> In the music world, this manifests as a fear of releasing music and instead endlessly tweaking knobs and refining 4 bar loops;
This is pretty common, and I’d like to add that there are more reasons besides “fear” for endlessly tweaking knobs and refining four-bar loops. Fear is a good explanation, and it’s not a wrong explanation, but it’s only a part of the explanation and as I’ve gotten older I’ve placed less weight on “fear” as the explanation for these things.
“Practice makes perfect” is the old adage but “practice makes permanent” is a bit more accurate. If you practice a piece of music, but your technique is sloppy, through practice, your sloppy technique becomes more habitual and permanent. The same thing happens with songwriting and composition—you work on a four-bar section of a song for too long and that four-bar section becomes permanently engraved in your mind as the only section of that song, a single section that loops forever. At this point it’s not a question of whether you are scared to release music or whether you feel vulnerable. Your mind has simply worn ruts into the ground that pass through these four bars over and over again.
This is one of the many places you can get stuck in when writing music and it’s one of the more common. There are plenty of people who never even make it to the four-bar loop, just noodling on guitar over and over again against some backing track. There are plenty of people who don’t even make it to noodling, and just play scales or licks that they know, never making the jump from playing something they know to making something new. And then there are people who get stuck playing scales or chords in isolation, without even a backing track, because they spent so long playing without a metronome or backing track that their timing is just complete garbage.
There’s a technique to bust past the four-bar loop, however. What you do is you just bust past the four-bar loop immediately, as soon as you’ve written it. Don’t give in to the temptation to listen to it over and over again. You might think that if you listen to those four bars you might be able to hear what comes next in your mind, but in fact, the more you listen to those four bars repeating, the more your brain gets used to the idea that after you hear those four bars, you hear the same four bars again.
In short, what you have to do is write a B section to your A section as soon as possible and before you spend too much time listening to the A section. When possible, I recommend writing your B section before you listen to the A section even once. At least, I recommend that you try working that way. There will be problems with the A section that you want to go back and fix but you can do that later.
And once you get past the four-bar loop, there are other places to get stuck. Just like it is possible to tweak the four-bar loop over and over again, it’s possible to tweak the chorus, verse, bridge, intro, or any other part of a song over and over again. You can end up rewriting lyrics, adding and removing instruments, completely redoing the arrangements, etc. “Fear” is a workable explanation for why these songs don’t get released, but the fact is, you hear your own song often enough and you just have no idea what parts of it are any good. You have to move fast enough to keep a fresh perspective, but slow enough to work out the details of your song, and that’s a delicate balance.
One of the things I learned from an art teacher with a PhD that I met without taking their classes was the hardest thing for an artist to learn is "when is the project done?" It's on the same level in software of "good enough". It might not be perfect (by who's definition), it might be able to be refactored and more elegant, but at some point it has to be released.
In software, we have version 2.0 etc releases to keep the tweaking going. In music, there are remixes. In other art forms, the same artist can make new versions. Knowing that you can do that kind of reworking can help get you to accepting done sooner.
> Don’t give in to the temptation to listen to it over and over again. You might think that if you listen to those four bars you might be able to hear what comes next in your mind, but in fact, the more you listen to those four bars repeating, the more your brain gets used to the idea that after you hear those four bars, you hear the same four bars again.
You've articulated my number one challenge when writing music. I get stuck in the 4 bar loops and then later I get stuck with my first-draft arrangement where I just end up listening to the track in an unfinished state repeatedly rather than taking action to finish it. I basically procrastinate at every step.
> you hear your own song often enough and you just have no idea what parts of it are any good
Yep. Thanks for writing this comment. You've hilighted things that I subconsciously already knew, but seeing it made explicit like this reminds me I need to pay be paying more attention to these traps!
Absolutely, there are different reasons for it. Maybe a 4-bar loop is a bad example since, as you rightly point out, getting stuck in a loop is commonly due to lack of songwriting chops and is a more technical skill that needs to be practiced.
On music production forums I frequently see people comment that they've been working on a track or album for years, they're just trying to get it perfect before they finally release it, so they're constantly doing tweaking to what's already there. That kind of behavior definitely indicates fear to me.
I'm going to try this advice. I have a tendency to get stuck in the 4 or 8 bar loops quite often, yet in my head I don't seem to have trouble thinking about what comes next -- but once I get in the actual DAW or pick up a guitar I end up stuck in that pattern. Thanks for sharing, wish me luck ;)
This is pretty common, and I’d like to add that there are more reasons besides “fear” for endlessly tweaking knobs and refining four-bar loops. Fear is a good explanation, and it’s not a wrong explanation, but it’s only a part of the explanation and as I’ve gotten older I’ve placed less weight on “fear” as the explanation for these things.
“Practice makes perfect” is the old adage but “practice makes permanent” is a bit more accurate. If you practice a piece of music, but your technique is sloppy, through practice, your sloppy technique becomes more habitual and permanent. The same thing happens with songwriting and composition—you work on a four-bar section of a song for too long and that four-bar section becomes permanently engraved in your mind as the only section of that song, a single section that loops forever. At this point it’s not a question of whether you are scared to release music or whether you feel vulnerable. Your mind has simply worn ruts into the ground that pass through these four bars over and over again.
This is one of the many places you can get stuck in when writing music and it’s one of the more common. There are plenty of people who never even make it to the four-bar loop, just noodling on guitar over and over again against some backing track. There are plenty of people who don’t even make it to noodling, and just play scales or licks that they know, never making the jump from playing something they know to making something new. And then there are people who get stuck playing scales or chords in isolation, without even a backing track, because they spent so long playing without a metronome or backing track that their timing is just complete garbage.
There’s a technique to bust past the four-bar loop, however. What you do is you just bust past the four-bar loop immediately, as soon as you’ve written it. Don’t give in to the temptation to listen to it over and over again. You might think that if you listen to those four bars you might be able to hear what comes next in your mind, but in fact, the more you listen to those four bars repeating, the more your brain gets used to the idea that after you hear those four bars, you hear the same four bars again.
In short, what you have to do is write a B section to your A section as soon as possible and before you spend too much time listening to the A section. When possible, I recommend writing your B section before you listen to the A section even once. At least, I recommend that you try working that way. There will be problems with the A section that you want to go back and fix but you can do that later.
And once you get past the four-bar loop, there are other places to get stuck. Just like it is possible to tweak the four-bar loop over and over again, it’s possible to tweak the chorus, verse, bridge, intro, or any other part of a song over and over again. You can end up rewriting lyrics, adding and removing instruments, completely redoing the arrangements, etc. “Fear” is a workable explanation for why these songs don’t get released, but the fact is, you hear your own song often enough and you just have no idea what parts of it are any good. You have to move fast enough to keep a fresh perspective, but slow enough to work out the details of your song, and that’s a delicate balance.