A week of making music

About a week ago, I was in a Discord chat with a couple of friends, and we had a conversation about the process of learning to do art. I mean art in the widest sense of the word: art as any creative work that allows you to express emotions, reflect your human nature, paint a picture of your culture. This includes illustrations, music, photos, writing…

Hell, even code could count, if you treat programming as an art form more than a form of engineering.

The points we went through, roughly speaking, were that you need to be making art to learn to do art, and that you need to make bad art to learn your art well—because you learn from your mistakes.

In the middle of the conversation, something spurred me to think about my pet hobby, electronic music production.

me: i SERIOUSLY need to get back to making music, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN THIS LAST TRACK WAS A YEAR AGO

I mean, it can’t have been a year, right? Have I really not released any music in a year?

It really was a year

Well, no. It’s not like I haven’t been making music completely throughout that last year.

On occasion, I would fire up Bitwig Studio (good DAW!) and fiddle around with writing something. In 2024: a little in September, October, November, then once more in December, and January 2025… and then, silence. Until April, where I started a couple projects that never went anywhere, but then went silent once again.

Now, this isn’t surprising if you take a look at my release cadence. For the past three years, I’ve been releasing one track per year.

I excused myself that I just didn’t have enough time to make more music. I said to myself that back in my school days, I had more time to play around with music after school.

Those were excuses, I know, but I believed in them pretty strongly.

Skill issue

There’s another thing that compounded the problem.

Out of the 153 Bitwig project files I’ve accumulated over the past five years, I have released 18 of them. That’s like, a 12% success rate.

Even last year, I started 18 new projects, while releasing only one. That could’ve been a whole album, had the overall success rate been higher.

So, why was it that bad?

I think it’s down to a few things. First, I’ve been noticing a steady decrease in fresh music ideas flowing into my head. My past method was to just kind of… wait until I come up with a cool melody, chord progression, or drum pattern in my head, and try to make something around it.

The problem is that this process is inherently very lossy. I’m not good enough with instruments and effects to effectively recreate all the sounds from my head exactly.

In addition to this, my musical imagination is very volatile. The moment I start fiddling around in the DAW, I recreate the core of the idea, and forget about the rest—that same rest of the fucking owl that can make a song feel truly magical.

The fact that I use the playback looping feature of my DAW doesn’t help this. I don’t currently have a better way to iteratively create nice-sounding instruments, and looping results in the idea getting stuck in your head like an earworm, erasing anything that came before it.

I don’t know that there’s anything I can do to help the looping issue, at least for now. Fixing it would likely require learning to play an instrument, then recording myself play, and assembling a song out of that. But learning an instrument is, how to put it… erm, difficult, and isn’t going to fix the broader issue of me not finishing songs.

You can work within the limitations of looping. It will influence your musical style, but that’s okay. I can tell you of many great songs whose styles are very loop-oriented. You don’t have to be making jazz to make good music.

What I can work on, though, is my musical imagination. It would be nice to be able to fire up the DAW and come up with something workable in a short amount of time.

And in addition to that, finishing things. Like, really finishing. Not dropping. Commitment.

The exercise

So, during that conversation, I came up with an idea: I’m gonna be making music for a week.
One song a day.

A week being a short enough time commitment, that it’s easy to just do it without even considering pulling out. An afternoon being somewhat short, but long enough that I could just kinda jam for a bit, write something short, and forget about it the next day.

And you know what? It worked!

I started writing music again. I wrote 7 songs. They’re short, but I like them. Some, I’d even be down to listen to on an album—and I’d like to polish them up and release them, some time next month.

Takeaways

A reflection I’ve come to is that, actually…? This is probably how most music artists operate!

As a programmer, I toil every day at solving interesting computer problems. A coding puzzle a day keeps the bugs away, so they say. I program every day, solving different problems, working on different projects. Never finishing them, of course. And that’s how I become a good programmer.

So it’s natural that, to become a good musician, you write a song a day, and you become good. You end up having songs to release albums with.

If you write a song every month, you end up with 12 songs in a whole year.
If you write a song every day, you end up with at least 365.
Multiply that by that initial 12% figure, and you can see how much your output would increase.

Having 365 songs ready means you have a lot more ideas to pick from and explore. And that’s how great albums get made. It feels liberating to have come to this realisation after trying to figure out a way to convince myself to release more music for so many years.

And like, of course it works that way. If it works that way with programming, why wouldn’t it work for anything else?

But, if you haven’t done this sort of thing before, it isn’t obvious at all.
School doesn’t teach this. (I know, “what the fuck do you mean school doesn’t teach this,” but you know it’s true.)

What’s surprising is just how insanely effective the music-making week has been. Out of the 7 songs I’ve written, I consider a whopping 3 of them good enough to be released to the public. That’s way higher than that initial 12% figure!

It could be that I just got lucky, but I think there’s something more at play here.

I believe the cause for this to be that I had to finish the songs within the same day I started them. Had I not needed to finish, had I had the possibility to scrap a song and let a day go to waste, this probably would not have happened.

The fact that I had to come up with a reasonable structure, involving a build-up and an ending, also helped develop my skills around that. In the past, I would often get stuck at the phase where I had a loop, but didn’t know what to do with it.

The time pressure forced me to start thinking about structure, and helped me figure out a few nice ways to start, develop, and end a song.

Another incredibly cool side effect—which may only apply to experimental electronic music, but is worth mentioning—is that after this whole week, I have 7 whole songs I can steal from in the future.

Take the music, paulstretch it to hell, add spacious reverb, and boom—an atmospheric soundscape, just like that. Crank up the tempo, add an amen break, play with the sample’s pitch, and you’ve got yourself a jungle track.

You can make instruments out of your songs. Samplers today are kind of insane, and you can do all sorts of wack shit with them when it comes to sound design.

An interesting idea that didn’t go anywhere: I also asked my friends for prompts. Words, images, stories to write music about.

It didn’t go anywhere because often times, electronic music is a bit too abstract to even relate to words. It plucks at my heart strings, but I can’t translate it into words and back.

There are also concepts I don’t really map well onto melodies just yet, because I haven’t interacted with them enough. I got a prompt “steampunk,” but didn’t do anything with it, because I don’t really consume enough steampunk-themed works to have a good frame of reference of it in mind.

Sometimes it works, but not always—and sometimes is a P < 100%. Guess we just got a bunch of bad rolls this time around.

And finally, I wouldn’t be done without mentioning the confidence boost.

It feels genuinely great to have made so much music that sounds listenable, in such a short period of time.

Finish your works. You’ll thank yourself for it, and you’ll feel great on top.

Caveats

This type of exercise won’t work as well for everyone.

I’d like to mention here that when I started, I was not totally incompetent in making music. I’ve been toying around with it for over 8 years at this point. I mean, this was my last track at the time of starting this exercise.

If you’re just starting out, 7 days will likely not be enough. If you don’t know anything about the thing you’re willing to learn, the beginnings are going to be very difficult. It’s gonna suck.

I feel like trying and committing for that initial time period though, will be enough to tell you whether you want to continue or not.

I know I want to :3

Can I have a listen?

No.

…but you should subscribe to my blog via RSS, to know when you can!
I’ll be sure to post an update.