As opposed to what? Spending time learning any of the alternative tools out there? Everything you do is going to have a learning curve, so you might as well start learning the tool that does what you want.
If you don't want to use a computer, you could write and perform exclusively using hardware. Like a modular synthesizer, or a standalone synth, or an Elektron box (Digitakt, Digitone, etc).
It depends on your objective. The process you describe is excellent for achieving technical mastery. Less so for compositional mastery, but it can still be educational to see written parts up close.
What it wont prepare you for at all is impovisational mastery and just jamming over some chord changes.
Also, I don’t know many musicians who would completely ignore technical exercises like scales, chord voicings, and arpeggios.
So, it depends on what kind of musician you’re trying to be.
As a record producer, some of the best practice you can do by yourself is to recreate a record you like from scratch.
Remake it from the ground up: the drums, the instrument parts, the mixing, the sonics, the loudness. Everything. Match everything perfectly to the best of your abilities.
You will learn a tremendous amount as you listen deeper and deeper into the record, as it will force you to ask questions about intent and process and balance that a casual listen does not challenge you on.
It’s just like art students with an easel and paint in the museum recreating an existing painting. You will experience every brush stroke and interaction of color, and in doing so learn far more about the masters then you ever could otherwise.
That wasn't a real quote. I guess my sarcasm didn't transmit to text.I found the entire article so ridiculous that for a moment I thought it was satirical.
The actual quote was this:
"Em dashes are great for inserting clarifying details, quick shifts, or sharp asides—without breaking the sentence. I love them. When used well, they add rhythm and emphasis. They help writing flow the way people actually talk."
I think you missed the point. That section is asserting that people wrongly assume em dashes to be a distinguishing trait of LLM output, while in fact they are good tools for human writers (as the author demonstrates).
Deciding you like em dashes— and writing a blog post saying so—because an AI told you they were good for human writers—is funny behavior—even if "you" weren't LLM output masquerading as an author.
It's very generous of you to assume a "human writer" wrote that blog post—is it not?
Not to undercut your point - because you’re largely correct - but this is my reality. I have a decent-paying job in which I work roughly 15 hrs a week. Sometimes more when work scales up.
That said, I’m not what you’d call a high-earning person (I earn < 100k) I simply live within my means and do my best to curb lifestyle creep. In this way, Keynes’ vision is a reality, but it’s a mindset and we also have to know when enough wealth is enough.
You're lucky. Most companies don't accept that. Frequently, even when they have part time arrangements, the incentives are such that middle managers are incentivized to squeeze you (including squeezing you out), despite company policies and HR mandates.
I am lucky. I work for a very small consultancy (3 people plus occassional contractors) and am paid a fraction of our net income.
The arrangement was arrived at because the irregular income schedule makes an hourly wage or a salary a poor option for everyone involved. I’m grateful to work for a company where the owners value not only my time and worth but also value a similar work routine themselves.
40 hours/week is of course just an established norm for a lot of people and companies. But two 20 hour/week folks tend to cost more than one 40 hour/week person for all sorts of reasons.
Well, for starters people probably want health insurance in the US which often starts at some percentage of full-time. Various other benefits. Then two people are probably just more overhead to manage than one. Though they may offer more flexibility.
Which is a shame because I bet most knowledge workers aren't putting in more than three or fours hours of solid work. The rest of the time they are just keeping a seat warm.
Spoken like middle management. If a knowledge worker is only putting in 4 hours they're either mismanaged or dead weight. Fire their manager and see if they are more effective, if not, then let them go. As a developer I routinely work 9 hour days without lunch and so do the others on my team and most people I've worked with as a developer. Myths like the 10% developer and lazy 4 hour knowledge workers are like the myth of the welfare queen. We really need to be more aware that when we complain about 5% of people that it becomes 100% to those outside of the field.
I'm working hard on this one. I'm down to a three-day week, and am largely keeping the boundaries around those other four.
It came about late last year when the current employer started going getting gently waved off in early funding pitches. That resulted in some thrash, forced marches to show we could ship, and the attendant burnout for me and a good chunk of the team I managed. I took a hard look at where the company was and where I was, and decided I didn't have another big grind in me right now.
Rather than just quit like I probably would have previously, I laid it out to our CEO in terms of what I needed: more time taking care of my family and myself, less pressure to deliver impossible things, and some broad idea of what I could say "no" to. Instead of laughing in my face, he dug in, and we had a frank conversation about what I _was_ willing to sign up for. That in turn resulted in a (slow, still work-in-progress) transition where we hired a new engineering leader and I moved into a customer-facing role with no direct reports.
Now I to work a part-time schedule, so I can do random "unproductive" things like repair the dishwasher, chaperone the kid's field trip, or spend the afternoon helping my retired dad make a Costco run. I can reasonably stop and say, "I _could_ pay someone to do that for me, but I actually have time this week and I can just get it done" and sometimes I...actually do, which is kind of amazing?
...and it's still fucking hard to watch the big, interesting decisions and projects flow by with other people tackling them and not jump in and offer to help. B/c no matter what a dopamine ride that path can be, it also leads to late nights and weekends working and traveling and feeling shitty about being an absentee parent and partner.
I would say that the music industry has only recovered in the last two decades. Not done well. Internet piracy famously cut the legs out from physical album sales in the early 2000's and the music industry was not prepared for that shift. Sales and budgets for physical music is now a shadow of it's former self. Not to mention how artists are often the worst off financially today because of the crummy payouts of streaming music, which has largely replaced the purchasing of records.
> I would say that the music industry has only recovered in the last two decades.
Do you have revenue numbers? (I don't.)
> Internet piracy famously cut the legs out from physical album sales in the early 2000's
No way. The Internet destroyed physical album sales. Are you suggesting that if it wasn't for piracy, people would still be buying CDs? The Internet also destroyed print newpapers, software sales on CD, locally installed software generally, brick-and-mortar sales of anything that can be shipped, and lots more. Is that all due to file sharing?
> artists are often the worst off financially today because of the crummy payouts of streaming music
People online say piracy isn't a big deal because "the artist/band makes their money from live shows and merch anyway". But that wasn't always true. Before internet piracy, selling music actually was a viable business. Only when anything and everything became downloadable all at once did the bottom fall out of music sales as a viable way to make money. If piracy hadn't beat legitimate distribution to the punch, physical album sales would still be a niche thing but a musician could live on digital sales.
This is why opposition to DRM is such a techbro take. If you care about art, like at all, you want DRM built into the fabric of the network itself so that those who hold the rights to downloaded material get paid for others' access to it. We had such an opportunity to use the internet as a distribution network such that creators could get directly paid for their work and not the middlemen. Ted Nelson, coiner of the term "hypertext", explicitly included DRM in its conceptualization. Creatives are now paying the price for lack of followthrough on Nelson's complete vision.
> If piracy hadn't beat legitimate distribution to the punch, physical album sales would still be a niche thing but a musician could live on digital sales.
How would current economics be any different? Would Spotify increase artist payout - why would they stop squeezing artists for every dime?
James Brown had that vertical integration once he hit his stride in the 1960’s.
It wasn’t uncommon for him to take the band in for a late night studio session (after a 3 hr show). The song would be recorded and mixed on the fly. Then a copy would be sent to his vinyl pressing plant, which could turn the physical copies around in a day. At the same time, the radio stations he owned in the Augusta GA, area would start playing the latest cut. Just in time for it to hit stores and be available for purchase.
There was no recorded or productionized music back then. And yet people liked music as much as we do now. So the only way to enjoy music was to do it yourself.
Singing and playing an instrument was just a basic life skill that everyone had back then. (Say, like driving a car or using a computer is today. Not everyone is a professional driver or computer programmer, but not being able to use a computer at all today would mean you failed at life.)
> before recorded music literally everyone was a musician in one way or another ... playing an instrument was just a basic life skill that everyone had back then
You're just making this up. Playing an instrument is a complex skill that requires a lot of work and an expensive piece of equipment. Music has been a profession since at least Mesopotamian times
> Playing an instrument is a complex skill that requires a lot of work and an expensive piece of equipment
Or it's something you just, you know, do? I listen to and play a lot of tunes from the Appalachians and you really do get the sense that just about everyone played something back in the day. They developed complex and extremely localized traditions that did not require formal music education to pass down. Some of them were musical geniuses, many were middling, just like with most things people do.
Even poor families would often have an heirloom fiddle around to learn to play on (sometimes even brought with them from Europe), and ownership of family possessions was much more communal. Many parlors or bars would have a banjo or parlor guitar around for whoever wanted to make some music while hanging around. Those without access or with limited woodworking skill also often made their own fretless banjos (which look different from what you might normally recognize as a banjo) out of wood and hide, or other simpler instruments like dulcimers. Not that there weren't also semi-skilled luthiers making non-concert-grade fiddles at more affordable prices. All this culture is well documented in the Foxfire manuals on Appalachian folk traditions, complete with schematics on how to make those things from different regions. Pretty far from 'made up'. Hell, a lot of American music traces its roots back to music made by actual slaves. It's hard to think of a group of people with less means and access to the things you've mentioned, and yet, music.
Music theory may have a nearly limitless ceiling for both complexity of understanding and expense of instruments, but your statement here completely ignores the entirety of global folk tradition. And it does seem like an accurate observation to me that participation in casual musicianship in everyday contexts has declined significantly in correlation with a lot of the trends in modern living.
There's a big difference between the statement I was responding to
> Before recorded music literally everyone was a musician in one way or another
... and your statement
> participation in casual musicianship in everyday contexts has declined significantly
I agree with the latter, but not the former. I'm not denying the existence of folk traditions, just pointing out that music-as-a-profession is very old - and even within folk traditions (e.g. my own (Irish)) there is, and probably always has been, some proportion of people getting paid
You've never played with a pen, finger or spoon hitting different plates and vases on your table and amusing yourself with the drumming? Twanged a ruler on the edge of your desk? Congratulations, that makes you a musician.
little kids,(feeling safe and secure) will try and grab your guitar out of your hands,they KNOW they can do this, and just go for it, guitars bigger than they are, or watch a little, out somewhere, smitten by a street mucician, dont want to leave..,..yanked away....scolded...
in Halifax, NS, there was a ukelele program, and ALL children partisipated
and second page into a search, it comes up
https://www.ukuleleintheclassroom.org/
> There was no recorded or productionized music back then. And yet people liked music as much as we do now. So the only way to enjoy music was to do it yourself.
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