Yeah, I’m definitely sticking with practice until further notice. Maybe when I’m older and more jaded with it I’ll focus on technique; I hope to eventually, for obvious reasons. I’ve noticed the “floundering” you mentioned (i.e. repeating myself) on quite a few occasions, but all I needed to do in those cases was listen to more music to emulate elements of, with MIDI transcriptions (or decompiled from the source) when possible. I suppose that’s a kind of studying, but it comes naturally enough to me that it doesn’t feel like it. In terms of language learning, this is comparable to comprehensible input (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug). No such thing exists for production, however. (Keep in mind less than 5% of what I write is freeform or otherwise genre-based.)

I like your overview of the pros and cons a lot, and if you end up delving deeper into production, we should definitely collab at least a few times, being at opposite ends of the spectrum.

I did a much more clear and concise rundown on my creative (lack of) process on Twitter earlier:

I no doubt would be able to write a lot of stranger stuff faster if I studied formally. One of these years I want to have the attention span and lack of stress to cross music over with memorizing technical terms and symbols at a time I’m interested in it.

Just one hobby I’m still not comfortable making a discipline though…

Currently it’s like a space where I want to go and communicate with its forms of sentience without having to worry about knowing the language. It starts out feeling embarrassing each time, but once I’m feeling “in it” that stops.

I think the intermediate fluency stage (http://ascd.org/publications/books/108052/chapters/The-Stages-of-Second-Language-Acquisition.aspx) is the point I’d start calling someone a composer. (I still don’t know what to call myself.)

Now that I’m more aware of how deep it goes and how simple it makes a lot of my stuff compositionally I feel better keeping it to myself, though.

As for mood, I just don’t ever try to convey one other than imitating an element of a track I already know. It just…sometimes comes about, sometimes doesn’t.

I don’t know what motivates me to continue, honestly. For a lot of people it’s emotional expression, but to me that’s what listening is for. Could be why I go entire months and years sometimes with no output.

The bolded parts are what I was trying to get at with the “thoughtlessness” (used in a neutral sense) about it.

I’m glad it did for somebody! Because looking back, it really went all over the place. The main thing for me is the way it shed a new light on the name of the site in a very freeform-appropriate manner.

For me emotion comes first when it comes to the appeal of music, though I can’t imagine most of what I listen to having much if any emotion put into it, so that would be emotion in the listener, i.e. myself. This is also why I don’t dismiss ambient/drone/noise and the like, as I don’t pretend to have definitions of “good” or “bad” in creative works other than whether or not they please me at a given moment. My top 10 list is thus a ranking of how many moments each summation of sonic elements happened to appeal to me, weighted by how powerful those moments were (not that that’s what was going through my head at the time…) Maybe I’d benefit from a more properly thought-out philosophy on art, but I’m not good for much more than this off-the-cuff type of thing at present. Maybe when I’m older we’ll see; for now I just have an unpopular opinion on what constitutes quality.

It definitely does rule out lyrics for me if they’re in a language I understand, though. I don’t think any vocalist has any business telling me what to feel. As much emotion as clearly goes into freeform and related electronic genres, that type of music shows instead of tells (again, id over ego.)

This is quickly turning into another personal rant, so it’s just as well I can’t think of what else to add.

(This place has become so quiet…could it be a lack of live events that’s done it?)

• This reply was modified 5 years, 7 months ago by Sherkel.

Found out that the “beam” from I Believe Nothing/Freeform Mercury/Freeze Highlander is from a sample pack called “Vengeance”. Haven’t checked it out myself, but it might be a good place to start for anyone in need of some variety in their sounds.