Nine Lessons from Making Digital Songs
Over the past year, I have enjoyed amateur digital music creation. From this hobby, I have learned some surprisingly impactful lessons about productivity, learning, and art that don’t just apply to music.
By reading this, you will learn to work more effectively, but more importantly, realize that you can learn powerful lessons from humble experiences if you take the time to reflect.
Productivity Lessons
1. Beat the lizard brain and ship.
Shipping projects (publishing them) is crucial. Artists and companies can have all the great ideas in the world, but if they don’t deliver on them, nothing changes. So, learning to ship is necessary if you want to succeed.
Shipping is not so easy because of the lizard brain.
The lizard brain is the ancient part of our brains behind primitive survival instincts, like reproductive drive, rage, and fear, including our fear of criticism. This fear of criticism causes us to delay shipment—perfection is impossible and our projects will always be vulnerable to criticism.
So, instead of wrapping up projects, we often waste time trying to perfect them, and sometimes give up and leave projects unpublished. This happened to me while finishing my songs. I used rationalizations like “it’s not good enough” to justify me in wasting hours on unnoticeable tweaks and leaving songs unpublished. If you’ve ever had similar rationalizations, you are also falling prey to your lizard brain.
To overcome it, you just have to start making sacrifices and publishing. As you get into this habit, you will start to love it. Cutting corners and shipping is freeing, satisfying, and necessary for success.
2. Parkinson’s law must be dealt with.
Parkinson’s law is behind one of the most common pitfalls in productivity—letting tasks take longer than they need to. If you want to get anything done during your brief time on this planet, you have to deal with Parkinson’s law.
Parkinson’s law is an adage that says that “work fills its allotted time”. This means that if you allocate more time to a task, the task will take more time!
I fell prey to Parkinson’s law for much of my music-making—I barely set deadlines or budgeted time, and as a result, simple tasks took hours, causing me to progress slower than a snail. I’m sure you’ve experienced similar things when projects move slowly or when easy chores take hours to do.
It sucks when tasks take longer than they need to, so we have to use Parkinson’s law to our advantage: we have to define clear “done” conditions and set reasonable time limits for tasks (for example, by time blocking or using timers). These let us know when to stop and make sure we don’t allocate excess time to tasks. It’s easier said than done, but as you practice it, you get much better.
When we stop spending excess time on work, we progress at an enjoyable pace and have more time for other activities.
3. Fail fast.
I had many small musical ideas that seemed good, but most ended up not working. Despite this, I kept working on them in vain, trying to salvage them, when I knew it would be as futile and frustrating as trying to move a 10-ton boulder.
We all frequently do these pointless acts of trying to force things to work instead of just trying something else. It’s a complete waste of time and it’s no fun.
You have to learn to focus on good ideas, instead of toiling to fix bad ones. This will make your work much more effective, easy, and enjoyable.
4. There is lots of information out there—sift through it.
In the age of the internet, it is a necessary skill to efficiently find the desired information. If you don’t build that skill, finding what you need will take unnecessarily long because there is just so much information and not enough time to consume it all.
I learned to find answers speedily by asking myself certain questions while skimming a source of information:
What am I looking for?
Will the answer to this question significantly help me? If not, don’t search for it!
Is this resource (or this section of the resource) answering my question? If not, skip the resource or section.
Is my question sufficiently answered?
After looking at a good number of resources, do I still not have an answer? If you still don’t have an answer, why keep looking?
You’ll want to repeatedly ask yourself these questions so you don’t waste hours watching YouTube tutorials only to find you haven’t learned a single thing (unfortunately, this has happened to me many times).
Sifting through the internet to quickly find the gold is a necessary skill in our present day.
5. Poor tools make things much harder.
I used GarageBand to make my songs. It lacks many features, so much so that most producers refuse to even call it a proper DAW (digital audio workstation). Because of GarageBand’s inadequacy, simple feats became either impossible or difficult and time-consuming. This made music-making less enjoyable and more frustrating.
For this small hobby, I was fine with using free, subpar tools. But, for more serious, long-term activities, I would consider investing some time, and possibly money, to find proper tools.
You have to ask yourself, are you fine with using a poor tool, doing things the difficult way, and facing lots of annoyance? Or, would you rather spend some time (and possibly money) to find a better tool to have more time and enjoyment in the future?
General Lessons
6. Put in the reps
James Clear, in his book, Atomic Habits, details an experiment that a professor did on his photography students. Half his students formed the “quantity” group. They were told that they’d be graded based on the number of photos they took. The other half formed the “quality” group and were told that they’d be graded on the quality of their photos. Can you guess which group produced better photos?
The quantity group.
This happened because the quantity group got lots of practice, taking many photos, experimenting, and improving. The quality group barely got any practice, taking only a few photos, trying to make them perfect, and barely improving.
For a while, I was like those in the quality group. I only worked on a few songs and tried to make them perfect. Had I made many songs, I would have gotten much more practice and would have improved more.
If you want to get better at something, you have to be like the quantity group. Acknowledge that you will likely be unable to produce great things while starting out. Focus more on “putting in the reps”, gaining experience, and improving.
7. Be clear about what you’re going for.
I tried to make songs in genres I liked. However, I didn’t study the genres adequately—I didn’t take note of exactly what sounds they used or what feelings they evoked. As a result, many of my songs were far off from what I wanted.
I bet you’ve experienced this yourself, maybe in your own projects, in cooking ventures, or just anything in your life where you worked towards a vague goal.
You must know what you’re going for and thoroughly study it (there are likely lots of unexpected intricacies) if you want to end up at your destination and not at some sketchy shack in the woods.
8. Look at the big picture.
You also have to consistently keep your target in mind to get there efficiently.
While making songs, I would often make an instrument sound decent on its own, only to find that it sounded poor when played with the other tracks. Had I spent more time with all parts playing together, I would’ve made a cohesive song much more quickly.
At the end of the day, what matters in a project is its overarching goal. When you forget about it, the work you do will only push your project astray.
Focus on your destination so you don’t take unwanted detours.
9. Professionals are on another level.
Professionals always make things look much easier than they really are. Cooking shows make fancy desserts seem easy to make and professional musicians (even the triangle players) make all instruments look easy to play. We often don’t give professionals the credit, respect, and awe that they deserve.
I experienced this during my music production, when I tried to make professional music, but fell short by quite a lot. From my humility, I grew a sizable appreciation and respect for professionals—they are on another level.
Conclusion
I am surprised to see how many valuable lessons I learned from a brief, far-from-great dip into digital music-making. All it took was a little reflection.
I urge you to also think about what you have learned from things in your own life. Experiences come and go, but the lessons you learn stick with you forever.
