These days I continue to work on little pieces — drafts or sketches — that are possible seeds for serious tracks. They are mostly not longer than a minute, 16, maybe 20 bars, and contain a drumbeat, a bassline, or even solely a melodic line. I’m sitting on this kind of work for a good month already, so I have decided a week ago to try to work on longer pieces — still sketches or drafts — where I’d begin to work on structural ideas, calling them skeletons.
After a week of work I’m realising I’m still making short 1 minute sketches (which I’m posting the backstage section) without any serious attempt at bigger structure, and I’ve been thinking why is that so. One reason might be that I have about maksimum three hours in the morning to work on music-making (that’s pretty much self-imposed), but usually less. Another (and perhaps central) reason seems to be, however, certain reluctance to start working on a track’s structure.
Truth is, once you start working on a structure, musical work starts to be much more demanding. There’s so much more mental work involved once you start thinking through the timeline: if this is here, then this must happen there or if here’s a breakdown there must be an announcement of it, perhaps through a build-up, or should it? And similar kind of thinking.
It seems suddenly creating music ceases to be only playing with sounds and beats but becomes some kind of story-making. And that has its own rules, which are as complex as they can get. When diving into the structural dimension of a time-based creation, what emerges is responsibility towards that dimension.
