Composer Breakthrough

Today’s episode is a homage to a quote I stumbled upon when reading Robin Hobb’s Fool’s Errand. It goes like this:

“And so I passed that day in pleasure. Which is to say, in the sort of work I wanted to do, rather than the work I thought I ought to be doing.”

Doing the work I wanted to do rather than what I thought I ought to be doing.

This is a wonderful sentence and it struck me when I read it.

As creatives, we are often stuck in a cycle of doing work to pay the bills and doing work that lights us up.

Sometimes those two things align and sometimes they don’t.

Ultimately the goal for all of us is to pay the bills doing work we want to do rather than what we think we should be doing.

I, for one, find it hard to distinguish sometimes.

Let’s take the start of my career for one.

Writing music has been a hobby of mine since my early teens. However, when I started to get paid for writing music, the lines blurred. When I wrote music I no longer knew if I was doing it for fun or to get money.

This stressed me out. Yes, I appreciate it is a nice problem to have but it does beg the question, how do you create the time and space to create for yourself when you are creating for others most of the time?

So today, I wanted to create some music just because I wanted to…although I then turned it into a podcast sooooo still turning it into work 😂 D’oh!

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As I mentioned in this blog post, so much about making slowcore music is about embracing simplicity.

In today’s episode of Diary of a Music Maker, I show you how I produce instrumental slowcore music.

You see me write the track ‘Do you think that?’ from the album, The past is blurry by my instrumental slowcore project, I don’t know myself.

My approach falls into these steps:

* Lay down the drums (usually the same drum pattern)

* Record the main guitar line which is usually a bassline

* Record a second guitar part that works in conjunction with the main guitar line

* Record a melody line

* If I am recording vocals I’d do that here

* Record an ambient topline

* Refine structure - I usually stick to an A-B-A-B-B structure

For the ‘master’ I keep it simple. On the stereo out bus, I keep it very simple with cassette emulation software by Wavesfactory and a limiter, PSP Xenon.

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This week my focus has been to write music that I want to produce because there is a quiet whisper in my heart that is telling me to.

You know that little voice that is so quiet it’s barely noticeable but tends to gently guide you towards the things that matter to you and bring you in line with your authentic dreams and goals.

But, what does doing that look like as a music maker?

Honestly, I am still finding that out but it does seem to follow these points:

* Do something you are curious about

* Do something that excites you

* Do not let what other people are doing stop that

That last point is tricky; learning to not let what other people are doing or saying influence you.

This tends to be quite easy if you are creating in line with trends or what is currently popular but the moment you move off into places where your creations are “different” then it becomes very hard to move confidently in that direction.

That is what I have been practising this week - moving confidently in directions where I see very few other people. It’s scary but also very exciting. To boldly go…(cue Star Trek TNG them music)…where no music maker has gone before!

p.s. The artists I was discussing in today’s episode were To Be Invisible (Piano Slowcore) and Tenebrae Sonus (Horror music for imagined movies).

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This is officially my first “Walk ‘n’ Talk” episode. This is a nod to my previous podcast as I take my iPhone, walk in the nearby woods, and talk about what’s been on my mind.

This walk ‘n’ talk with my iPhone is also a nod to today’s focus, my love of demos and the art of capturing magic.

When you hear a demo, knowing it is a demo, do you assess the quality of the production? No, you listen to the music. That’s the magic.

I want to chase this demo feeling of capturing the magic of the song rather than the polish of a master.

Pat Flynn calls this “being happy with scrappy” and Michael Gilbride over at Mad Records Monologue calls it “Demo-itis”.

Yes, I still love a well-mastered piece of music but in my line of work (incredibly polished and well-produced trailer music) I have been hungering for more imperfection and humanity in music.

That’s exactly what these projects have been bringing me - refocusing on the joys of songwriting over and above music production.

A good example of this is when I first heard Jimmy Eat World’s demo for Authority Song. I fell in love with the song.

When the album was released I immediately bought it, I skipped straight to Authority Song and was bitterly disappointed to hear a new, polished mix of the same song. It had lost a lot of its magic.

p.s. The artists I discuss in this episode are Melody Tapes (Lofi Acoustic) and To Be Invisible (slowcore piano).

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Over the summer I was fitting our en-suite bathroom with all new stuff. This meant ripping out all the old stuff and completely refitting it with new stuff.

This meant I had a lot of time listening to new music which made me very happy.

I was going down a DIY musician rabbit hole and then I discovered all these slowcore playlists…

Slowcore, what is slowcore?

I didn’t realise slowcore is what it is because I would have just labelled it “sad indie” or “alternative”.

All these years have passed and I have loved a genre without knowing it had its own sub-genre. How exciting.

I immediately went to my studio (aka the messy front room) and started creating my take on slowcore.

The first album to come out was Memories on Loop by Faded Moments. Since then at least 4 more albums from other artists have followed. I’ll keep you posted.

Those Distant Lights is the name of an ambient artist I have held onto for years and I have finally found the project that fits the name.

I was inspired by the work of Other Nothing (which was actually on one of those slowcore playlists) and was taken about by the beauty of their work.

I used to study sound art and sound collages so listening to ambient music that feels like a sound collage or like someone’s audio diary is very exciting.

I want this with Those Distant Lights; to create these short ambient works that feel like sound collages.

This week’s podcast episode is basically focused on the idea of music being an audio sketchbook. This appeals to me very much.

When I started Art, other people’s sketchbooks were far more exciting than their finished pieces. The sketchbooks were like a window into their mind.

I guess I want this show to be like that too - a window into my creativity and thoughts about the music I am excited about.

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In 2020, very shortly after our third child Phoebe was born I launched my first podcast.

It was called, The Trailer Music Composer’s podcast; it was all about writing trailer music.

At first, I started out releasing blog-style “tips” like ‘The 5 Biggest Mistakes Every Aspiring Trailer Music Composer Makes’ type of stuff.

I quickly realised however that I did not like sitting at my desk speaking in a microphone.

To top that off I had a newborn baby that I would take out for walks to have a nap during the day.

Given that I am not a fan of perfection or the act of chasing it I grabbed my iPhone and started recording these tips whilst walking with baby Phoebe.

This was awesome, I got to get out of the house and also talk about something I felt very passionate about.

I then branched out into interviews and the odd show with more than one guest.

This was great and I slowly fell in love with the format.

However, I quickly realised that I wanted to talk about more broad topics, not just music for movie trailers. On the odd episode, I did but the audience didn’t resonate with those episodes so much.

Slowly I began to lose momentum as I ran out of Trailer music-related topics.

On the side of this, I launched another show called “Composed: mindset for musicians” which was a 3x per week show of short mindset-related topics.

Composed was actually an attempt to launch a vlogging side of my YouTube channel but again it didn’t quite click. Maybe vlogging about just mindset wasn’t the way, maybe I should do more interviews.

To solve this I launched another show called The Richard Schrieber Show - it was my writing pseudonym at the time.

This show was all interviews and I even go a VA to do all the episode artwork and everything…it was SO MUCH WORK. I loved chatting with other music makers but weekly interviews are a lot of work to arrange. Interviews were fun but I didn’t want to just do interviews.

So after several episodes, this show was left by the wayside.

3 podcasts in and it wasn’t feeling like it gelled with my work of making music.

Over the next 12 months, I trialled (in private) different formats for the new show and slowly came to the realisation that my thing was MAKING MUSIC so why don’t I just do that?

I could still do interviews and talk about other stuff but the main focus was making music. After all, I do it every single day so it wouldn't be more work to just record myself doing it and talking through it.

I was inspired by Sam Sulek and The VlogBrothers because their content isn’t overly edited at all - it just feels like you are hanging out with a friend.

That’s what this show is really about - hanging out with a friend who writes music.

This was the most common thing people said about my previous shows that they felt like they were just hanging out with a friend ❤️

So without further ado - here’s the intro episode to The Diary of a Music Maker.

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