Turning Ideas into Compositions

[PeterHanes]

@tengig

I think I’m not alone in this

Indeed.

Finishing a track

Hi! I am really struggling in terms of how to do a whole track on the machines. I used to word with hardware before but sequenced everything through cubase and switched to live with plugins later. So now I am really stuggleing on how to finish a track properly. So far I have nice stuff going within the sequencers but as for variations, buildups etc I struggle using the hardware properly. How do you guys do it? I was thinking of recording into ableton, arranging there and importing the bits …

Finishing tracks is hard?

This brilliant comment was posted in the Zoia thread and has so far received 26 likes… so it looks like others have this problem! Please discuss any tactics you have to make yourself finish a track… this is for people making some kind of electronic music on their own, using any combination of hardware and DAW(s). I’ve been using Live to sequence and mix a small bunch of hardware, with the Analog Rytm doing the beats running its own sequencer synced to Ableton. The plan is to record live jams …

Complete songs, no not me

I only end up with cool patterns, and keep twisting them to death. Really don’t know to Build up a good set… Similar problems? Advice?

Songwriting/finishing tracks on hardware?

When I worked ITB, I could finish songs quite easily, because I could see the whole song before me. But now Im trying to compose more directly on the hardware, so that its easier to perform live. But I find myself getting stuck in jam mode often. I’ll start on a loop, and then evolve it into what I think are sections, but before I know it I’ve meandered off into a whole new pattern in a different key, and when I bring it back to the original patterns its just a completely different song, tha…

The creative process / constistency - tips?

Hey guys, I haven’t finished a song in my life. Last time I nearly did (before the accidentally wiped the hard drive) was like 7 years ago. In the last year I’ve been getting into music again: I bought an A4 in February and am about to buy a second hand MD mkII (no UW). I tthought he the A4 was piece of equipment which would offer me everything I need for being able to spend considerable amounts of time with it without getting bored. But often the patterns and sounds I come up with just bore …

How To Get Back Into A Song

Title isn’t particularly good for this one but hey ho… Managed to steal my usual 2 hours or so on a Saturday night to do music and once again, I’ve built the foundations for a tune but ran out of time to finish it. I realised as I was shutting down the laptop that I have dozens upon dozens of these half finished ideas that I never return to or, when I try, I can’t find the groove/enthusiasm to finish it. Now, three quarters of these ideas are probably dog shit but every now and again I come u…

How much time to finish tracks?

How long did it take you to complete some of what you consider your most ‘accomplished’ tracks? I’m getting a feeling that after a certain amount of time / threshold, the more time I spend on a track, the lower will be my eventual ranking of that track against my other creations. I’d like to better understand that empirical threshold, to make better decisions about whether to continue down a certain path, or just write off the effort and move on / start fresh (on the line of “If it’s not happe…

How do you let it go?

A lot of advice suggests that you use your time wisely when making electronic music, breaking up sound design, experimentation, and songwriting. I find it hard to break these up using my Elektrons. As soon as I get an interesting sound going, I start working things into a pattern to start looking for ways to further tweak the sound. Pretty soon I have the beginnings of a track, but I’m still tweaking away, as it seems like there is something new around every corner. The pattern/kit relationship …

Help! Advice on arrangements/compositions

Hey all, I’d like to post about something I’ve been struggling with since going out of the box and ditching ableton. I find I’m really stumped on turning multiple patterns/jams into full blown songs. I get caught just looping a 4 bar pattern over and over or chaining a few patterns together and just jamming out and tweaking the sounds etc. The problem is I have so many of these jams/ideas (literally like 30-40 good sounding mini jams) and very few completed pieces of work to show for it. M…