So many things could be said about the creative/artistic process... so many different artists/creatives each undertaking their own journeys - all sharing similarities in some ways, and uniquely different in others. And for everything that could be said, there are some things that can only be experienced...
Over the years, I ended up buying into alot of hustle culture type rhetoric. Yet, for all the ego highs it provides, it's logical strategies of willful "making shit happen" doesn't exactly apply so well or consistently in the world of art.
As much as grinding away for long days in the studio appeals, there was alot of banging my head against the wall trying to make that work before realizing it doesn't (at least not for all artists/creatives.) That the creative process is its own thing with its own rules, and trying to force it to be what mind & ego would like only ends up counterproductive in the end.
The last 2-3 years of my creatives processes have been educational. In some ways, it might be fair to say I've finally "surrendered to" them - trying to force less & less, increasingly attuning to the waves of energy and harmonizing with them (the best I can). Granted, there's still been a ton of struggle, speedbumps, paddling out to exhaust myself when the waves aren't there, debilitatingly painful wipeouts, and all the other challenges that come as the polar opposite of the peak highs of ecstatic flow as surfing the best waves. Yin & yang... can't escape it.
It's nuts to think of how long I've actually been making music, and all the different chapters I've been through on that journey - not even really knowing what chapters I was in at the time. How many different phases past versions of self passed through over the course of making the hundreds of uncompleted ideas that made their way into my "grave" folder, the hundred or so that actually got completed, and the couple hundred still in-the-works. Sometimes clarity does come in hindsight - and it's been easier to see the phase I've been in the last couple years as the creation of new ideas have been put on pause, with focus shifting to the engineering side...
It kinda started as switching off a paid plugin subscription, substituting different plugins into a couple hundred projects - not intending to make improvements during the process, but fascinated to hear them happening in real time as revisiting and tweaking some small things couldn't help but serve their refinement. Then came The God Particle plugin - testing it out on some of those projects, leading way to another round through everything given its magical capacity to up the mixes' quality another 10-15%. Then Kraftur. Then Ozone 11. And then... well, it was just evident what chapter I was in: a multi-year stretch of distillation/refinement, slowly chiselling my way to engineering mastery.
It's not a conventional path.
Of the countless music producers I've listened to, a majority stress "completion" - like, banging out tracks quickly. Not taking years. And the vast majority of engineers aren't producing during their process, but solely playing their focused role on a per project/paycheck basis - working through a mix in hours. To keep revisiting the same project multiple times over years, doing different iterations as expanding one's skills and warchest of tools... the closest examples I can think of might be the stories of Kanye taking forever to find the perfect kick for Stronger or Dr. Dre taking an abnormally long time perfecting his 2001 album before its release. Otherwise, I might be something of a freak here.
But the creative process is what it is. Unique to each artist, each project.
And it's been hella interesting "surrendering to" this process of mine. And, though part of me feels hesitation to saying it, satisfying.
The self-doubts never cease - questions of whether I'm just "dragging on," keeping myself "stuck" in endless loops of rationalizing perfectionism as "progress," how much of a difference all this "improvement" to the productions' quality will actually make in the bigger picture, whether anyone else will ever actually notice or appreciate, etc, etc. Yet consistently, the process reveals why I keep going.
The succession of small tweaks, becoming dopaminergic rewards unto themselves as hearing and feeling the big differences they make. The unveilings that what I thought were good mixes still had so much more room for refinement - and that as putting in the discipline to actually make those refinements, the potential for the songs is being realized in real-time.
No more haphazardly & prematurely putting out releases while rationalizing laziness to go the extra mile ensuring their quality with conclusions of "good enough," but really attuning to what the projects want & need to flourish into their own. Putting brakes on my impatience to embody the stewardship role - taking as long as fucking needed to ensure its really done, rather than rushing, throwing in the towel, and continuing to put out stuff that's actually sub-par to the standards of excellence I want my art to embody.
It's a damn fine line between that and the perfectionistic shadows though.
It's its own process of refining my discernment.
Impossible to count the hours put in at any given project, looping through to sculpt the tiniest of details 99.9% of people would never be able to hear or understand why spend the time & energy on; numerous nights lying in bed with the earworms of a project echoing in my brain, questioning if I've gone way too excessive, seemingly unable to escape the ruts etched into my neural networks; now years "putting off" new explorations & creations under the logic of "completing what's been started to properly clear space for the next chapter;" numerous times a project feels almost there, only to feel like the goalposts are pushed back yet again and trying to grasp a slippery fish, chasing a horizon on a treadmill, playing a game of whack-a-mole...
Yet riding that edge perhaps being the only way to really discover things that couldn't be otherwise.
Pushing & testing these limits, perhaps the only way to truly find out what & where they are.
Surrender to the process, ego death by a thousand paper cuts of persisting in the face of those uncertainties and releasing my ideas of when a project is "done" or "good enough" in exchange for the sensory upgrade to attune to when it actually is & isn't.
The refinement of all these projects, mirroring the refinement of self - killing off ego slowly, so that the artistic heart & soul underneath can come out in fuller expression through what masterpieces could never reach maturity without the patience to keep sculpting & refining in the face of all the doubts & impulses to force the process to be different than what it is.
That all said... maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I have been rationalizing "holding on" with all these romanticized notions of "the refinement process" and such, staying stuck in the past - as embodied in perfectionistic obsession - while denying myself exploration & expansion in/of the new, where there may be far greater satisfaction awaiting. Maybe it's still a different form of the "improvement" trap - perpetually putting off arrival as justifying some sense of "not ready" that's based in self-consciousness/doubt rather than actually having to do with the projects readiness.
Maybe I've settled into a comfort zone of the chapter I've been in, subconsciously afraid to close the door and leap into the unknown of the next.
Sometimes it's a fine line between heeding a deep innate wisdom guiding the creative process and self-gaslighting oneself to dismiss it via all these ideas of what the process is & should be.
Sometimes so fucking fine that the line itself actually disappears as engaging the shadows of Scorpio's drive to perpetually dig deeper for "truth" and Virgo's unsatiable controlling tendencies for management of the minute details... Jupiter's endless expansion with Saturnian structure & discipline to excess, taking the Uranian innovation too far into distorted eccentric mutation... Neptune, overseeing that dissolution of boundaries to leave both the heights of Divine creativity and depths of madness, inextricable from one another.
Obsession... or devotion?
Maybe the mind can never truly know, sometimes.
Maybe time shall tell.
Though in the meantime, the refinement carries on... for long as needed until the heart, soul and songs say it's time for the album(s) to enter the public sphere... ⏳✨
It's interesting to think how hard it must be for those artists that taste a bit of success and then they are quickly catapulted into creating their next album with expectations that it will be as good or better than the first. Maybe that's why so many sophomore albums fail, because they don't have the time to refine things.
The industry dynamics definitely add a whole different element into the picture, in those regards.
In some ways, I probably ought to be grateful for my obscurity - no such pressures. It's probably a gift to have the freedom to allow my processes to unfold as they need to on their own, being able to grant the art to flourish into what it wants without imposition of timelines and pressure to try fit it into expectations - both others' and my own.
at the same time, there's also the potential curse as sometimes those lack of constraints can result in endless explorations & tweaks, veering way the fuck off into vortex that just burn time & energy.
double-edged sword. I probably could've made, finished & released a whole lot more music were I to be playing more within "industry norms" rather than off doing something different on the fringes. but, there's also stuff that could've never been discovered & created, were I not on a different path. whether the fruits ever do reach a wider audience, uniquely contributing as something truly different... perhaps only time shall tell...
☯️
I think creativity is better than formulaic stuff in the end. That's just me though. Lots of people have made lots of money on the formulaic stuff. Even this new AI stuff is topping the charts I saw the other day. Blech!