PRODUCER ZEN: WRAPPED AND HAPPY THOUGHTS ON CREATIVITY AND CREATING

My dear patron fam,

whether you are celebrating Christmas or not, I am wishing you an awesome and chill time with family and friends for the ending of this year. All the very best for 2023! May it be a healthy and happy one for you!

To close this year, I thought about doing one last post for you. I thought about which topic it should be and all signs led me to do another Producer Zen post. To sort of wrap up some more holistic and happy producer life thoughts which manifested more clearly in 2022 to me.

As you might have noticed from things I post, or from feedback I send, when it comes to writing or producing music there honestly are not really right answers for everything, or maybe even anything, involved in it. Most of them are usually opinions. In the end we are all trying to experiment, to find an own individual way. 

I don't really have a set way nor a a super clear plan for projects when I start them. I do have experience of working in this field for years though, and somehow managed to train my hearing and to learn tools and how to solve certain issues I confronted on the way when creating music. I still pretty much come to every project blank it feels though. I believe, if you embrace that not knowing everything from the start or in general, it is a healthy attitude and an allover healthier experience going through the process. Good art is open, open enough where the artist can have her or his experience and the audience get to have their experience when they listen. Both do not have to be the same. They usually never are. And that is something important to remember.

To me one of the goals when writing music is to keep working till I get to a point where I am really happy with it. That one moment, you call it "final", even though you probably would get back to it and change it in a month time. One of the keys to move on within art to me is to simply keep on creating and doing. By trying to free time for it, trying to learn new things and trying to listen and somehow understand things in my own way. But most important, by actively doing it and not mainly thinking about it, nor by trying to understand everything. I believe that if you start walking that way and stop waiting for the right things to happen, then one is moving and not imagining.

Another learning from the past years is to focus more on the essence of a track, not too much on all the detail around it. One can easily get lost in these. Even though I love detail, and they are still important to me, it is just like there are sonic benefits, which are the less elements you have in a track, the better you can hear the ones that are there. And the less there are, the more space and personality they could have.

Often, I find myself in a creative process of adding, adding layers to thicken stuff. To make it sound bigger, more interesting or unusual. Often, the more things you add, the smaller it can get. It is a thin line to walk and it does put you in a different setting when you start with building instead of removing. These days I know I am at the end of a creative process when I start removing instead of adding. To get a clearer and a simpler understanding for my creation.

Most important within all of this I feel is trying to stay true to yourself. Surely it can be a great help on the way to look for feedback, talk to others to get a different perspective on what you do. But while doing so, it is also important not trying to conform to someone else's idea of what you should be doing so much. Keep on doing your own thing. That is also the reason why I mainly give technical feedback on here. The actual content, elements and story of a track is something so super subjective and a very personal process of things I do not want to compromise but maybe just guide a little with the help of my technical experience and trying to see where I feel it could benefit from.

All I know for certain is that I really like making cool and interesting stuff. I am sort of obsessed by music production. I try to do my things as good as they could be. But I try to always remember I have to finish things to move on. Knowing how things works is not what makes it work. 

Often the magic happens in a way that is intuitive and incidental yet accidental at times. When you are trying out things and then all of a sudden something falls in your lap and leaves you wonder why. It is totally okay not to know why. In the end it does not really matter. That is the core of any art. 

Whatever it is you are trying to achieve, maybe just try to make it your favorite thing. Try to be your own audience to the music and make it that moment for you. Pretty much everything we create is a reflection of a moment in life or time. Time could be a day here, or it could be two years. Just try to give it all of yourself. You will notice when you are happy and not interested in working on something anymore. Then it is usually done. Then you can decide if it is good enough to share with people or not, and that is fine if you decide not to. If you try to think in this direction I believe there are less moment of regret involved.

Happy 2023 everyone! See you on the other side and thank you for being here and supporting me.First post of 2023 is going to be a new category focusing on sound design tricks.

<3

Flo