Archive for January 11, 2010
The creative process
I don’t do new year’s resolutions, but I have told myself that I’m going to get back into blogging more regularly in a form other than just posting playlists and chart updates. I also reminded myself that blog posts don’t have to be novel-length tomes.
I thought one subject that’s close to my heart in recent months that might be interesting to some of you is just documenting some of what goes into producing and remixing tracks, and since I’m doing a lot of that of late, there’s probably a lot to talk about. 
So look for regular, or at least periodic posts, about this.
One of the things I’ve realized in recent weeks is that every project takes a similar path that I refer to as the roller coaster. A project is either progressing very easily, or it’s a major struggle, and there’s really just not any gray area. “Roller coaster” probably isn’t the best analogy here; a roller coaster is a sine wave. These projects progress more like square waves:
I’m not sure why this is, honestly. But whether I’m producing a song of my own, or I’m remixing someone else’s song, I’m crafting an arrangement, and that’s about 95% a creative endeavor and about 5% a technical one (the mechanical effort of doing the creative work in my software of choice, basically, accounting for that last 5%).
I explained this to my friend Nathan, and told him that the process sorta sucks the life out of me (especially when I’m in the “struggle” phase of the square wave). His response was basically that creation is giving life to something, and that it only stands to reason that it would (temporarily) drain some life out of me.
Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy this process. (OK, I enjoy the “easy” phase more than the “struggle” phase.) But it can be exhausting and exhilarating at the same time, and I find that pretty fascinating for some strange reason. I suppose, if nothing else, it makes it easier to deal with the “struggle” phase knowing it’s all part of a pretty predictable process of bringing a song to life.
In any case, on the remix I’m currently working-on, I think I went through the easy/struggle cycle about 20 times over the course of the weekend. It’s a good feeling knowing that the track is mostly finished, but like a painter and his canvas, or a woodworker and her nearly-done chest of drawers, there seems to be a nearly endless amount of touch-up and polish to be done, and some of it—as you might have guessed—is easy, and some of it… Isn’t.
Regardless, it’s sounding pretty good now, and I’ll tell you all more about it very soon. Until then, keep the volume up.
