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!!!!!  

Well I have the same issue from time to time. I have a family also with 3 kids, and it always seems that time is slipping away. Don't shut the door on it, though. If you start selling your musical stuff, you've pretty much guaranteed that you'll never do anything again. That would be sad. My advice is to just try to make a resolution of sorts, that you will lock yourself in the studio whenever you have even an hour to yourself. I know it's hard sometimes. I haven't spent as much time in my studio lately, either. But I try to at least get down there a couple times a week, just to get the juices flowing a little. With busy lives, sometimes we block out our creative flow and motivation. Sometimes you just gotta force yourself to take some time in your studio, and let life take a back seat for a change.

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!

That post could have been written by myself.... It is so frustrating.
I've tried to whip myself with rude arguments like: " If you're not capable of arranging time for music, it only means music is not important enough to you, so stop complaining!"
"You're just collecting excuses for not making music, and the reason is to avoid facing the fact that your music sucks!"
 
After moving house last july I haven't even gotten the basement hobby-room to a condition that would allow plugging in my DAW-pc. This forum and some magazines are the only things that keep me in touch with the hobby. I'm losing it...:o/
 

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!

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?
 
Sunday is my only day off, so I allocate myself 2-3 hours in the studio when my chores are done, but I try and do a little every day, even if it's just organizational, as Sharke mentioned.

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!

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

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!

For me, as a former gigging musician, I schedule the time much like I scheduled a gig. If I'm working on a song, I'll tell the wife "I'm recording Friday night at 7, and it's going to be a few hours". That way, she knows to please don't commit me to anything. I'm not going anywhere. Doing it this way is the only way that works for me. I have to allot the time just like an actual paid recording session. During the week, I'll generally try and get into my studio after dinner for an hour or so. Even if it's just to noodle on guitar, at least I'm doing something in there.
 
I fell into a period of not making the commitment to practice and record. We can always come up with other things to spend our leisure time on, and I was guilty of doing that. Once I saw dust on my guitars, I knew I'd been neglecting something that meant alot to me. That's when I made the change of habit.
 
Randy