My daily practice for the past six days has been to use Ableton Live 11, each day starting a new project and, after 30 minutes, exporting the project as a wav file. Here are the tracks, ranging from 12 seconds to 58 seconds.
I didn’t have much ritual around the practice. I tried to set my expectations at the bare minimum, keeping in mind that showing up for the practice was a feat to be proud of in itself. When I think about how difficult it sometimes felt to keep up with the daily practice, I see that it was good I set the bar so low for myself, but I also wonder if I had set it higher if I would have felt a different, higher stakes approach that would have pushed me to learn even more, make even cooler sounds, or show up earlier and more consistently to the practice. These kinds of thoughts are likely not that helpful to my growth as an artist and a person, but perhaps some gentler version of them with some widening insights could be.
My process usually went like: Do I have a half hour right now? Is now a good time? No, I should do that other thing. [8 hours later] Oh dang, it’s time for bed, but I have to do the daily practice. Maybe I can do a double session tomorrow. But no, remember how committed you were on day one, when you stayed up until 2am to get the practice in before closing the day? But I’m trying to practice a bedtime daily too… You’re going to enjoy the exported audio file in 30 minutes, you can do this…
So, it was sort of plagued by those old procrastination habits. I wonder if I can create a pre ritual to the ritual to help me enter the ritual with less resistance and chaos. Maybe I could sit down and listen to street and ambient sounds for 3 minutes and let those inspire the creation process, to take some pressure off myself as the genesis of creation(!). Maybe I could create some additional parameter that makes some of that thought process a little more mindless… I originally thought the less parameters, the lower the pressure. But now I see the distinction between parameters that set you up for doing something and requirements that constrain the outcome of your doing. Going with the former come future daily practices.
In hindsight, a lot of the things I feel I didn’t do enough of, I did do some of. For instance, I wanted to and did learn from YouTube (even if that only meant watching YouTube shorts for 5 minutes), try downloading a plug-in (which I used on Daily Practice 5), record my voice and manipulate it to sound less like human vocals, and use my dusty ahh midi keyboard. All of these things I was feeling like I had been lazy about (even as I try not to talk to myself in this way internally, I’m feeling it on the low), but I did in basic, bite-sized ways. I guess this feeling of “not enough” comes also from the hard parameter I set for myself to export by the time 30 minutes had gone by. I knew I would want to push myself to work beyond 30 minutes, and that this pressure would make the task even harder to begin, so I was strict with myself about truly limiting the daily practice to 30 minutes. I missed one day over the weekend when I was busy and feeling dead tired, and I feel incomplete without this “Daily Practice 6” (just as I feel incomplete with never having done my second interview for Project 01, how do you deal with these kinds of thoughts and feelings?).
I was surprised by how many sounds came with the plug-in I downloaded. I am also surprised at how little I feel I progressed as far as learning my way around Ableton and becoming a wiz with the software. I suppose I need to put my 10,000 hours in (or at least a couple more weeks). But it’s humbling to see how I can’t “get good” at something super fast, an idea that one part of my brain always wants to gamble on, probably to soothe the feeling of lost time honing a craft.
My daily practice didn’t explicitly inform what I’m tossing around for Project 02, but I am wondering how I might incorporate sound composition into the project.
Side angle of where it was going down:
Screenshot of Daily Practice 5 audio track interface:
Damn, these blog posts are really helpful in seeing my own process, reviewing it from the future and considering where I agree and disagree with the way I lived, the way I acted and decided…………..
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