PLEASE HELP....FINDING TIME TO BE CREATIVE....

Greetings...
After 15 plus years of gigging I am finding myself at a major obsticle of sorts. I seems as though now that I am not gigging I can not allocate time to get into my studio to write and record. Life has swallowed up too much of my time to get a solid structure to be creative. Last year I upgraded my rig with new pc, newer interface, Sonar X2 and some new plugs. The plan was to get comfy with the software and get to writing and recording. I turned down some gig work to make time for this to happen. It is nearly a year later and I am no further ahead at any of those things. I thought I may turn to the collective here for some advise as to how you all "get er' done". I know I can't be the only one juggling schedules to fit in time for their love, passion and craft. I have a family, grandkids (although I am only 48), an all consuming day job that is not musically connected. With the holidays upon us i can probably scrap any plan of getting into the studio but I am truely getting depressed here. I have almost given in to the idea of starting to part it all out and close the door. How do you guy's and gal's get around all the BS that can swallow you whole without getting rid of your wife, kids, parents, dogs, job, needy people and the rest. Could use some serious ideas here or is it time to close yet another chapter in life. HELP!!!!!  

You'll probably find that lots of us are in the same boat, i.e. heavy work schedule and only a small window of time in the evening to be creative. You just have to sit down and make the best of the time you have, it's as simple as that. The important thing is to make sure you do something every day, even if it's just fifteen minutes. It doesn't matter if your progress is slow, as long as you're always moving forward. I think the key to being successful at anything worthwhile is to accept that it takes time. Some people give up if they're not getting the results they expected quickly enough. These are the people who bounce from interest to interest without actually mastering anything. 
 
Sometimes my day transpires that I only have a quick 30 minutes to work on a song. So I fire it up and figure out how to make the best of that 30 minutes. It doesn't even have to be "creative" in the musical sense. Maybe I'll route my drums to a bus, or do that track cloning I was thinking of experimenting with, or even just organize my tracks and tidy things up a bit. Sure, I didn't really make any creative progress with the song but at least I put some work in, and the psychological reward is enormous. As soon as you start saying "aw gee I don't have time tonight," and you do that for a few nights in a row, that's when the rot sets in. Pretty soon you lose familiarity with what you were working on, and the prospect of getting back up to speed seems daunting. Then you're in danger of letting it slip away, of abandoning the work you've already put in. This leads to depression, and that horrible feeling of guilt whenever you look at the DAW you've spent money on. 
 
I'm tellin' ya...consistency and commitment is everything. One of the best things I ever did was start a set of "chains" on this website here: https://chains.cc/ - The idea being that you set yourself any number of habits that you want to keep up (be realistic about how many) and every day you have to do something towards each habit and mark it off on the chain. Pretty soon you'll have some nice chains on the screen and you feel committed to them. You really don't want to break any of the chains because you know how disappointed with yourself you'll be. It's a really simple idea but a fantastic psychological aid. I'm on the 12th week of unbroken chains and I can't tell you what a difference it's made to my motivation. I have things like "Work on a song," "Read a manual," "Play guitar," "Read Mixing Secrets" etc. Every night I do a little of each, even if I don't have time to do much. All of a sudden I'm keeping things up that I would have abandoned before. Try it!

Hi,
 
As much writing as I have done this past year, it has never dried up for me in 40 years, I've always wanted to get into music more and more, and being that I am really comfortable with computers, wouldn't you know it ... DAW's and I don't get along, and getting help is nihilistically horrendous and fudged up to the extreme!
 
I have, actually given up on it for a while, and am considering taking it up again, and seeing if a different program helps me a bit more, and this time I'm probably going to burn $99 dollars on Sonar, but I am already prepared for not getting help.
 
I was reading the User Manual thing, and already I can see the potential for 15 problems and 15 different answers! And I was merely trying to take a look at it, so I would be better suited and prepared for an install!
 
At this point, if this does not happen, I doubt I will ever record music on the computer, though I will continue playing it and putting it on the background of my poems, by recording the music, and then later reading my poems over it as I hear it, and record the whole thing. It doesn't sound as good as it would if I could match up the two properly, but I have not been able to get any help from anyone to do this right and these ****ing daws are designed for geeks, not artists!
 
The folks here are nice when they help and a handful of them are really cool. The rest ... forget'able in terms of help!

jamesg1213
Sharke has it right. Do at least a little each day. A great time to work on music is when you're waiting for something..maybe you're going out somewhere and have an hour to kill..fire up the music, there's nothing else you can do, right?
...

Agreed.
 
At the very least I read what I wrote one more time, and find an English correction here or there, that quite often, triggers ... ANOTHER CHAPTER ... or significant detail that helps you move along!
 
The only issue, for me, is that I write from a totally visual inner space, and it's about keeping up with the inner "movie", and it's really difficult to change anything after you get it down, because it seems to change all the visuals' "color", as I describe it (have no words for it!).
 
This was the reason why I wanted to do music and poetry at the same time, since I am fairly good at feeling things with the inner sights and come up with words for it. What I wanted was to be able to play something and record voice at the same time, let's say, but I have to hear it on earphones (for example), so I know what is happening. The results, for me, is different if I am to do this one track at a time, since 10 minutes later, the feeling is totally different and changes!
 
Being "open" to those changes can be tough, and I imagine that it is twice as HARD in music, because if you don't know the notes or chords, you can not quite/exactly play it back! And that makes it tough, I imagine, but that's me thinking about music and me right now, and I don't know how this goes for others in similar situations. But I don't go over grammar or English when I'm writing something, so I imagine that for me, in playing music, it would not matter what note or chord I played, and I still "felt" it and had a story/situation spoken over it.
 
It's all a "movie" for me, and that is the reason why sometimes the lyrics are so meaningless for me. The music shows me one thing that the lyrics don't!
 
One last thing. Sometimes you are working on the same thing over and over again, and there used to be a saying that went something like ... "when you think that you just got it, throw it away! You will be rewarded tenfold!" ... and sometimes what that tells you is that what you are doing is not what you need to do, to help you have more dedication to it! For me it means trash that piece and start on something else when the time comes!

slartabartfast
Lots of time here...not so much creativity it seems.

Maybe we just need a REAL coffee house where we can actually say something and have fun discussing art ...  ohh wait ... this ain't the life and times of Alice B Toklas and folks here are too married!

Maybe you can make plans...I don't like doing that. I don't need a schedule and I'm sure not going to
create one because there are many things in life to enjoy. Besides...to much of my time as already been scheduled being a provider.
Yeah I can see the grand kids dropping in and you explaining that you have a schedule to keep.
 
If I feel like recording and playing my guitar it'll happen. It'll happen when it's right and don't have something running around in the back of head telling me I should be doing something else.
 
It could be you're simply going through withdrawals. If you were gigging and assuming it was a band that practiced NOT on stage then you were spending a lot of time with music and now having to adjust to a more relaxed state.
I also assume that if you've been playing for that many years then you know you don't have to spend 8hrs a day practicing and can do a lot of that in your head.
You can get a lot done, have a lot of fun or both in an hour or less if your heads on right. If the time is right.
 
Oh...you mentioned "BS" in ones life...I get rid of that stuff fast. No room in my life for it. Maybe that's a big difference. ?
 
 

This may seem off-topic, but stay with me … it is totally to the point.
 
The company I work for (a large Fortune 500 US firm) is committed to promoting a healthy lifestyle for its employees.  To that end, they brought in a speaker several years ago, a former philosopher (or at least philosophy teacher) who transitioned into becoming an advocate for healthy aging.  He suggested seven things one must do daily to stay healthy up to the time of checking out.  One of those was exercise.  He asked the audience how many of them did not exercise daily.  Lots of hands were raised.  When asked why, many responded “I don’t have time”.
 
His reply (and here’s where the philosopher kicked in) was: “Guess what … we always make time for the things most important to us”.  Hmmm … can’t argue with that.  As a result, since hearing that, there are very few days when I don’t exercise 20 to 30 minutes.
 
Now, why did you have the time to do gigs but not to do studio work?  Probably several reasons, one being gigs are scheduled events that you commit to ahead of time, so finding time the day of the event isn’t something you need to debate with yourself.  But another profound motivation (I suspect) is that doing a gig is an experience shared with others.  Sitting down at your DAW is a solitary endeavor.  I certainly have a struggle many days to find time for music at my DAW.  But when I sing in choral groups, there’s no struggle … I don’t even have to think about attending rehearsals.  Both motivations are in play here: shared experience rather than solitary, and someone else sets the schedule.
 
I don’t have a solution to suggest on how to alter your motivations.  But examining it in the framework of all the things you do and the priorities you place on them may give you some insight.  Maybe you need a pre-planned schedule, as one of the other posters suggested.
 
But at least know this: you are not alone when it comes to this kind of internal struggle.
 
Oh yeah … and one more thing: don’t fritter away as much time as some of us here do on music forums. 

nice post dmbaer....
 
 

craigb

dmbaer
...He suggested seven things one must do daily to stay healthy up to the time of checking out.  One of those was exercise. 

So what were the other six?
 

To be honest, I cannot remember most of the others, although they were mostly common-sense recommendations.  One I do recall is "take one alcoholic drink per day (not more than one and you don't get to save them up for the weekend)".  For me, finding time to exercise is easier than stopping after one glass of wine in the evening. 

1.  Create a list...

craigb
1.  Create a list...

The problem is, when you get to the end, how do you create the list to get rid of the list/lists, so you can move on?
 
The only time I wrote something on a schedule, was in school. And my screenplay was the first and last piece to be written on a schedule. From that point on, all my papers, and such were always done in the first week, so I could spend days/weeks looking at it and use it as toilet paper if needed.
 
But even the screenplay, was unusual, and I have always trusted my ability to write something, and I had nothing the night before, and decided to go to bed early and then get up early and write before the sun comes up. Just as I was falling asleep, my dreams sequence/movie started, and voila ... there was the beginning of the screenplay, and I wrote some 40 plus pages, that the class spent 3 hours analyzing to my consternation ... it was what I saw ... it had no meaning except that "I SAW IT", and that was that. But for them it meant the story would be this and that and this and that ... and I have to tell you that I was getting quite annoyed, and didn't feel I needed the ideas, when the dreaming situation would easily play itself out! Which is what I did with the rest of the screenplay.
 
That screenplay is at the Library of Congress and is dedicated to Nicholas Roeg and Theresa Russell, with a large thank you to Luis Bunuel! Sadly, her agent never gave her the screenplay. She would have liked it.

Hi jcamp,
 
 Don't give up! Sometimes I think that guys who at one time gigged on a regular basis seem to have a tougher time getting into recording  than those who didn't. When you gigged you probably knew the material and you probably repeated it at every gig, maybe not exactly the same sets but after awhile it was not an unexpected thing to go and play. The main thing being to get there and get set up, after that the rest was simple. It was up to the house sound person to make the mix sound ok. It was up to the bass player to play the bass etc. 
 
 Going into recording something that sounds like an entire band can be a challenge. Some wonderful musicians are not as good at pulling a computer system together,loading the software and learning all you need to know. Even if they can do it, many of them don't like to do it. They do it because it is a means to an end. The process of playing their instrument, recording it in a way that sounds good and getting a good result involve more than many want to deal with. Although some might not like to admit it, the technical process to get to a finished product stretches their patience and know how. I'll admit it stretches mine at times.Nothing like playing a live gig.
 
 
 I usually only do a project I can do  in a short amount of time. I might get an idea one night and just lay it down to a rhythm track. I do very little to no editing on my main parts. The main part and the drums are all I need to work the project up from there. IOW streamlining the whole process to the most simplistic  and fast way to do it, that way only a few hours here and there can get a lot accomplished.