Pretzel Logic Music

Lately I’ve been seen quite a few artists on my feed expressing frustration for having to find time around their day job to be creative. I am very thankful because I’m not in that position anymore (it surely feels like a day job sometimes anyway), but I’ve been there so I relate

I’d like to contribute to the discourse by saying this: The key to success is living an integrated life, which means connecting all the segregated areas in your life into an all encompassing, harmonized whole.

In simpler terms, living an integrated life as a musician doesn’t mean putting your musical mind in storage when you do something else; on the contrary you can still exercise it and maybe find useful points of contacts between your job and your art

Genius lies at the intersection between unrelated areas. IE: the Autotune technologywas created as a way to discover oil fields underwater. Dr Hildebrand heard a friend say she’d have loved a plugin to keep her in tune and his brain connected a seismologic software he developed

When you’re working you’re obvioulsy not at your DAW so you need a way to keep making music without any device. Easier said than done right? Let me offer a paradigm shift to you:
The physical way of making music, sitting at your DAW or playing an instrument is only the latest link in a much longer and meaningful chain. I’d argue that if you sit at your station without a fairly clear idea of what to do, you are not composing, you are researching

Music doesn’t come from your technology, it comes from your musical mind, the technology is there to merely capture it when it’s formed enough. So how do you develop your musical mind?
At this point in your life you already have a massive data base of music you like in your head. Go thorugh it and start making connections. IDK what specific snare sound seems to be recurrent in a genre. Next time you compose, you won’t have to scroll thorugh a thousand sounds

That was just an example, but in a larger sense, keep your senses open. Music is interconnected with all that’s happening around us. The Brazilian filmmaker / composer Jarbas Agnelli one day saw a picture of a bunch of birds on five wires and decided read them as notes

Any work environment. Actually, any environment has background noises going on. Repetitive noises have rhythm patterns. Unusual sounds have great texture and a pitch. And anything is a song lyric. If you strive towards integration, these connections will be clearer and clearer

I know that working instead of creating sucks, especially if your job doesn’t teach you anything (are you sure you’re not paying attention to that too?) but there are several ways to go back to your DAW and you’ve already skipped the research phase.

This entry appeared as a thread on http://www.twitter.com/@taichi_method