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This is true. I got interested in music, wanted to compose electronic music of my own. I went on to read several books about music theory and composition. I then realized that composing good music is extremely difficult, and has very little to do with the study of music theory. I believe most musicians sort of have a recipe book of tricks and patterns they discovered, which they combine with some improvisation. These "known recipes" take a long time, lots of practice and experimentation to acquire, and they are what makes an artist's musical style, or flavor, so to speak. No amount of reading about music theory will give you this. Interestingly, programming might be similar in many ways.

People complain when an artist releases an album, and there's only 2 good tunes, the rest are just "filler". People might assume the artist was just lazy or something, couldn't be bothered to put enough work into the album. I think the reason that's so common is that well, it's just that hard to create good music: 2 songs is all the really good music they managed to create in that time. Also makes you appreciate artists who can produce an album full of good tunes, these people are exceptionally gifted.




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