For how long have you kept on making music but taking a cold turkey break from the gear/synth (online) community!? (YouTube, forums, podcasts, magazines, social media, trends etc.)
Did you notice any change? What happened in you and how was the process?
Please share!
That would be a good chance to refresh and explore your own ideas fully.
May i observe, many of those who would have useful things to contribute about this ( certainly and regretably not me ), are not going to read your post, and won’t be here to respond.
I have similar desires at times.
True, but it could have been in the past too, or like me, the spaces between the visits grow more and more.
I do that when I feel like forum time get’s too much, usually a couple of months, maybe half a year. Then use the time I would have spent online to organize things, diy stuff and just focus more on doing things without thinking too much about it.
It’s basically like a refreshing break, like a holiday with zero GAS.
After some time I’m glad I can come back and dive into the community again, though.
I make music for me, and will continue to do so in the future. I didn’t have an online community around it for a long, long time. I had an in person community in my old city and I really miss that. I haven’t found one in my new city yet, but that’s due to extenuating factors.
I’ve learned a lot from this place but if it disappeared tomorrow nothing about my life would really change too much - which is kind of weird to say because I feel like I’ve made some genuine connections, but that’s just kind of the nature of the Internet.
I wouldn’t really call music gear YouTube or social media influencers trying to “make it” or peddling half-assed advice a community. More like crabs in a bucket. I don’t follow trends and haven’t valued the use of social media outside a few forums for a very long time.
What this forum is great for is hearing others creations and processes and when you’re learning or new features come out to search and find solutions and new ways of doing things.
I think the focus has shifted a bit from elektron stuff to all gear in general for better or worse, but I do miss the more intense focus on Elektron equipment from years back (I’m guilty of this as well as my workflow has evolved)
I think the beat battles/challenges are quite cool as well
Regarding a break: it’s fun to check in here and there but thankfully these days I’ve kinda found my music making tribe and although I’ve tried to collaborate with others here it hasn’t really developed 
have had better luck in discord and other social media platforms like X, Reddit, and Facebook finding like minded individuals to work on tracks together.
Have been the most productive finishing music and finally getting paid to teach people how to do it too! Yay! Forums and social media can definitely be distracting and an easy way to never finish any music, so overall I’d suggest people to log off if they ever want to actually release something
I’ve taken a few breaks and with anything, less distractions equal more productivity!
A break? No. I spend very little time online except on Elektronauts. In fact, the Elektronauts server could sue me for stalking, because my behavior shows clear patterns. I don’t have Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, or other time-consuming “cigarette substitute” sites. I think I just like to chime in and answer community questions about gear, techniques, and whatever else I hope to contribute to. I make music, and doing this is satisfying in a way. Like-minded people with similar interests are golden, and in real life they’re not my regular neighbors.
I started doing this without any community, then gained that (in person) in a few different cities over the years. I now live somewhere that doesn’t have any, though i do still find people to play with on infrequent occasion. I joined this forum maybe six years ago and its been the first online music community I’ve been involved with, never having done the social media thing. I go through periods of being active and not on here, mostly because my life is busy.
I find that being on here and engaged with folks doesn’t make any difference whatsoever in how much music i make. I enjoy it, i like to discuss music, synthesis, circuitry, et al, but i don’t need any motivation to make music, it just happens. I do find that when i haven’t been on here for a while i don’t have GAS, then ill pop in for a couple days and start desiring products, which is unsettling. I almost never buy anything (in general) but the desire is distracting.
I would miss this place if it went away but in the context of this thread, it was the in person communities that gave me a reason to up my game in making music in ways no online source could.
I would highly recommend taking long breaks, years even, if you feel like it.
For me it’s been great every time, even though my reasons for it have always been quite different.
As welcoming and nice as this forum for example is, spending too much time here has it’s price.
I mean the time directed away from making music is a huge factor.
Also reading everyone’s opinions on things might blur the idea of what you want to do.
I took a long break from the end of 2014 until about 2020, only making a few bits of music during that time, but I felt I’d lost my love of music after it being a big part of my life.
Lots of life changes, and now I work on music most days. I’ve never been as productive as I am now and make music for myself.
Tbh, this forum helps me stay away from other sites that do me no favours, social media, news, etc.
I like niche communities that exist in a vacuum away from the perils of modern reality.
This place pretty much helped me avoid going on news sites and social media, which always makes me feel low level anxiety.
I’m not really that into the hardware music producing side of things, manly because I’m ITB as I’ve been nomadic for the last 5 years. I don’t want to travel with expensive/ big gear and I don’t have a desk to put it on, or speakers for that matter.
My biggest time drain is YouTube, but that’s my own tug of war with a quick dopamine fix.
I should leave YouTube alone, if I did I would definitely see an increase in music productivity.
I find when I hit a block musically and feel frustrated I go on YouTube for a dopamine hit clicking on all those shiny thumbnails.
@patrick - Just FYI, there are extensions you can add to your browser that make YouTube show up as a search bar and a completely blank page. No other content. Highly, highly recommended if you are distracted by YouTube thumbnails. I installed it many years ago and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made for my productivity.
I a big proponent of the “see one, do one, teach one” philosophy of picking up a new skill.
The gear community can be a great place to “see one” — when the community has strong values around sharing experiences over superstitious griping and bitching, anyway. Elektronauts has been invaluable to me just in that it let me “see” so many previously unknown things about all aspects of music creation and production.
The gear community can also be a great place to “teach one” — when the community has strong values around asking questions over superstitious griping and bitching, anyway. And I find Elektronauts generally rewarding in this regard, too. A little less so than some points in the past, maybe? But more so than most other forums and media.
The “do one” in the middle, though… I really think being “very on line” or engaging with a community in this phase is rather counter-productive. Best case scenario is you end up making music for the approval of your community rather than personal joy or taste. That’s a very good way to turn creativity into a job and music into factory produced shells, IMHO. When I’ve taken a break from Elektronauts, it’s been to step away from seeing and teaching to focus on doing. And it was a great relief when I did.
Even really welcoming and encouraging communities like weeklybeats.com that are set up around the idea of “doing” still end up becoming approval quests in my head.¹ First time I did Weekly Beats, I was crazy productive, wrote some amazing things, and was stressed practically every minute of it. Then I took some time offline to “find myself,” figure out what made me happy and why I wanted to do the things I did. And this year Weekly Beats has been just as productive, but also a joy!
So to me, the gear community is a there-and-back-again Campbellian hero’s journey. You start in the community and hear the call. You end in the community, changed but wiser. In between you have to voyage away to figure out the things that are uniquely your own.
1: This probably says way more about my own personality than it does online gear communities. But I bet my personality type is not totally unique amongst us nauts 
Personally, I’m more involved in the online communities when I’m between projects. That’s when I have the most to contribute conversation wise be when I have the most desire to explore. I find that if I’m actively working on something it’s best for me to lock in. Like not using software during a project just in case it breaks something, but the software is my brain.
The exception is something like Jamuary, where a part of the project is exploring and sharing work. No problem getting sidetracked there, because getting sidetracked is a part of the process 
Just read everyone’s responses, and I honestly resonate with all of them.
I can see the value in having hobbies without “knowing it all” or already knowing how everything is supposed to work. Let me give an example: I ride my bike every day, commute, and go bike touring, but I’m barely involved in bike forums compared to music forums.
With biking, I don’t know all the standard answers, and that’s honestly a blessing. Should I go tubeless or not? I don’t know — I have to figure it out for myself. It’s easy to cheat now and see what everyone else thinks before even trying something yourself.
When you started with MPCs back in the nineties, there were no internet forums like today — just the manual, which I still keep on my bedside table.
Sometimes I miss that era of no pre-given answers.
It’s the same for me. I think I use this forum like other people scroll through insta or Tiktok. If this place didn’t exist, I’d probably get lost on YouTube instead. At least here I’m active and interacting in positive ways, instead of just passively consuming nonsense information or negativity. Spending so much time on here definitely has its problems, but it’s overall a good stress relief for me and it makes me feel like I’m part of a community. Most of my friends live in other places and it’s nice to talk about shit that just doesn’t matter at all on here with nice people on a regular basis.
Without Elektronauts, I’d still be making music I think. But it definitely helped me so much to learn in the beginning. It also helps me stay productive, whether it’d be for occassuonally sharing some music or the latest 12 albums project. It helps feeling accountable in some way and not releasing shit into a complete void, though it’s still pretty much a void.
I think if I left here, it would have its pros and cons. But I don’t see an issue currently because when I hang out here, it’s never during times when I could make music instead. If that opportunity arises, I will always prefer that. And then it helps me to finish things sometimes because I want to eventually present it here.
any breaks i take make me rethink my entire setup and go on a buy and sell binge - but my wife says its hobby rather than an ocd obsession so thats nice…i have a dream that i will be able to make hours of music from one device and be fully satisfied, never read the news or watch tv again and be at peace - perhaps a desert island and a guitar will do it who knows
With the exception of Elektronauts, I’ve become disillusioned from the online community over the past year. I’ve been much more active musically as a result and it feels like there’s less external pressure or influence. Less consumer pressure too.
Reddit and YouTube were my two biggest sources. Nowadays Reddit doesn’t feel real. One of the mods on the synth sub admitted bots in the comments was a major problem they don’t know how to deal with. And YouTube doesn’t feel much different. Watching synthfluencers feels like advertisements and musical content is more about showcasing a product rather than musical output. Here’s a video of my hands and my new synth, no offense to anyone I’ve been guilty of it.
I’m starting to read books again instead. It’s much more inspiring than a gear review, or reading some unhinged comment about why a synth’s analog filter doesn’t actually sound analog enough.
That might probably be the best thing to do 99% of the time. I think the world would be a much better place if more people read regularly.
