15 Lessons from Making Music Every Day for 15 Years

What happens when you spend a little time each day making music?

For the last 15 years, I've dedicated at least a little time each day to making music. 

In this episode, I tell you how I managed to do it, while holding a full-time job, the lessons I've learned, and tips that can help you create every day so you can reach your artistic dreams.

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Transcript:

In case you decide not to listen to this, here's the most important part. A little bit every day goes a long way. And just as a slow drip in a bucket might not look like much, over time the bucket will fill up. If you dedicate at least a little time to your art each day, you will make progress over time. If you get what I'm saying, move on and get to work. I'm gonna spend the rest of this explaining how I managed to make music every day for the last 15 years while holding a full-time job. What it's taught me

and I'm going to give you some tips and strategies you can use to finally start making your artistic dreams come true.

Every day for the last 15 years, I've made it a point to do at least something towards my musical career. My day job is a high school English teacher. And while that does afford me some holidays, weekends, and summers free, the time is usually very limited. Sometimes when I'm lucky, I get a chunk of hours to spend on music. Other days, it's just a few minutes. But no matter what, I make sure I do at least something every day to move the needle forward. I've managed to build my own career in music doing only what I love.

I might not be swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck, but it helps me pay my mortgage, covers the cost of all my gear, and most importantly, it allows me the freedom to pursue my own artistic path however I want. And when I say make music every day, it means I might write and record and make videos and teach classes. Other days, I might just write some lyrics to the verse of a song or record a single instrument on a track or grade an assignment for my Berkeley class. This is not about how much time you have.

even a few minutes will do. I've got a whole book of 365 activities you can do with just five minutes. You can download the first 30 days for free. Some days you're have a lot of time and some days you won't. But if you just show up every single day, even if it is just for five minutes, you will progress over time. These are some of the things that will start to happen.

You learn art is made by making art. Stop planning, stop imagining, stop learning, stop buying stuff. Use what you have, make something. Creativity is making something with what you have. When you show enough to make your art every day, it becomes whatever state you happen to be in that day. Your art becomes like a journal of where you are mentally, what you've been through, what you've been doing, and it documents your experience as a person.

The only way to do that is to show up and do it. And when you make it a point to show up every day, you learn that inspiration follows action. Most people have it backwards. They think you need inspiration to take action, but you have to take action first and then you get inspired. Once in a while, you're going to feel it. It's going to be like magic. You get an idea and you get really excited to do your music, to do your art. But most of the time, you're going to have to just make the best of whatever time you happen to have.

So just get to work. If you love doing this, as you start making music, something will catch your ear. Something will inspire you. Something will get you excited. The key is not to wait for inspiration. It's to get into it, start doing something, and then the inspiration will come and find you. The more often you do it, the more you start to get this abundance mindset. Like there's no shortage of ideas.

You don't have to be lifting rocks and unearthing buried treasures to get song ideas. They're everywhere. Just take them and go and see what happens. Try things out. The more you do it, the more you realize there is to do. If you think you need the perfect idea, you're never gonna get started and you're gonna stress out about it. And that's how you get writer's block. Cause you're worried about whether it's gonna be any good or not. Just make stuff. The more you do it, the more you find ideas in the everyday things you do.

The more the minor things in your life become something that you can create interest around and turn into major things. A lot of what art is, is taking everyday mundane things and showing the beauty or showing the mystery or something interesting about them by shining your light on them as the artist. And the more you show up, the more you get this abundance mindset. It's not like you're gonna run out of ideas. It's like you're gonna always have ideas because there's always something new to write about.

That starts to lead you to realize that you can write about anything. The more you write, the more you realize there is to write about. I've noticed this a lot about lyrics. If you only have one thing to work on, you feel like the message really has to capture everything about you. If you're going to say something, it better be important. It better be the exact distillation of whatever it is you're going through in that moment. But when you start churning stuff out a lot and you write more and more, you realize there's more stuff you can write about.

There's deeper levels you can go into about everything. Each day you just kind of go with whatever you're thinking about, whatever you're feeling. You start to realize like there's an interesting conversation I had earlier today. I can write something about that. Or I saw something that a character on a television show went through. Maybe I can explore that. What does that feel like? You start seeing opportunities everywhere and you can explore these thoughts and experiences. And I can really get stuck on lyrics and I get insecure about the lyric writing, especially when I'm not doing it a

But when I am doing it a lot, like I have been in January, I start getting a little more comfortable. It's almost like the things I'm saying are getting diluted by all the other things I'm saying. It's easier to keep saying things once you start. And the more you say, the more you realize you can go into more detail and you can explore different sides of yourself instead of whatever you might have in your mind that is appropriate for music or songs. If you're looking for things to write about, you'll find things to write about. One of the most magical things that happens when you're doing this every single day,

is that inner critic starts to go away because there's always tomorrow. You can kind of throw today away because you know you're gonna show up tomorrow and you showed up yesterday. So today, if it works, great. If not, who cares? And sometimes your time is so small that there's no time to be critical. You just have to make something happen. Again, you gotta move that needle forward. So if you've only got five minutes, don't waste the time being critical. Just do something, move forward, let there be imperfections.

Be an imperfectionist, don't worry about perfection and just move on. If it's really that bad, you can fix it tomorrow. It's never gonna be your best work ever. You've got too much other work left to do. There's so much still to come. It's the best you could do right now. You start to realize that. If I just show up, I'm gonna do the best with what I have today. And sometimes your best is great. Sometimes it's average, sometimes it's no good, but it doesn't matter because there's gonna be

many more opportunities coming and the next one is tomorrow. I think you also start to realize that the inner critic is kind of part of the process and is in a way your friend. The critic is there really just to offer some suggestions to say, hey, maybe that's not a good idea. Maybe protect you from a bad idea. It's great to listen to that once in a while, but you can't let it rule your work. So let the inner critic have its opinion, but just keep going, keep moving on, keep showing up, keep working, do what you can today.

Yes, this might not be the greatest chord progression I ever wrote, but let's see what I can do with it. And a lot of times you'll find that your taste starts to carry you through. So where you may have made errors in judgment earlier, your own personal taste starts to work with that. And as I said before, we build off of what we create. We make something and then we react to it. Every time you create something, now you have to make new decisions with it. So if you do make something that's not so great, you might find that the next step you use on it,

is actually improving it. So you become less and less afraid of the critic and doing stuff wrong and imperfections because sometimes the imperfections and the happy accidents become the greatest feature of the things you create. And all of that leads you to this feeling of experimentation. If you only worked on one song, one painting, say for the whole year,

You're going to stress about every little detail and you're going to want it to be perfect. And you're going to want it to say exactly what it needs to say to express yourself fully, all of which is impossible, but you're going to never take any chances. You're going to try to do everything the right way. When you're creating a lot, when you're making stuff every day, you can just throw a day away. Let's see what happens if I try this. Let me do something weird today. I think a lot of the curiosity starts coming to the surface too, because you're

doing the same thing all the time. Let's try something new. So experimentation becomes exciting and failed experiments don't phase you as much. If you've only got one thing you're working on for the whole year and it fails, that's devastating. But if you've one of 365 fail in a year, who cares? You've learned something more than likely and those experiments help us grow. They take us out of our comfort zone where we can try new things. It's a great spirit to have to your work. Most

Interesting art took some sort of chance. did some sort of experimentation. It did something that people weren't doing. And that's what makes it interesting. When you show up every day, you have a lot of chances to try weird things out and see what happens. You're also going to start to find that your music making sessions start to take on missions. You start to decide, I want to do something with this today. I want to try to do something in this direction.

A lot of times when it's just one thing a year, one big project, you want it to do all kinds of things. You try to make it do everything. And when you try to make a song, for example, do everything, it does nothing. It doesn't fit anywhere. How can I have a song with like a heavy metal intro, then like an ambient, like go to sleep, meditate part that goes into a country song. then that's like, it's nothing and it has no purpose. But when you have these little

daily exercises, you can make a mission. I'm going to make a song for this. I'm to make a song for this situation. And you just try stuff out and see what happens. You're going to find that there's more direction in your music making because you're more focused with what you do. You might decide to spend a session learning a piece of gear or a plugin that you haven't really been that familiar with. And that becomes the exercise. I'm going to make something with this new device I got with this new plugin, with this new effect. And then you start creating right away.

and you're using the creation process to test out your gear instead of the testing out the gear being the whole point. When you're thinking more in the mindset of creating something rather than just tinkering with something, you're going to come up with more stuff. Showing up every day is going to give you an opportunity to learn the stuff you already have because you can't spend every day trying to figure out new gear, new plugins, new devices, new workflows.

So you wind up going to things you know and going deeper with them, understanding them better so that you get quicker with them, so that you know how to use them, you know when to use them. This reduces all that time that we probably spend when we want to make music, looking for the right tools, the right answers, the tutorials, all the stuff that we search for instead of actually making the music. When you're trying to move forward, just trying out stuff doesn't cut it. And that's because you start to realize that learning doesn't count.

unless you do. Learning doesn't count unless you do. You can't just watch video tutorials and expect to know how to do something. You can't just read a manual and expect to make progress. You have to actually put the time in. You have to apply that stuff. So for me, a lot of times what happens if I do see an interesting tutorial or I want to learn something, I'm then going to do it. I'm not going to just keep going down these rabbit holes of learning things, feeling like I'm being productive when I'm really not producing anything.

What I'm going to do now instead, because I want to create something today, I want to move that needle forward. So I'm going to take that idea I just learned and I'm going to apply it to something I'm working on. And this reduces our learning time and replaces it with actual doing time. Think of all the things that in life that you really don't learn unless you do it. Can you learn to drive a car by just reading a manual? Can you learn how to cook a dish by just looking at a recipe? Can you watch a tutorial and become a championship boxer?

You have to do this stuff. You have to be in there and you have to experience it in art and music or exactly that. So when you're in this mindset of creating every day, you realize that learning doesn't count unless you do. Showing up every day gives you great opportunities to try new songwriting approaches, new song structures, new genres. You get a chance to just see how it feels.

I know in my Jammuaries I wind up doing a lot of different styles just for the heck of it. just realized I got a little time today. Let's see what happens if I try this new genre. I've never made a song like this. And sometimes you get these nice surprises and sometimes you learn things from those different approaches that you can take in your more normal approaches. You're going to find that you start building patterns, habits and routines that help you be more productive. So you start learning things you can do to smooth out the process a little bit.

that might be your organizational habits for your gear. You're gonna start learning things that are holding you back a little bit that are slowing you down that you might not realize if you're only showing up every once in a while. But if you find yourself every single day doing the same thing, you might say, hey, let me fix that. I recently just did something like that myself. I got these Siri enabled light switches. So instead of having to turn on all the different switches in my room when I come to work, I can just tell Siri to do that for me.

And she does it and everything pops on in one second instead of like 20. And it doesn't sound like a lot, but it does make it a little bit easier to get started. If you think of 20 seconds every day, plus 20 seconds to shut everything, let's call it a minute. That's 365 minutes a year. That's some serious time you can use to making your music. So you'll start seeing that there's little things you can do here and there that will save you time. When you're trying to do something every single day, you start learning about like using templates.

saving your own presets. I've often just taken sessions that I create a song in and saving it as a new name and then just delete everything and use it like a template. It's a great way that I don't have to keep loading up instruments or finding the sound I had last time. can just reuse that stuff. And the more you show up, the more you start to build confidence because you've done this before. You're getting used to it.

I will refer you to a great video by Sarah Bell Reid when she talks about confidence comes from doing. It's a nice rephrase on confidence. We think we have to do things and then become confident, but she says confidence happens because you do things. And I totally agree with this. We start to trust ourselves. We start to realize like, hey, I've been here before. I've been stuck here before. I figured it out. And I'm going to probably figure it out again this time. The more you show up, the more confidence you build for yourself and in your music.

And vulnerability and insecurity is a major part of any artistic adventure that we go on. It's part of the thrill. And I think you also learn that being a little scared about what you're doing is exciting. You might not love it at the time, but it's part of what challenges you and makes you grow and gets you better at what you do. So these like kind of dueling things of insecurity and confidence start working together and you start to see them as part of the collective.

process of making music and making art. It comes away with you feeling like you know what you're doing. You feel confident. So check out that video from Sara Bell Reid. It's a really excellent and inspiring video. If you're having trouble getting started, see if you can just go as simply as you can. There were a lot of days in Jamiroi where it was just me and a guitar and that was it. And I just worked on the guitar and it was so nice. It almost felt like a futuristic technology, the acoustic guitar.

You don't have to charge it. You don't have to turn it on. There's no wires. There's nothing to connect. It's like what all our gear is trying to become. All this stuff is that wireless and Bluetooth connectable where you don't have to manage any of stuff. And picking up the music guitar sometimes just feels like magic because it just works and it's simple. Start simple. Do what you can do. Don't overcomplicate it. When you have a little more time on certain days, then you can try to complicate things if you want. But being simple is...

Such a great way to move forward and to learn things and add complexity little by little. Most complex things are just lots of simple things put together anyway. So as you get used to one way of working, then add the little detail, add that little extra thing. But like I said before, creativity is about working with what you have and solving problems with what you already have. So think of your work getting started like that. Start simple with what you know and add to it as you go.

You can't wait for gimmicks like January or beat tober or the new year or your birthday to start doing work. You gotta just start and make it a part of your life. Let other people know what you're doing, that you're going to dedicate a little bit of time to this every single day. I've said this many times this month, I still have to do my January and that's like, okay, go do it. You know, people rooting you on after a while, they don't want to be the ones that get in the way of what you're trying to accomplish.

If they are, they're not on your side. You'll get people to respect that for you if you respect it for yourself. So when it is time, don't go on the internet, don't check your email, don't look at social media. All of that stuff, that incoming stuff is other people's desires and priorities imposed upon you. And thinking about it that way has really helped me think a lot differently about this stuff, because all of these inputs...

are signals you're receiving from other people, what they want you to do and what they want you to pay attention to. Where we're trying to output, we're trying to put stuff out. So if you think of our musical input outputs, like where the output here, we don't want stuff coming in all the time. Once in a while is great, but we're trying to produce stuff. We're not just consuming. And unfortunately, if we're using computers to make music, we have all those inputs coming in. We have to really pay attention and not get involved with that.

I've lost tons of time making music because I thought I'd just check my email quick. You don't just check your email quick, it sucks you in. You don't just see what's going on on YouTube or just check social media. They're all designed to suck you in. So you gotta just make it a point not to go there. And sometimes you can do things to prevent that. There are apps where you can lock out the internet, you can turn off the wifi. You might even try something like streaming what you're doing.

I found streaming is very helpful. When the music production club gets together and we're spending our hour, we spend a first hour making music, then we come back and share what we did. It's all over Zoom. I'm not fooling around in that first hour because I've got to make some music and I got such a limited time and I'm going to share it in an hour. So I want it to be as good as I can make it. It just takes out that option. I don't even think about going on the internet or checking my phone.

So protect it, and if you honor that, other people will too. That's what I've learned after the last 15 years of trying to be somewhat productive every single day by doing at least something to push things forward a little bit. It's really the secret weapon. Anytime I've ever been asked, how do I accomplish what I do? That's the answer. It's just little things. It's nothing special or miraculous. I'm not more talented than anybody.

I don't have more experience. know a lot of people that are way more talented, way more educated, way more experienced, but they don't have that same work ethic. And that is kind of comforting because you can control that. You can control how much you put into something. You might not be able to control like your natural born abilities, but you can control how hard you work. And you don't have to kill yourself. That's a big part of this too. If I only have five minutes, I only have five minutes. I don't beat myself up over it. Cause I'm going to show up tomorrow.

It's another thing that happens is you go a little easier on yourself. Don't make it such a huge obligation that it stresses you out, because then you'll never be able to keep to it. All you have to do is show up for a few minutes. When you got more time, you got more time. And a lot of times when you think you only have a few minutes, you might find yourself getting sucked into it because you love doing it. When you prove to yourself you can show up on the days when it's difficult, that's so empowering and it makes you realize that you really can do this. You just got to stick to it.

Hey, let me know what you do. How do you get productive? How do you get in the zone? How do you stay focused? How do you keep showing up when inspiration is low? I'd love to hear all about it. I could use all the help I could get. It's an ongoing struggle. It's never easy. It's kind of the beauty of it. And it's what makes creating art beautiful is because it's not easy. But when it happens, there's a little bit of magic and you'll get more of that magic if you show up consistently. Best of luck. Have fun and see you next time.

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