I’m lucky and blessed enough that my best friend and I have evolved in our musical tastes in a pretty parallel fashion over the years, despite him living three hours away from me for the past ten years. In high school it was all Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Queen, etc. Then we got into jam bands - Grateful Dead, Phish, String Cheese Incident, Widespread Panic… fast forward to our late 30s, and we’ve been completely bitten by the electronic music bug over the past couple of years. Not that we don’t love the music we’ve always been into, it’s just interesting in a very amusing way how much our tastes and the music that we record when we jam together has evolved in a very electronic direction - at the same time even though I only get to visit/jam three, MAYBE four times a year. These days we’re both big into synthwave and ambient electronic music, and I’m glad that we’re on that same page.
Life is a journey my friend. Forge your own path and have fun with it - it’s music!
I used to make some kind of dance tracks, emulating different styles I heard in the tracker scene, burn them on CD-Rs and pass them around, and the local hoodlums would play them in their cars because apparently the poorly mixed loud bass was perfect for their subwoofers.
Yes I did ! It was a lame filtered disco/house shit with tons of low-quality sounds from the ICQ interface. I can’t find it but I still make stupid pieces from time to time.
If friends don’t get electronic music or give it a chance is their loss not yours. Hypnotic repetitive pattern based music is by any means closer to the music of our primal ancestors then any other genre outthere. Our creator gave us a heartbeat, it just forgot to put a open hihat in between. Where just filling in the blanks😁. Millions of electronic music lovers outthere.
I don’t need to explain anything, all of my best friends (5) are amateur musicians like me and 3/5 are into synthesizers and/or weird guitar pedals like me. They understand my obsessions 100%. As for the people who don’t, I don’t bother explaining anything. If they don’t get why I hoard scrap metal to my summer cabin to record baging it around in an empty shed & running that thru a bunch of distortion pedals, fuck em.
I’m with you dougr, this is a very familiar story - my journey is almost identical to yours (except I indulged in New Order massively), and I certainly enjoy my hobby but don’t really share my music too much. My problem is that I am always seeking perfection, which is difficult to achieve (impossible, no such thing perhaps?).
You’re enjoying yourself doing what you do, that’s the most important thing.
And I keep lusting after new hardware, that’s the exciting thing about this hobby…always something new to whet your appetite.
I dont explain it, its my secret laboratory where i make mad frankenstein noises. If you say techno - you get that “hyper hyper” argument, they know from the radio.
I used to struggle this with, and still do occasionally.
What I’ve found helpful is sharing my creations, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel. Demos, concepts, raw mixes, finished tracks. I just link them to a specific set of friends whenever I feel like I’m stuck in excessive self-criticism.
Receiving compliments and/or criticism from outside helps in guiding your process toward a tangible goal. You’ll eventually start having a realistic perception of your skills and you’ll learn to recognize and accept when a piece is finished.
Eventually you’ll still notice errors in your older work and you can then improve by trying to avoid the same mistakes.
My band is about to release a new album and reviews are trickling in. Two reviews so far have brought up my contributions as definite highlight of the album, but the thing is I personally think I’ve never played worse or come up with more boring material than on this album. Never before have my parts been singled out in reviews like this, either.
I guess what I’m trying to convey by this obvious & sad humblebrag post is that you yourself are often not the best judge when it comes to your music. I would have personally wanted to go back & re-record all of my parts, and would have had it not been for budget constraints and my bandmates saying that I did fine. I would have probably killed what the reviewers liked about it in the process.
yeah, people need to be “comfortalized” - since most people tend to have their identy hung up by the vectors on which their desires point towards things around them, it’s hard to show them a direction that’s perpendicular to the way they are comfortably with. Even with myself, whom I think of as quite open-minded, still have some days where I don’t want to listen to something someone shows me, because that drags me out of current listening routines. what I do now, is that i put my own tracks onto USB (in the car) or online (anonymously), and just play it without asking if someone likes it. and hey! people don’t get into critical mode that easy.
You should post something in the « Current sounds coming from your gear » thread. Very cool thread with instant gratification no matter what you post. Don’t forget that this Community is all about sharing and learning.
- since most people tend to have their identy hung up by the vectors on which their desires point towards things around them, it’s hard to show them a direction that’s perpendicular to the way they are comfortably with. Even with myself, whom I think of as quite open-minded, still have some days where I don’t want to listen to something someone shows me, because that drags me out of current listening routines. what I do now, is that i put my own tracks onto USB (in the car) or online (anonymously), and just play it without asking if someone likes it. and hey! people don’t get into critical mode that easy.