How to make something amazing (and not go crazy in the process)

10 rules for musicians and other creative types

Forgive me for not writing in the last few months. I’ve been working on something amazing, which I finally finished. (That “something amazing” will be secretly pre-released to friends tomorrow, after which I’ll be promoting it very heavily to various tastemakers to see what happens. I don’t want to talk about it in public, though, at least not yet. If you know what I’m referring to, cool.)

Recently, Sara (Riobamba, who started the fantastic monthly global dance music night in Boston called Pico Picante and is currently working to document music producers in Bogotá) asked me this question:

loren! i am entering my phase of studio-quarantine. any tips for how not to go crazy??

I have a lot of thoughts about this.

If you are a young producer or songwriter, you are probably listening to some fantastic music and thinking to yourself, “Oh geez, how could I ever make this?” And honestly, even if you’ve been making music for decades, there’s a good chance that you feel like a fraud, that maybe it was all luck, and you’re wondering whether you can even do this anymore.

That’s how creative brains tend to work… they need constant reassurance that their talents exist. Imagine how Superman would feel if he hadn’t flown in a year… he’d be wondering if he could still do it, right?

Here is the truth: IT IS POSSIBLE TO MAKE AMAZING THINGS. Right now. No matter what you’ve done in the past, and no matter how much “writer’s block” you feel.

It is possible to make amazing things.

I am not telling you that it’s easy. It’s not easy. Songwriting and producing to a high standard is the hardest thing that I’ve ever done in my life. But it is possible, and I can say that with confidence, as someone who has been to the edge of hopelessness and has come back from that edge.

I used the phrase “to a high standard” in that last paragraph. Let me explain.

Ask any DJ or music writer and they’ll confirm this fact: The internet is full of music and 95% of it is completely terrible. And trust me: you don’t want to be in that bottom 95%. You want to be in the top 5%. If your music isn’t in the top 5%, you should spend all your time trying to make better music; don’t bother wasting time promoting it because you’ll fill everyone’s inboxes with even more trash and they’ll resent you for it.

You can be in the top 5%, but it takes sacrifice on multiple levels. You need to be able to make a large time sacrifice. You need to sacrifice your own ego and your preconceptions about yourself as an artist. Some people aren’t in a position psychologically or fiscally where they can make this kind of sacrifice. Try not to beat yourself up about it.

So, how do you get your music up to a high standard? You work your way up. But that alone seems so obvious, and yet is not really helpful at all. Creative work is not like physical work, where you can shovel the dirt from this location over to this other location and you can see how much dirt is left. In the middle of the process, sometimes the end becomes more obvious, or you’ll start feeling like you have more control over the final result. But it’s never as straightforward as shoveling dirt.

Here is a whole article about creativity and how to get to point B (where you want to be) from point A (where you are now), hopefully without going crazy. Read it first, then live it and see if it works for you. Sorry this is so long, but honestly, it only scratches the surface.

Clear your mind of all the other advice.

Of course, you want to make something amazing. We all do (at least those of us who read these types of articles). I have some experience steering the creative process (and maybe, more often than not, having my life steered by it) and along the way I’ve read a fuckton of articles that promise to UNLOCK THE CREATIVE DOORS.

Sadly, most articles about “the creative process” are not at all helpful. The advice I’ve received falls into a number of different categories:

1. The “you’re a unique snowflake!” advice, designed to inflate your ego (“you’re a Creative Type and magical things Will Happen if you just go out there and take what’s yours, so it’s ok if you act like a horrible person, because you’re giving your Creative Gifts to the world!”). The internet is full of this kind of advice, mostly written by people who call themselves “information publishers”, and sometimes in the form of “Ted Talks”.
2. The “technical details” advice, which gets into the nitty-gritty of whatever kind of software and hardware you have or should get, without ever addressing the fact that most people who own those things don’t actually get around to making anything, and that creativity requires more than collecting awesome gear.
3. The “what you make can only be great if your heart is in it” and “the best artists are just natural-born artists and if it’s you then you’ll KNOW it’s you” advice, which is usually given by people who have no experience making things, and aren’t familiar with the creative process that was hiding underneath all their favorite albums and paintings and films.

All of this advice is worthless. You have to ignore it all. You have to come to the realization that most people don’t know what they’re talking about, and furthermore, that there is no way for random people on the internet to know how you work best.

What I am proposing is a trial-and-error process with some crucial ground rules. If you follow these rules, you will learn something important about yourself, and you’ll get a little glimpse of your own potential as an artist.

It’s hard. And it’s probably worth it. So here goes…

Rule 1: Take enough time.

You may be misguided enough to think that you need “talent” or “inspiration” to make great music. You are wrong. You need one thing most of all, and that thing is…

A contiguous block of time.

This sounds trivial. It is not. It is crucial. And it is very difficult to achieve.

It can’t just be any block of time, you see. It has to have these features:

• It must include your brain’s “most active time of day”, the time when your brain is capable of getting into the zone and making fantastic things.
• It must be a time when you can achieve reasonable isolation from distractions.
• It must be long enough of a time so that you can “get into the groove”.

This last part is very important. It takes time to start things up and be productive, especially if you don’t do it every day.

Your computer will crash for reasons you can’t explain. You’ll realize you need to upgrade some sort of silly piece of software to work better with some other silly piece of software. You’ll spend time setting up gear and plugging it all in and clearing your workspace and throwing out half-eaten slices of pizza and coffee cups (and, after doing so, you’ll spend time reading internet articles on nutrition).

You’ll spend time wondering why the fuck you got yourself into this mess and wondering whether you’ll ever get out of it.

And you need the time to spin up, you can’t skip it. You need time to get all of this stuff out of the way before you can actually make your creative hours count. So you need a big block of time, or many big blocks of time in a row.

The exact amount of time that this takes during each session is highly variable depending on how long you’ve been doing it and what kind of work you do. It’s something you have to learn by doing. Just set aside more time than you think you’ll need and see what happens.

Rule 2: Find out when your brain works best.

There is a time of day when your brain works best.

You may already know what time this is; it’s the same time you find yourself being naturally productive and feeling pretty good about the results. Work hard to find this time, and use it to your advantage by scheduling your most creative work then.

When you’re doing creative work, you have to make lots of decisions, pretty much constantly. That’s what it means to make art…art is making creative decisions for a particular reason. And each person only has the willpower to make so many decisions per day before we start phoning it in and making bad decisions. So normally, your “best time” is going to be earlier in the day, rather than later, after you’ve been refreshed by sleep.

My “best time” is in the morning, right when I wake up, and I get a shorter “second best time” around 9:00 pm, for reasons I don’t understand. Sometimes I can ride the wave at 9:00 pm and work through the night, and then pay for it the next morning. This is sometimes helpful to meet deadlines, but I rarely do my best work overnight.

Even if you really want to and it seems fun, you probably shouldn’t schedule all your creative time during evenings. Your brain is trashed from working on things at work all day, especially if you’re a “knowledge worker”. I made music for many years like this and the quality of my work and my relationships suffered and I was kind of a mess. It’s possible but it’s not great, especially as you make more music and it gets less naturally fun (you probably already know what I mean).

Similarly, you can’t schedule your creative time in favor of sleep. You have to sleep. Come on. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but I know I do, because right now you’re calculating your miniscule amount of free time in your head, and skipping sleep seems like such a great “lifehack”. I have done this. It will catch up with you and you’ll end up hating yourself, so don’t do it. The more creative work you try to do, the more your brain will try to sleep, because sleep plays a very important function in helping your brain process what you’ve done so far. So make sure to sleep, ok?

Rule 3: Make a workspace and isolate yourself.

You have to have a place where you can work and isolate yourself from distractions and other people. You need to be able to switch your brain into “I am making stuff now” mode.

Nowadays, this means one thing more than any other thing: Get the fuck off the internet, and don’t get back on until your creative time-block is over. Turn off your phone and put it out of the room or hide it under the bed so you can’t see it. Turn off your wi-fi.

The internet will try to kill your productivity. Kill it first.

I have a custom computer that I made for music which has absolutely no way to connect to the internet, and I do all of my internet work on a separate computer that has no music software on it. This has worked very well for me. I’m not suggesting that you go this far, but you should consider it. It has a lovely side benefit of removing the threat of most computer viruses (although you also have to remember to never plug anyone else’s USB stick in, but I digress).

Also, it helps a lot if your workspace is consistently the same place, where you can set it up correctly for audio work and set up some nice audio monitors and such. Some people work fine in headphones on an airplane or whatever, but I guarantee that by the time you hear their fantastic finished mixes, they went through a long period of gestation in a more studio-like location.

If you’re doing a week or longer, stockpile some easy-to-eat favorite foods so you don’t have to order out. Eat a little bit and get right back to work. Frank Zappa used to burn a hot dog on the stove and put it on a slice of bread with some mustard and that was lunch. I’m not saying you should try to be like Frank Zappa but he was definitely a master of the creative grind.

The point of all this is to have a place where you can stay focused for long periods of time without distractions.

Rule 4: Back your data up, now and every week.

This is another thing I feel like I shouldn’t even have to say, considering that it’s almost the year 2014, but BACK YOUR DATA UP.

If you’re a painter, I envy you. But you probably aren’t. You probably work in some sort of digital media format. And if you work digitally and you don’t have everything backed up safely to protect against a hard drive crash or cloud storage disaster, you are sabotaging yourself.

Remember this: if digital data doesn’t exist in two places, it doesn’t exist at all. Three places would be better, but two is minimum.

I know what you’re thinking: it’s such a pain in the ass to back things up, and hard drives are so expensive. I’m cheap and lazy, too. But this is one of those things where you have to bite the bullet and just do it and stop complaining about the expense.

Also, if you’re a technical person who’s really into computers, don’t just mirror your drives. Redundant storage is not a backup. Sure, it can protect you against a failed drive, but it can’t protect you against accidentally deleting a directory that has some important thing in it that you forgot. It can’t protect you against some terrible program accidentally or maliciously corrupting your data. It can’t protect you.

So make backups of your data. Encrypt them if it makes you feel better. Update them weekly at least. You will thank yourself later. As a creative person, catastrophic data loss is not a thing that you should have to put up with. Get ahead of the curve.

Rule 5: Start small and do one thing at a time without judging.

So you’re sitting in your workspace and you’re in the middle of a creative timeblock. But what should you actually do? Oh no, now you’re listening to some music made by other people to try to get yourself in the zone and the world starts rushing at you all at once, reminding you of your own insignificance.

Here is what you need to do. Here is how every piece of fantastic music you’ve ever heard was made.

You have to start small.

Start by focusing on one thing only. It doesn’t matter what it is. Focus on it and get inside it and play with it.

The world’s most silly interview question for songwriters (which I’ve been asked a lot) is, “So, do you start with the music or do you start with the lyrics?” And the answer is: Yes.

You just start somewhere. The difference between artists and non-artists is that artists started working, and didn’t try to tackle the whole thing at once and get discouraged and overwhelmed.

So make a drumbeat, write a song title, write one line of a lyric, start twisting knobs on something, pick up the guitar and just play without thinking very much.

Without thinking. Without judging. You can’t judge your work at this stage. More on that later (see rule 8).

Most importantly, you have to let yourself start. Just start. Stop making excuses and start somewhere, anywhere, it doesn’t matter where.

And don’t tackle the whole thing at once before you even know where you’re going. You might think you know where you’re going, but you don’t. When you get to the end, you’ll see that it wasn’t where you thought you were going to go. The human brain is not good enough to envision the most amazing things in life before they come into existence, and if it were, we wouldn’t be very amazed, would we?

One more note about starting small: Some people say lately that we’re a “generation of multitaskers!” That’s complete bullshit and you need to come to terms with the fact that if you want to do your best work, you can only really do one thing at a time. If you insist on multitasking, you’re inviting disaster into your studio. Don’t insult your work like that. Do one thing at a time and don’t force it.

Rule 6: Iterate. Grind. Nothing is sacred.

How will you make something out of nothing? You will make small pieces of things and you will combine the small things into a big thing and you will make creative decisions about the combination. You’ll look at it the next day or the next week and say, “Ok, that wasn’t as good as I thought it was,” and you’ll use it as a jumping-off point to make a better thing.

This is the process you are welcoming into your life right now and it’s the process you need to follow if you want to make something amazing.

Techies call this process “iteration”. It means you’re going back over the thing you’re working on and trying to improve it. The important thing to remember about this process is that nothing you make is sacred; if you look at a particular part of your work and you think it kinda sucks, try to swap that part out with something better. Keep the old version around, and when you do replace what you’re trying to replace, do an A/B comparison of the old and the new versions to make sure you’re on the right track.

I spent the last three months making an amazing record, and one of the songs that I completed went through 18 different versions. Eighteen. It sounds almost nothing like it did when I started. I gave up hope on making it better, but I persevered anyway, and now it’s probably the best thing on the record.

Every B-side and filler album track by all your favorite artists happened because they were lazy and gave up on making it better. Don’t let that happen to your work. Don’t make filler. Make A sides.

Rule 7: Collect music you love, and keep it around.

Make a collection of other people’s music that you think is really awesome, and keep it around when you work on music.

Listening to music that you find inspiring during your creative timeblock might inspire you in ways you hadn’t expected. It also provides a good reference for how other things sound. Often, the way you remember things sound is not at all the way they actually sound once you start listening analytically with your creative brain.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that great art is all made in a vacuum. It is not. Great art is made with the knowledge of other great art. Don’t just copy other people’s work wholesale; use it as a jumping-off point.

It’s also great to have a reference point for yourself, sonically speaking. When you’re busy making a hot beat and you’re pumping up the bass 12 dB more than any other recording ever made in the history of the universe, it might sound great on your speakers at that time, but when you sit down and listen to it later, something will sound off. Use the other material as a reference point to make your own creative decisions.

With that in mind…

Rule 8: Expect your own music to sound terrible.

What I’m about to point out can be really hard for creative people to digest, and I understand that.

At some point during the process, you are going to look up from your work and compare what you’re doing to some other people’s music, and you are going to be horrified. This is because your work will sound totally terrible compared to whatever it was that you were comparing it to.

This is a fact that you have to keep in mind: Your music is going to sound terrible. It will probably sound terrible at all points in the process except the very end, when you look back and realize that, hey, you made something pretty good. This is normal. You need to expect your music to sound terrible and just keep working.

All that music you love? It probably sounded terrible, too. Have you ever heard unfinished demos of any of your favorite records? They’re terrible. It’s always terrible until it’s done. I can’t tell you why this is true. It just is.

This is doubly true if you’re a vocalist and you’re recording vocal takes… you are going to be horrified at the way your voice sounds. Until it’s finally all mixed together, you will think you’re a complete failure. Accept this and move on. Get a friend to help you track vocals if you need an impartial ear (but they probably won’t be able to hear it, either).

This doesn’t apply to absolutely everyone… but if you really think everything you do is really fantastic at all times…

Rule 9: Be honest with yourself.

You have to be honest with yourself about the quality of your work.

Your friends are not going to tell you. Nobody is going to tell you.

If you release a record and your singing voice totally blows or your recording quality is terrible or your lyrics suck, people are going to either be silent or they’re going to say “Hey, great track, I really liked it.” Most people will not put their relationship with you on the line in order to tell you the truth about your music, and even if they did, you probably wouldn’t hear them.

So you have to be objective about your own music. This is very, very hard to do, but you have to do it. Compare it to other things that you like. Compare it to other things that you don’t like. Be honest about what’s similar and what’s different. Don’t be afraid to throw things out and start over (see rule 8 above).

Rule 10: Don’t share your work until you’re done working on it.

I break this rule all the time in order to expose the creative process, but in the last three months, I’ve been very good about this.

Don’t share your work before it’s done. Ever. For two reasons.

1. If you share your work early, people won’t get why you’re doing it. They’ll point out things about your work that haven’t been addressed yet and they’ll criticize them. Then you’ll get discouraged and stop working on it because criticism hurts.
2. If you share your work early, you’ll be more likely to throw your hands up and say “I guess it’s done!” before it’s actually ready.

It can be very tempting to show your work in public after you’re at a natural break point. I strongly suggest against doing that if there’s a chance you might work on it again in the relatively near future… the act of sharing it will solidify the work in your mind and you won’t be able to approach it with the same creative-critical eye.

Bonus rule: Try to have fun.

To be honest, a lot of creative work is not fun. The people who do it a lot are the types of people who are drawn to it for some reason other than having fun. But that doesn’t mean you should go out of your way to make it not fun for yourself.

In another 50 to 100 years, there is virtually no chance that anything you make today will have survived, even if you’re Lady Gaga or Amon Tobin. So keep that in mind.

If you run yourself into the ground, you might make something super amazing, and you’ll also probably hate your life and die early. And part of the art of making art is the ability to keep yourself alive so you can continue making art.

So, good luck! Give it a shot, and send me what you make.