The ONLY Secret to Making Music - Music Production Podcast #406

podcast
Written By Brian Funk

There's really only one secret I can tell you that will help you make more music, have more fun making it, and leave you more satisfied with what you make.

Work Fast.

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Episode Transcript:

Brian Funk (00:00.206)

Do you feel self-conscious about your music or your art? Does the inner critic cripple you? Do you have writer's block? Maybe it's not that you don't have any ideas, maybe you have too many ideas. I wanna share a workflow with you that has helped me make more music, be more creative, and feel more confident and satisfied with my work. It's helped me finish more music and be more creative with the music I'm making. It's helped me enjoy the process and I'm happier with the end results. And it's really just to work as fast as I can.

while making music. I'm making decisions quickly without too much thought. Sometimes the very first idea that comes in my head is the one I stick with and go with and I make it. And then once you make a decision, you react to that decision. And the next thing you do is a reaction to the last thing you do, but you can never move forward and build these things if you agonize over each decision. It's about committing to a body of work. You're just trying to create as much as possible, not one perfect piece.

Your music will be like a diary. It's keeping track of where you are in that specific point in your life and in your musical abilities and your taste and your production abilities, your songwriting abilities. It captures each moment of those different stages as you go. If you're trying to make something perfect, you're going to spend so much time on it and agonize over every single decision. And you're not going to have much to show for yourself. And you're not going to be able to reflect on how you've grown.

There's a wonderful feeling when you can go back on your body of work and hear where you were two years ago, three years ago, two weeks ago. The more you can do that, the more you get an idea of where you've been and how you're growing. And you get this sense of progress that's very inspiring. It makes you want to sit down and do it some more. had Adam Roxar on the podcast some time ago, and he talked about how he sees his music as artifacts. So his art is artifact. So think about how

When archaeologists go to a site and they're trying to find out like what ancient man was doing at the time and they dig stuff up and they find artifacts, they find like a piece of pottery. They don't find the best piece of pottery they ever made. They find a piece of pottery and they find another piece of pottery. And there's probably different levels of quality and craftsmanship in each one. And through excavating all of that

Brian Funk (02:23.489)

different pottery, we get a sense of what kind of pottery these people made. Some of it might be really nice and some of it might be just very functional, just to learn and grow and hold things or whatever. That's a great way to think about your art because it's just the stuff you're leaving behind. It's almost for yourself, but the more you leave it behind for yourself, the more you create a story of who you are for your listeners. And the story is such an important part of why we love artists, why we come back to them.

I think one of the threats people are so worried about is AI and that it's going to take over. But one thing AI will never have on us humans is a life story, a background, a kind of trajectory of where they've been and what they've been through and how that shaped our art. That's something we got to lean into. And that's what makes it so interesting when archaeologists dig that stuff up because they're piecing together the puzzle of who these people were.

And through our art, we're leaving behind little clues, little fragments of who we are, where we were and what we're into. And that helps listeners and people construct a story. It helps you remember your own story. Most of our life is not even a memory anyway. So by having some musical breadcrumbs to follow can be a really cool way to go back in time and get a sense of yourself in a way that maybe a photograph doesn't give you or even a journal entry doesn't give you. There's something different about music.

It communicates on a level beyond language. It's feelings. There's feelings music has that we don't have words for. And having that will help create your story and make you a more intriguing artist for your listener. Most of us probably know the feeling of inspiration, how exciting it is when it hits, how much it makes you want to work. And many of us make the mistake of waiting for that feeling, thinking we can't really do good work unless we feel inspired. First of all,

That's foolish, that's amateur thinking, that's not gonna get you anywhere. You're gonna spend most of your time waiting. If you think about it, most of your inspiration comes once you start doing something. You have to sort of start the engine, get working, and then you can start traveling along the path. It's once I start tinkering around with sounds or instruments or playing chords on my guitar that I go, ooh, that's cool. That's exciting. It's kind of like getting your hands dirty first and then the inspiration comes.

Brian Funk (04:46.902)

But once that inspiration comes, it is a rare and fleeting feeling. I like to think of it like holding water in my hands. Imagine holding water in your hands. If you don't drink it right away, it slips through your fingers. And inspiration is the same way. You can't hold on to that energy. It slips through your fingers. So you got to act fast on it. As soon as we slow down and analyze this inspiration, this water in our fingers, it starts slipping away. And the slower we go,

we start to lose steam and then we allow the inner critic to start to catch up. We gotta work faster than the inner critic. It's almost like a race. Think of it like that. You got your inspiration, you got like a head start on the jump and you're ahead of the critic and the faster you can make ideas happen and try things out and add it to your song, the further along you get. But as soon as you stop and question things and wonder if that was a good idea, was that the right chord progression? Was this the right melody?

Was this the right lyric to say, now your inner critic has caught up and it can criticize. The inner critic can be very useful. It can help save you from bad ideas and embarrassment, but it's not so great in the creation phase. In that phase, the ideas are like little babies. They're just kind of crawling around. They don't know what they're going to become when they grow up yet. We need to nurture those ideas. We need to water those plants and let them grow and blossom.

You wouldn't criticize a little kid for falling down the first time they try to walk, but we do that with our ideas. We can't let that happen. We gotta just keep trying to get up and fall down and get up and just move forward. Don't worry about the fall. It's, as they say, the getting up that matters. We gotta just push forward. And the faster you can go, the more likely you are to make that progress. You've captured the initial energy of the idea.

You know that feeling when an idea first comes to you. It almost never feels the same way again. And that's because you're not the same person you were when that idea first came to you. That particular situation when you have an idea, you put something down that you like, is a special and unique time. You are in a certain space at a certain time. Something happened to you earlier in your life that's brought you here. And soon something's gonna happen that's gonna take you away.

Brian Funk (07:04.606)

Our thoughts, our feelings are all like that. They're fleeting. Everything you've ever felt has passed. You can never go back to that. And if you do, you're going back to it through a different perspective. It's like that old saying, you can never go in the same river twice because the river is always changing. And so are you. So that person can never go in that river again. And returning to an idea is nearly impossible. This is

The exact advice that John Lennon gave to George Harrison when George Harrison was growing as a songwriter, yes, John's for some advice. And John said, finish the song in one sitting, get through it all at once because it's almost impossible to go back to it. So much happens in those beginning stages. In fact, I kind of believe that really like 90 % of an idea happens in the very initial stages, the big.

puzzle pieces get put in in those early stages. And we want to sit down or stand up or have you work and put those pieces together as fast as possible. Get them down because every time you do, you're getting this picture clear or your music is getting clear. You're narrowing your focus. And once you get done with that first 90%, then you can go work on the next 80%, which will be the editing phase. And then you can allow the critic to come in and focus on some.

details of mixing and things like that. But I would even say in those stages too, it pays to move fast because you're going to just overthink things. We have access to infinite tools. Inside our computer, we have everything. You have all kinds of compressors and EQs and effects and different reverbs and everything you can imagine. You're going to tweak things endlessly if you let it happen and you'll listen back. And when you hear your music, you're going to have this critical mind of like, what's wrong with it.

What do I need to fix? Whereas when you work fast, you just kind of pick up on the energy of things and you enjoy what happens. And a lot of times those little mistakes or imperfections become the cool thing about the song, the thing that you come back to. And it reminds you of who you were and where you were. And maybe you're something funny or something interesting about where you were in your life because you allowed it to stay there. You didn't polish it out. The slower we go, the more we start polishing away our humanity.

Brian Funk (09:25.376)

We start clearing out little noises and little imperfections or weird timing things that happen. And soon we get something that's kind of like boring and standardized and perfect and by the rules. And we don't need that anymore. We've got machines and AI that can create music like that for us now. We don't need any more of that kind of stuff. We need what you have, your own personal take on things.

I'm not trying to say there isn't value in working hard and long on a project and spending some time to get things right. And you can learn a lot that way. And you might even be able to iron out lot of the issues and develop new skills. But from my observation and my own personal experience, most people don't have the problem of rushing through their work too quickly. They labor over it for too long.

They question everything, they get stuck. They don't know if this is the right answer. They don't know if this is the right way to do it. Did I EQ this right? Did I do that right? Did I pick the right change and progression and all of these things just become these questions. But there are no right answers to these things. So you'll endlessly tweak things until you get there. And a lot of times I've found when I do that, I just kind of take away all the fun of the song. And I've...

done this many times where I've decided to really work on a track and get it just right and sculpt it. And I listened to what I have and then I might go back to an early version, an early demo even, and just enjoy the demo much more because it has an energy to it. It has a spirit. It's inspired. It's not contrived. It's not this really like airbrushed polished performance. It's raw. It's a human. It's

an artifact of where I was in that moment. It's a moment in time. When you edit things to death, you no longer have a moment in time. You have all these little pieces stuck together that don't have any consistency and congruency to each other. Our emotions are fleeting and we're trying to communicate emotions within music. And if we wait too long, we lose sight of what those feelings really were. And we start getting all these other ideas popping in. And the more you think about an idea you have, you've got this song.

Brian Funk (11:39.212)

and you want it to do this and then you spend a little time thinking about it it'd be cool if it could do that and it'd be cool if it could do this. Oh, we could have a little part here that does that. All of these little fantasies you have in your mind are these perfect ideas in fantasy land, right? It could do all these things. It could be such an amazing song. I just gotta work on it. But as soon as you commit to these ideas, all these fantasies that are perfect become imperfect reality.

And we're less satisfied with what we've done because we have all these other possibilities we could have had. We should have done that. We should have let it do this. We should have changed this, but we committed to this and we can never have the same satisfaction in an idea. It almost pays not to think about it so much because at the end, when you're done, you'll take it for what it is and not for all the things you thought it could be. And when people hear your music, they don't know all the things you thought it could be.

they only know what it is. That's how they experience it. The curse of being the music producer is that you don't get to hear your music for the first time. And the longer you spend on the piece of music, the further you are from that initial impression. I've worked on songs for a long time and found like I know every single thing that's gonna happen in every single moment. I'm not surprised at all. But sometimes when I work fast,

I do things, I move on, I do things, move on. And then when I listen back and I kind of take the bird's eye view, I'm still kind of excited and surprised by what happens. Like, yeah, listen to that cool noise that happened, know? Listen to that interesting way this happened. I forgot I did that because I didn't labor over it. I just moved on, just tried it. And then again, I react to what happened and that creates this momentum. So we don't want to just...

dream about what a song could be and imagine what it could be. We to make it something and let it be that. Nothing has taught me this lesson more than my music production club live meetings. Twice a month lately, I've been getting together with members of my music production club and we meet on Zoom. We come up with some kind of prompts to guide us a little bit. We usually have a monthly music mission. So every month there's some sort of prompt and maybe some tools I've created for the members that they can use.

Brian Funk (13:54.708)

narrowing down their possibilities. And we get together, we meet for a few minutes and we talk about what we're gonna do. Sometimes I roll my musical dice. I have a set of dice that I can roll and you get different notes. I've got cards, I've got activities for my book, the five minute music producer. We pick some guidelines. And then we turn off our cameras and our microphones and we work for about 45 minutes to an hour solo. And we're making stuff. We're trying to follow those guidelines but...

There's no rules. The point really is just to make some music. But the guidelines are there to help you not overthink things. The time crunch is incredible. It's a lot of pressure because 45 minutes is not a lot of time to make some music. And you know that after the 45 minutes are over, we're gonna get back together and share what we've done. So ironically,

The pressure of that time crunch and trying to make something that you like in such a short amount of time actually relieves the pressure of making music because you have this built-in excuse of, I only had 45 minutes. This is the best I could do. This is all I came up with. So no matter what, when you share something, you're kind of off the hook. But the surprising thing that happens time and time again is that people create stuff they actually like.

because they're not thinking too hard about it. They're not questioning things. They might go with the random notes we've rolled or they're just doing the exercise from the book. They're just going through the process and trying to do the best they can with it. They're not questioning it. They get an idea. Okay, I'm going with that. These are the chords I played. Those are the chords I'm gonna use. This is the beat I programmed. This is the beat I'm gonna use. We just move forward as fast as we can. And a lot of times interesting things happen because we let it through.

We let our personalities through. We're not spending time editing it. We're not questioning what's going to happen next and if we're doing the right thing or not. So no time for that. It's great. And when we share things, we get feedback from each other. We get some commentary and it helps us decide a little more if we want to continue with things, change things. We get some information from other people. And so often after these meetings, I get right back to work on what I was doing because I'm excited. Not only have I made something that

Brian Funk (16:13.53)

I might think has some potential or was fun and I was in the moment with, but I also heard a whole bunch of other people do it and got the inspiration from them too. And there's really something special about having that kind of community around you and people that are excited about things. When other people are excited about things, it makes you excited about things. So sitting there and forcing myself to do this, and this happens in January as well, we try to make a piece of music every single day.

You just don't have a lot of time to worry about things. The inner critic cannot catch up to you for the speed you're working on. If I only have an hour to do something and I gotta get it done by the end of that hour, I can't stop and think. I can't question it. And a lot of times I let things happen that I would never let happen normally. And a lot of times those are the things that I really like. I try weird experiments. I try to do things in another way because I wanna have it happen fast.

And I get lucky. Sometimes things fail. That's fine too. But there's always a learning process. There's always something to walk away with. And I've got that artifact, that little breadcrumb about where I was on that very day. Very satisfying. The other place I see this working is with my band, Some Good Evil, we're a three-piece rock band. I play guitar and sing. We've got a bass player who sings as well and a drummer who sings too. And all of our songs are written together. So nobody's bringing songs to the band.

We get together and we jam and when we start to hear something we like, we kind of pursue it and we craft it into a song. And with these two guys, Alex and Chris, I have such a good relationship with them. been playing so long that we're so comfortable with each other that we're free to be bad. We don't have to worry about doing something good. We're just trying to create music. So we play things. I'm singing, I'm blabbering, I'm saying weird stuff, stuff I don't mean or don't feel or I really do feel.

Things come out of your mouth and out of your fingers onto the guitar and sometimes cool stuff happens. And this stuff would never happen if it wasn't for this freedom and this kind of urgency to get something together. Like if I hear Alex playing something on the bass, I'm gonna try to figure out what I can play over it. I'm not gonna say, hey, don't do that. That's not a good idea. I don't like that chord. I don't like that change. I don't like that beat. I just work with it.

Brian Funk (18:33.318)

And then once we have that, now was trying to sing over it. And I've been surprised time and time again about maybe ideas of beats or rhythms or stuff that I wasn't so jazzed about in the very beginning, suddenly becoming songs that I really love. And they happen so fast that way that we don't have too much time to question it. We just roll out into the next section, roll on to the next part. Let's try this. Cool. Go, let's play it. And we're doing it. And as a result of that, we've got

A lot of songs, lot of cool ideas to choose from. in the next probably few days, we're going to have our new EP, the Master Plan EP come out. It's four songs. And even the way we recorded this was a very fast process. We did not overthink things. We just tried to work as quickly as we could. We got our drums, we didn't even use a click track. We found that that was just making us a little too critical. When we put that click on and played to it, we had to play perfectly in time. Now,

And this recording, we just played the way we normally play. We got the drums good, then we added the bass and the guitars. We did our overdubs, but since the drums weren't so perfect, it meant everything else had a little bit more freedom too. And the drumming is great, don't get me wrong, but it's not to the grid. It wouldn't be on a strict tempo and it fluctuates a little bit, but that's emotional. And that's what we did on that day. And we've captured that. Whereas when we record to the grid,

It's this like perfect thing and now the bass has to be perfect. And if I'm a little bit off on the guitar, it sounds weird. My vocals, if they're not right in tune, you really notice it because everything else is right where it's supposed to be. And a lot of times when we listen back to those things, they just don't have the same emotional impact as the stuff we've been doing lately. That's a little bit more loose, a little bit more personality. And again, to bring it back to like AI and where music has been going and everything's so polished and perfect. It's so refreshing to me.

at least, and this is biased because I'm in the band, but it's so refreshing to hear music that has that, that has like a moment in time and an emotion to it. And it would be different if we did it again tomorrow. It's got personality and character and it's a real good idea of where the band is today. And that's why I'm so excited about the EP and I've had so much fun making it. Whereas other stuff we've done, which I still love, was much more labored upon.

Brian Funk (21:00.824)

And when I listened to it, listened, was that right? Did we do that right? Whereas when I listened to this stuff, it's like, hey, that just felt good. And yeah, it was cool that that went a little weird at that part, you know, but it worked for the song and it worked for the emotion that we're trying to create. Again, it even helped us develop our songs and get them written faster because we're trying to move fast. So it forced me to write lyrics faster and get things down.

and really just capture the ideas more instead of trying to capture them perfectly. And it makes for just a much more satisfying experience both while creating and while listening back. Think about yourself and other people you might know that make music. How many of them have been sitting on ideas? How many ideas have you been sitting on and working on for ages that one day you're gonna get out once it's good enough, once you this? And then when you start thinking that way, you...

wonder if you need a new piece of gear, a new plug-in, a new computer, something, you gotta take a new course, watch a new video before you can move on. It just gets you stuck in this cycle of not ever finishing things and so many people don't get there. And it's really sad because you have a unique voice. Every single one of us has a unique voice. If every musician in the world sat down and made music right now, no one would make the same thing as you.

All the micro tiny decisions, the big decisions, every little thing will have a little bit of your own personal stamp on it. Your own individual personality and characteristics would make their way into every tiny decision you make. Add those up and the end result is just infinitely complex and unique. And this is important because we've got things now like our AI that can do this stuff and make music and they're pumping stuff out like crazy and it's all

built off of stuff that has already existed and your voice is not getting heard because of it. We need to take advantage of this and make stuff as much as possible. Get our voice out there and hone it and craft it because the more you go through the process of making a song, getting through every stage and finishing it, the more you practice it. And we get the least amount of practice on the finishing side of things because it's the last stage. Not every idea gets to that last stage.

Brian Funk (23:19.992)

Every idea begins and a lot of us are really good at crafting a couple little loops real quick and then moving forward becomes real tough because we don't know what to do next. Now we start getting critical but we have to move past those parts and just try whatever we want and move forward. The reality is you don't know if you're ever going to get to the end if you wait too long. None of us know if today is the last chance we ever get to make music. This could be it.

If you don't get it out today, you might not ever get it out and you won't have that legacy to leave behind. And it's an important thing. I really believe that each of our individual contributions is important, even if all it does is inspire another person to do it. I get very inspired when people share music. I love to hear when people finish music because it convinces me it's not impossible. Because there are times when I'm making music where it feels impossible.

For all the experience I have, I've released albums and tons of stuff. Every time is difficult. So I need every kind of encouragement and every piece of evidence I can to show me that is possible. So even if all you're doing is convincing the next person that it's possible, that's valuable. But I don't think that's where it ends. think that...

You're also showing them like, you could do this, you could do it this way, you could try that, you can use this chord or make that melody or put that sound here. It doesn't have to do it this way or that way. You're just giving people ideas and that's a really valuable thing. And finally, one thing that's really cool about having a body of work of music because you've worked fast and you've got things done and you've left it behind and moved on to the next thing is that

Every time you come back to your music and listen to it, just like the river, you're different. So you get this whole other perspective on your music. It's crazy to listen to stuff you've made a few years ago and feel something different than what you had initially felt. It's the beauty of art is that it starts with the creator, but once it goes out there, the meaning is up for grabs. Everybody interprets it in their own way, including the artist.

Brian Funk (25:32.774)

So stuff you might have made when you were in your teenage years or early twenties feels a lot different five, six years later, sometimes even five days later. You start to see things about yourself that maybe you didn't see before. You start to get an idea of who you are. And it's so inspiring. It makes you want to continue working. Something pretty funny just occurred to me as I'm editing this episode here is that I've been planning this episode for a long time.

I've been thinking about what I could do to make it better, some ideas, some stories to tell, and it's taken me months to do it. And it's a perfect example of why you have to work fast, because the longer you take to work on something, the more likely it will never happen. And this one almost slipped through the cracks, but thankfully I've got it together. So a funny irony here, you just gotta work fast. I'm gonna leave it at that. I really appreciate you listening.

and watching the music production podcast. Thanks for coming along on these journeys and being there and being people I can talk to about this stuff because it's a constant battle. It's hard. to think about this stuff and try to verbalize it and analyze how I feel has been super important to me. And I hope it matters to you a little bit, but more than anything, I just really want you to make stuff, create, finish ideas, move forward, go to the next thing.

develop, grow. I think it's one of those like ripples in the pond thing where if all of us musicians and artists could get that sense of satisfaction and that sense of fulfillment from having this body of work, the world would probably be a little bit of a nicer place, a little less frustration, a little more compassion and all that kind of stuff. That's a kind of big dream, I guess, in a lot of ways. But I think there's some truth to it because

I know the feeling and I see it in other people's eyes when they create and they're proud of their work and they can see the progress because they've been doing the work. It's really hard to see the progress if you don't ever finish the work or you belabor it too long. work fast, make a body of work. Just put stuff out, create, create, create, grow, have fun doing it and thanks for listening. Have a great day. I'm Brian Funk. Take care.

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