On April 19th 2022 I had the wonderful privilege of watching Mena and Nils‘ dog while they went out for the night. Aside from cuddles and good sushi, I also was allowed to fiddle around with Nils‘ music hardware. But I immediately became overwhelmed with the Elektron-Workflow, since I never really dug into these machines. I also became very frustrated with myself. It felt like I forgot how to make music, how to jam around, how to scribble and finish songs.
It wasn’t the first time I felt like this: After I was really engaged with the music community in 2010 I fell off of the whole thing in a major way. The reasons are still not really clear to me. In the end I think it was a total lack of focus in my life. Dedicating time to a single activity was never my strong suit and there was so much going on, I never felt like I had the time.
That somewhat changed the next day after my hangout session with Nils‘ puppy. I told myself: let’s do this. I was gonna make music almost every day for the next week or two and see If I could get back into the headspace. Weirdly I could.
After a few days programming grooves and making very basic arrangements it came back to me. I started watching countless videos on music production in Ableton, deep dives into mixing and arrangement techniques and sythesizer reviews.
For my birthday some wonderful friends got me a Keystep 37. A few weeks later I got myself a Korg minilogue xd. Seeing Elliot Jay Stocks talk about success gave me the confidence to say: Yes I can be both a designer and a musician. Joining various music production discords gave me a new community and a very understanding girlfriend, who’d watch TV shows with headphones on, gave me the quiet time I needed to work on my mixes.
I was able to make music as much as I could without stressing to much about that I should. I took extended brakes while on holiday and just went on to gaming when I didn’t feel like making music. Also, getting a cute puppy didn’t really help with my free time for the first few weeks, but thats also fine!
Setting goals never works for me. The only thing that keeps me going with a project, is to take every spark of inspiration or motivation I have and use it as immediately as possible. Not letting those moments pass but taking the energy and putting in the work is what helped me.
From April 2022 to December 2022 I saved around 45 Ableton projects. Around 10 I finished as complete tracks. 5 made it onto my new EP „The Work“. It’s me taking stock of those months as I promised myself I would earlier last year. I’m really happy about my progress and I would lie if I said I would make these tracks just for myself.
This music is just as much, if not more for the people to listen and dance to, as it is for my personal enjoyment. I hope you like some of what I produced last year and I’ll be over the moon if 20 people bought my EP on Bandcamp, as that would settle the cost of mastering.
„The Work“ will be out on Bandcamp on the 20th of January and a week later on all major streaming platforms on the 27th.
Thank you.
