CONTE

Dealing with Despair!!!

This is what I feel like right now: I work crazy hard. I spend my days locked in my studio pouring through manuals and learning how to use music software, listening to my favorite tracks and ABing my mixes, draining every last drop of creative juice into my tracks. And they’re still not good enough. They don’t even sound CLOSE to my favorite mixes, my favorite songs, my favorite music.

I know I’m not the only person who feels like this. Lots of artists have to deal with feelings of despair and mediocrity, that two week period of “fuck, everything I make is boring and fake and not worth the space on my hard drive.” So how do we combat this?! How do I keep going back into my studio to make music? How can I possibly be OK with releasing tracks that I know will never be at the level of my favorite artists?

Make lots of shitty stuff. That’s how to do it. Make LOTS and LOTS of shitty, bad, boring, bold, overstuffed, saturated, bleeding music.

My problem right now is that I’m trying to make ONE perfect thing. I’m concentrating my efforts on one or two tracks. While I’m definitely learning a lot in the process, it’s frustrating as HELL to wake up to the same song again. And when I hit a dead end, I keep ramming my head into the wall, trying to fix it, which is just too discouraging.

I think it’s time to move on. I need to make hundreds of songs before something is good. Spending 50 days on ONE mix? Not the answer. Not at this point in the process. There’s too much I still need to learn. I’ve got to stop trying to make perfect stuff, and start having a little more fun and being more free and easy about the process.

So, how to deal with despair? Just make LOTS of stuff, and know that most of it will be shitty. Make that your goal - to make lots of shitty music. Then one day, you’ll wake up and realize you’ve recorded 50 songs, and 3 of them are pretty good….