Something Joshua Penman, aka Akara told me years ago has stuck with me. He said that when making music you got to understand that it sounds bad all the way up until it’s completed. Only then, when everything is polished and complete, will you feel you have the track you wanted.
He also talked to me a lot about understanding that it’s a process and it takes time. When you are sketching out a song you should know it won’t sound good, but somewhere down the line it will sound amazing. In this article I wanted to talk about my process of making my album and how I used this wisdom to take time with my process.
The Process Unfolding
In a later article I showed off my steps to writing a track. I walked through the idea of making a sketch, a working composition, and then a final master. I also talked about working on many tracks so you never get stuck on one, and you’re always feeling fresh.
The next step to this is how your sketches and compositions slowly turn into completed tracks.
In this image I want to show how the process unfolds. When I am first starting out I might have a bunch of sketches and ideas. It looks nothing like a completed album. I can actually spend days and weeks before actually having a completed track, let alone 8 or more.
What works for me though is knowing that I am slowly working on things and I will eventually get there. There is also a cycle to it. As I complete 5 sketches I usually take one sketch and turn it into a working composition. Then after a week I have 10 sketches, and 3 working compositions. Then I will spend a week on turning the sketches I like into compositions. From there I have a bunch of tracks that if I polish them I have a lot of completed songs.
This way I am constantly working on new sketches, refining them into compositions, and eventually I have a bunch of finished tracks. It works in waves for me. Sometimes I just can’t finish a track, but can have a hundred new ideas. The years have taught me that it’s okay, and just flow with whatever is happening and know that at some point you will polish it all up.
The Cutting Room Floor
When you look at that graph you will also notice that I always have way more sketches than final finished tracks. This isn’t even counting the ones I work on and just throw away an hour after working on it. I think this is a very important concept for producers to understand.
It’s really important to come at this non attached. It’s all about making things and moving on. In making a lot of sketches you will find that only a small percentage of them are any good. It takes courage sometimes to throw out some potential songs in the hopes for a better one to come, but it’s worth it.
Flowing with the Waves
Writing an album is such a complex and huge undertaking. I might be working for weeks and not have anything definitive to show for it. I might have sketches and sketches, but nothing polished. Knowing my own cycles and waves I can be a lot more relaxed with it and know it will all come to pass.
Have patience with yourself. Let the sketches flow through you. Use your taste to decide which ones are worth working with, and slowly polish your tracks overtime. If you have patience with yourself, you will be surprised how fast these random parts and ideas becomes a cohesive whole.
