Any composers/songwriters/producers? What was your journey?

Post Reply New Topic

Have you found it difficult to understand what other people like about music? That has always been a challenge for me. I realized maybe something was wrong with me in college, I wanted to be a famous composer/musical artist, but I didn't understand what people liked about music. I know what I like, which is the sound colors, tasty textures, mathematical relationships, and other things that tingle my brain when I listen to it or study it. It's over a decade later and I've gotten more comfortable with myself and how to express myself, but that lack of understanding is still there. I recently learned this is called "mindblindness"? I am getting am doing an autism and adhd assessment tomorrow, so maybe i'll learn more.

Anyway, whats your stories?

I've done (and haven't really stopped) songwriting and producing, but only on an amateur basis.

Mostly I started writing my own songs because I was very into the Beatles and they wrote most of their own stuff, so being a copycat I felt I should do it too. It was all pretty wooden and crap to start with but as I gained experience I got a lot better, and as the Beatles obsession began to calm down I found myself writing with more originality. More recently I seem to have run out of ideas, but when I looked back at my best work I was surprised how much I liked the lyrics and some of the chord progressions and melody lines.

As for producing, I didn't know that existed for years, but as I was soon using multi-track recording machines (it was the only way I could get the sound I wanted) and doing the whole thing myself, well nobody else was producing it so I guess I must have become a producer. I've recorded other musicians but haven't really guided them artistically very much, I was more of a recording and mixing engineer for them. But the boundaries between those jobs and producing are rather blurred so I don't know.

A lot of people have said they like the finished recordings I've played to them, and I think some of them really meant it, though it's hard to know whether they just liked my voice, my musical arrangement or whatever.

I've never consciously paid much attention to what other people might like when I've been creating music. I've just gone my own way and done what sounded good to me at the time. Apparently the Beatles worked like that too. Paul McCartney said something like "we've only ever done what we like, it would be a pity if we changed in a way that people didn't like, but it's the only way we've ever gone." I agree with that approach. I think music that's been contrived to please a particular market tends to sound cynically done somehow, and in that way I'm glad I'm not a professional. It's hard to completely get away from it though - I often have a vague idea of a target listener that seems to influence me, but I don't think it means much because that listener probably doesn't exist. Still, if I had an idea I thought absolutely everybody would hate, I probably wouldn't record it. I'm very much my own man but my art appreciation is to a degree influenced by what others around me like. But I've never recorded stuff I don't like just because I think somebody else will lap it up.