, and I still do. So it was a huge change in my life when I began to make music, and, with the help of a few tutorials, discovered that I really enjoyed what I made for once.
Obviously, that couldn't last. Within about a couple of months I've already hit the same brick wall that comes with every hobby. Do I keep making music like I'm doing already, or do I become serious? Do I really want to dedicate my time to something that might just not work? I was still estatic from the fact that I could actually make music with the VST, so I began to push myself, hard. In the space of a month I've already spent about 100 hours on FL Studio, and eight weeks in, I already had 5 or 6 tracks made. But then, looking back over my songs, I've realized that even though I've advanced a lot since my first track on FL, my tracks are still lacking. After making electro house basslines and drum beats, and learning how to EQ and compress, and after learning about sidechaining and gating, delay and reverb, I still realized that I haven't learnt a lot of basic knowledge. I still relied heavily on tutorials to develop, and when I stopped learning from them and became too advanced for 'training wheels', I was stuck.
Everyone I asked said that you just have to keep making music, experiment, and you'll make progress, and it's been an uphill struggle to make any songs. Until very recently, I've had to use Nexus entirely for my songs, and after running out of ideas using those Nexus samples, I ran out of song ideas too. I use Massive now, and even though I can make some good-quality patches, I still have to rely on tutorials on how to make them, or on tweaking existing patches. I can't make a patch from scratch, and even though I've spent hours learning about all the parts of the synthesizer, nothing clicked. I'd follow a tutorial to the letter, and the sounds I'd create would sound either as bad as those I used when I started out in FL, or they'd sound totally different.
Because of this, most of my songs have basically been spontaneous, and I've have periods of days, or weeks (usually after listening to someone else's song) where I'd read up on guides for hours on end on mixing and mastering techniques, hoping to find somewhere something that I could use that would tell me how to emulate a sound I heard. As much as I want to, I can't go and say ''I want to make a song about Pinkie Pie'' or ''I want to remix this'' or ''I want to make this genre''. I've tried making trance music since I first got FL Studio, and the trance song (actually, the only song in general) that I'm proud about is one that I created using Nexus samples and lots of mixing.
Even though I'm slowly learning new things about FL, I'm still stuck on the same things I was when I started - Most of my songs just sound like simple melodies tacked onto a drum track, and my buildups sound unconvincing. Some of my songs are rife with glitches to do with phase cancellation, clipping and all sorts of other phenomena and I've had to spend dozens of hours just trying to rectify (or in most cases hide) them.
I'd ask you guys how you made that leap from being dependent on others to being self-dependent, but I doubt I'd hear anything new. I've looked everywhere and I still can't find a solution to my problems. I still make tracks that make me wince when I hear them, and I've only been able to make a song once that turned out like how I imagined it to be. I've always been really passionate about making trance music, or house music like Swedish House Mafia, but when I can't even make a simple supersaw after knowing advanced synthesis theory and four or five months of practise, I'm pretty much fucked.
I'm not content with simply being able to put a beat down and seeing where a song goes. I want to be able to make songs that I'd like to listen to and that I'm actually proud of, but I'm afraid that I've run out of luck. For the past couple of weeks, I've spent more time vectoring cover art than I have made music, and I haven't made any progress in music-making since Febuary. I'd look up a tutorial for what I'd want to do, or ask a friend, or go by my own knowledge, set down a decent drum line and then spend hours fiddling with the bassline and eventually discarding the entire lot. I've made loads of simple techno and house floors, but I haven't had any inspiration or anything to make a proper song. I just churn out good-sounding synths and make simple beats with them and pass them off as music. I don't even know if I'm going to be good at making music - What I know how to synthesize, I can do it well, and I know how to mix and master, and I know the effects and algorithms inside out. I know song structure and layering and I can pick out techniques in other songs and replicate them to suit my style. But I can't make a song. I'm beginning to think that even though a lot of aspects of music production come naturally to me, some elementary techniques or skills that I don't know about are impossible for me to master, and because of that, I'll never be able to make a passable song, not to mention a good-quality song.
I guess I'll just have to hang in there and try hard to turn that anger into motivation to improve.
