Author James Clear recently published an enlightening post about goals vs. systems. He proposes that one can find effectiveness in a project by focusing on systems and jettisoning goals.
The general idea is this: a goal to complete a novel in three months is intimidating, and this looming target often triggers anxiety and procrastination. Regardless, you should have a system planned out to reach that objective, such as ‘write five hundred words each day.’ Clear argues that you may find yourself more productive by not having the goal, but maintaining the system. Just simply write five hundred words a day without the pressure of an end goal. Soon enough you’ll have that novel.
But we do this to ourselves all the time. We place unnecessary stress on ourselves to lose weight or to succeed in business or to write a best-selling novel. Instead, you can keep things simple and reduce stress by focusing on the daily process and sticking to your schedule, rather than worrying about the big, life-changing goals. When you focus on the practice instead of the performance, you can enjoy the present moment and improve at the same time.
These sentiments echo the advice that I give to music producers who are stressed about ‘not enough time in a day’ to finish an album project. Take it from me, writing and recording an album is nerve-racking, especially when you’ve put the process in the context of resulting in an album statement.
A simple way to remove the stress and put the fun back into recording is to forget the album. Just record songs. Those songs may show up on an album, but don’t think about that now. Just make a point to write and record every day. Stay consistent, and keep up the practice, and you’ll end up with a bunch of songs. Whether you want to release them individually, as EPs, or as an album will be your choice, rather than a ‘goal’ choosing for you. As a bonus, this will become a habit. You’ll continue to write and record every day even after the ‘album’ is finished.
Not enough time in the day? Forgo watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt tonight and instead spend thirty minutes in your DAW. Not inspired? Play around with sounds and loops. Delve into that new soft synth you purchased last week. Waiting for inspiration is for producers who don’t deliver. Chances are once you start messing around inspiration will magically appear.
There’s also the Seinfeld method, which is another great tool for consistency and output. Jerry Seinfeld uses this to make sure he sits down to write every day. Via Lifehacker:
It’s more commonly known as “Don’t Break the Chain,” and the concept is simple: spend some amount of time doing a desired activity every day and, when you do, cross off that day on a calendar. This creates a chain of Xs showing your progress. If you don’t do your specified task on one day, you don’t get an X and that chain is broken. It seems almost too simple to work, but it’s allowed me to accomplish so much more than I ever thought possible.
I think a trick here is to get a big, bold calendar and hang it where you can’t miss it. Use a thick marker – maybe even bright neon ink – to X out the days. Working on music thirty minutes a day is a good starting point, and let the calendar’s visibility remind you of the task at hand.
Not every day has to be successful or produce the beginning of the next big hit song. The point is to be working at it consistently, and the long-term result (or goal, if you’d like) is that you’ll be so much better at what you do with a large body of work to show. And I’m certain there will be a potential hit in there somewhere.
Posted by the Polyphonic YouTube channel, this video essay illustrates all the remarkable things that happen in the three minutes and thirty-nine seconds that comprise The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” It is remarkable when the details get laid out: the convention-defying sections of the song, the ingenious chord combinations, the metamorphosing moods and transitions, even how the deceptively simple lyrics reveal a deeper meaning. “Good Vibrations” is indeed a “pocket symphony.”
The making of “Good Vibrations” was unprecedented for any kind of recording, with a total production cost estimated between $50,000 and $75,000 (equivalent to $370,000 and $550,000 in 2016). Building upon the multi-layered approach he had formulated with Pet Sounds, Wilson recorded the song in different sections at four Hollywood studios from February to September 1966, resulting in a cut-up mosaic of several musical episodes marked by disjunctive key and modal shifts. It contained previously untried mixes of instruments, including jaw harp and Electro-Theremin, and it was the first pop hit to have a cello playing juddering rhythms.
Its title derived from Wilson’s fascination with cosmic vibrations, after his mother once told him as a child that dogs sometimes bark at people in response to their “bad vibrations”. He used the concept to suggest extrasensory perception, while Love’s lyrics were inspired by the Flower Power movement that was then burgeoning in Southern California.
The instrument that steals the show in “Good Vibrations” is more often than not mistakenly referred to as a theremin. Kudos to Polyphonic for initially calling the instrument on the recording by its actual name: the Electro-Theremin. He gets it wrong the second time around, though.
From an article about this instrument via NPR:
… in the 1950s, trombonist Paul Tanner and an amateur inventor named Bob Whitsell made an instrument that made sounds similar to Leon Theremin’s creation, but made it a lot simpler for non-experts to hit specific notes and control the volume.
Tanner’s instrument — like the theremin — was used in science fiction films and a very popular television show from the early 1960s called My Favorite Martian. Tanner featured it on his 1958 album, Music for Heavenly Bodies. The few people who bought The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds when it came out in May of 1966 would have heard Tanner’s instrument on the song “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.” But in the autumn of that year, every American teenager heard that weird sci-fi sound on every AM pop radio station, when Paul Tanner performed his Electro-Theremin with The Beach Boys on “Good Vibrations.”
One more observation: near the end of the video I found myself thinking, “Wow, Brian Wilson did look exactly like Paul Dano.” Then I realized that was Paul Dano. Sneaky.
Treat yourself to this ten minute explanation of syncopation, using the deceivingly complex rhythmic basis of Radiohead’s “Videotape” as its example. “Videotape” is my favorite of the Radiohead ‘dirge’ songs but what I didn’t realize is that it actually grooves at a very un-dirge-like 155 BPM.
Vox has been on fire with their videos for a while now. I watch them all. Check more of their output HERE.
Technology In Music: A Chronological Playlist Through History:
Let’s start from from the beginning, in 1937: a timeless feel – eerie and alienating at times, permeates ‘Oraison’ by French composer Olivier Messiaen. The song was originally written for an ensemble of early electronic musical keyboards called Ondes Martenot. The Ondes Martenot is a very expressive instrument, meeting Messiaen’s avant-garde composition techniques. If you’re expecting beat drops you may want to keep in mind the release date.
Peter Saville On His Album Cover Artwork:
{Saville on New Order’s Technique cover:} It was a garden ornament and we rented it for the shoot. It’s a very bacchanalian image, which fitted the moment just before the last financial crash and the new drug-fuelled hedonism involved in the music scene. It’s also my first ironic work: all the previous sleeves were in some way idealistic and utopian. I’d had this idea that art and design could make the world a better place. That even bus stops could be better.
Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?:
In 1977, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth published a paper called The Complexity of Songs, which is basically one long joke about the repetitive lyrics of newfangled music (example quote: “the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory, and the ultimate improvement of Theorem 1 has consequently just been announced”). I’m going to try to test this hypothesis with data. I’ll be analyzing the repetitiveness of a dataset of 15,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and 2017.
Forgotten Tributes: 25 Monumental Relics of Yugoslavia:
If you were to travel today through the area that was once Yugoslavia, you would come across some incredible massive objects that allow an unexpected look directly into the area’s past. Before dissolving into several smaller countries in the 1990s, Yugoslavia became home to a number of large-scale futuristic monuments.
Gary Vaynerchuk on Impact Theory (Podcast):
I think that Steve Jobs came along {and} became an icon, but the sad part of that narrative was he did not treat his employees well. He became an icon and the narrative became he got the most out of people by being a jerk, and that became romanticized. And a lot of people in Silicon Valley today run companies where they’re mean because they think that’s the right thing to do because they put Steve Jobs on a pedestal. I want to become that big {but} what I want to come from that is that kids that aren’t even born today think that they can build a five billion dollar company and {still} be a great guy or a great gal. I want to build the biggest building in town ever by just building the biggest building in town, while I think most people try to tear down everyone else’s building.
Yet another way that Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music album was ahead of its time … via Priceonomics:
Over the last several years, pop music has been inundated by massive hits with one-word song titles: “Happy”, “Fancy”, “Rude”, “Problem”, “Jealous”, “Chandelier, “Hello”, and “Sorry” are just a few examples of this trend.
We are in the era of the shrinking pop song title. The transition has taken place slow enough that you may not have noticed, but when you look back at the history of pop, the change is stark.We analyzed Billboard Hot 100 song title data and discovered a steady upward trend in the number of one-word titles. Today, the probability of a one-word title is two and a half times greater than in the 1960s. The average number of words per song title has also declined substantially. The increasingly industrialized pop machine likes its song titles short, sweet and on brand.
Why might shorter song titles be better commercially? Mostly because they are easier to remember, particularly if they are repeated over and over in the song. The last thing the music industry wants is for you to love a song but be unable to remember its name when you go to stream or download the song. But it’s tough to forget “Hello” or “Happy” when Adele and Pharrell keep repeating the one-word title throughout the song.
The pop industrial complex is focused on making the consumption of its product as easy as possible, and that has meant making song titles ever more simple and memorable. Expect to hear a lot more one-word title hit songs with lyrics that will drill that title into your head.
This fascinating article from The Atlantic reads like an episode of Black Mirror:
Impressionable young fans would do well to avoid John Seabrook’s (new book) The Song Machine, an immersive, reflective, and utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music. It is a business as old as Stephen Foster, but never before has it been run so efficiently or dominated by so few. We have come to expect this type of consolidation from our banking, oil-and-gas, and health-care industries. But the same practices they rely on—ruthless digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing—have been applied with tremendous success in pop, creating such profitable multinationals as Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.
The music has evolved in step with these changes. A short-attention-span culture demands short-attention-span songs. The writers of Tin Pan Alley and Motown had to write only one killer hook to get a hit. Now you need a new high every seven seconds—the average length of time a listener will give a radio station before changing the channel.
Orlando’s Lou Pearlman apparently has a lot more to answer for than the criminal schemes he’s presently serving time for.
Side story: in the mid-’90s I once wandered into a downtown Orlando pizza place to grab a quick slice and noticed Pearlman at a table with a large pie in the middle, and four teenage boys sitting across looking wide-eyed and attentive. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall.
Update: Vox interviews John Seabrook about his book and the ‘mega-producer’ phenomenon:
When you’re talking about the Swedes, and to a certain extent the Norwegians, there you’re dealing with a different set of cultural influences. There’s this whole concept, from a novel in the 1930s, called Jantelagen, the laws of Scandinavian restraint. The idea is that individual success is to be frowned upon in Scandinavian culture, and it’s really about the group and not the individual. That particular set of influences was very instrumental in shaping Denniz Pop and his group of disciples, of whom [leading mega-producer] Max Martin was obviously the most successful. It’s a major force in Max Martin’s career.
What’s the difference between the Beatles and Max Martin, really? You could say the Beatles’ songs are maybe a little bit better, but that’s a very subjective judgment. The real difference is that the Beatles perform their own songs and that’s why the Beatles are universally recognized as geniuses, whereas Martin never performs his own songs, and that’s why outside the music industry, nobody knows who Max Martin is. It’s a hard thing for most Americans to wrap their minds around, but if you look at it in a Swedish context, it makes a little more sense.
Update 2: Bob Lefsetz reviews Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside The Hit Factory:
They don’t sit in studios with guitars and pianos, writing melodies and lyrics together. At best, they do that in Nashville. Rather producers come up with beats and then they have their favorite topliners create melodies and hooks on top. And if there aren’t enough hooks in the track, they start all over. They’re in the business of hit singles, not album dreck. And they know one hook is not enough, that you’ve got to grab the public instantly and continue to thrill them.
And this formula is working.
I’m not judging it, just telling you how it is.
All the people truly driving popular culture are in this book. That’s why you should read it. And that’s why you’re gonna hate it.
NPR:
Where do you draw the line between inspiration and appropriation when it comes to musical compositions? That question is at the heart of several high-profile court cases, including the recent “Blurred Lines” trial and a current copyright-infringement lawsuit involving “Stairway to Heaven.” But it isn’t always easy to prove a song is yours – particularly when you’re up against one of the biggest rock and roll bands of all time.
But proving a song is yours isn’t always easy, says leading music attorney Ken Anderson. “The first step is establishing ownership,” Anderson says. “That means that the material is original to you, meaning you’re the one who created the material.” [He] says you also have to show that the accused had access to your material.
“We listen to the music if it’s recorded, or we study it if it’s only in written form,” says [musicologist Judith Finell, who has testified in many high-profile cases]. “And usually, we transcribe any section of that music if it sounds similar to the other music we’re comparing it to. Then we start to determine if they have similar pitches in common, similar rhythms. What is it that makes them sound related?”
This is a fun radio piece from NPR, which does focus mostly on Led Zeppelin’s infamous ‘appropriations.’ I wouldn’t put the “Blurred Lines” case in the same category as “Stairway To Heaven”, though … I see some merit in the latter, but, personally, not much in the former. (As I tweeted to a friend the week that the “Blurred Lines” lawsuit went for the plaintiff, “I wonder what the Bob Marley estate is thinking right now.”)
I’ve recently been doing some consulting work for a well-known songwriter, and a recent top 40 hit by an unrelated artist contains a melody line that is suspiciously similar to one of hers. The artist in question (or, more likely, his label) was proactive in that he gave my client shared songwriting credit, but without contacting her. We found out through online press that the song received. No one here is upset – the similar part is brief, and my client is happy for the extra royalty that should come in – but this practice of preventively crediting songwriters that may or may not have been intentionally appropriated is new to me. It’s probably a lot more common than I know, mainly due to the issues raised in the NPR piece.
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