Last week I worked full-time on music production, something I hadn’t done in years. I called it “Beat Week.”

I’m between novels, and with the next one still simmering in my subconscious, it felt like a good time to briefly switch up my creative focus. I decided to take a break from my client work as well, and told everyone I was going on vacation. A vacation to my music studio!

Before I fully committed to writing novels (around 2008), music production was my main creative activity. Making beats frequently took up the majority of my waking hours. My friends and I had a really good run in the late nineties and 2000’s promoting dance music events and releasing tracks on our label. Our videos played on MTV, we wrote music for commercials and videogames (including Dance Dance Revolution), and we toured around the US and Europe to DJ at dance clubs. But the best part for me was always making music with friends, or working alone in my studio, late at night with my headphones, bobbing my head in the dark.

That lifestyle came to a natural end, a combination of getting older, having a kid, our parties making less money, and everyone’s priorities shifting. We kept making music together, and the record label continued to release tracks, but we accepted that our “full-on” music crew days were over. There were other things to do in life, and the music industry was changing rapidly before our eyes. New musicians were coming up through SoundCloud, Spotify, Bandcamp, and YouTube, with or without a record label. Our fifteen minutes of music fame was up, and we were pretty much okay with that. We’d kept the same party (Qoöl at 111 Minna) going for fifteen years, an epic run.

All this to say that I hadn’t really experienced music immersion in a long time. So I was curious what it would be like to dedicate an entire work week to making beats. Here’s what I experienced.

Days 1 and 2

I committed to writing at least three sketches a day, with each sketch including drums, bassline, chords, a lead/melody, and some percussive elements. The first couple of days I found the work engaging…but not that exciting. I didn’t have any great ideas, and while a couple of the grooves I wrote had potential, nothing was blowing my socks off. This was discouraging and I wondered if I was a little depressed, finding little joy in what is often a joyful activity for me.

On the positive side, my workflow improved, and by the end of day 2 my brain had pretty much merged with Cubase.

Day 3

On Wednesday I wrote a beat at home in the morning, then headed down the coast to Pacifica to work with one of my music partners at our shared studio. We had a fun, productive music session, and I was reminded that for me, music making needs to include a social element. Not for every session or for every track, but collaboration is an essential part of my music-satisfaction formula.

Days 4 and 5

On Thursday and Friday something clicked; for whatever reason I started to have fun with the process. I experimented working in genres I’m less familiar with, and allowed myself to integrate some premade loops and samples into my sketches (something I usually try to avoid, as it can feel like cheating, making the process almost too easy). But it was fun to speed up my workflow even more, and by the time I had processed the samples and loops I was using they were often unrecognizable.

I’m very happy with the sketches I wrote on these days, and I was once again filled with the joy and excitement of music making that I had hoped for from the beginning.

Takeaways

  • Carving out time for a couple music sessions a week isn’t that effective for me. I need immersion in the activity, at least a few hours every workday, to reach my full creative and productivity potential. This has implications for how I structure and schedule my activities over the course of any year. I’ll blog more about this topic once I make some concrete decisions and block out my time.
  • The good feelings I get from making music are at least partially related to the quality of the work. If I’m making “blah” work (subjectively) then I have “blah” feelings. Since I can’t reach “peak quality” from dabbling, I can’t expect very much positive emotional feedback from any creative activity unless I immerse myself in it.
  • For a long time there’s been a gap in the music that I listen to (vapor twitch and chillwave, according to Spotify’s Wrapped) and the genres I’ve produced, like house and progressive breaks. But this week I could feel that gap closing, as well as getting into new, unexplored territory.
  • Activity immersion results in “compound dividends” to borrow an investing term. Small ideas lead to big ideas, positive emotional feedback leads to more enthusiasm and excitement, small technical breakthroughs lead to significantly better workflows, and so on.
  • I could see adopting this kind of dedicated immersion for all future creative projects. A week to write a short story, a month to write an album, three months to write the first draft of a novel, etc. These “creative bursts” wouldn’t include finishing work (editing, revisions, mixing and mastering, etc.) — those activities could be completed in a non-immersive framework.

So that’s my Beat Week report.

What’s your own creative process? How do you balance creative work with your other day-to-day responsibilities and commitments?