As I dive into Rack composition more and more, I become more musically productive. I lash some new combinations of modules and sequences together and have something that I like much quicker than when I run Ableton Live, add instruments, and then program patterns. Working in Rack seems a lot more rewarding, because you experiment to arrive at an end result. And the experimentation is the reward.
A friend of mine once told me (of their own music) “I got a lot more productive when I lowered my standards.” This is a flippant comment, meant to be humorous, but it points out something important: music is subjective, there’s no absolute scale of quality, so worrying about how your stuff fits on other people’s continuum of quality is wasted effort.
If you’re making music for the right reasons, you let go of trying to fit a particular genre or scene. Make the music you want to hear. You are here to leave a meaningful, positive mark on the world, and you can’t do that if your musical imagination is hemmed in by trying to fit in with what other people make.
There will be more successful artists than you, by someone else’s standards of excellence. Your success should be personal and unique to you. If you try to make the perfect techno, or trance, or gabber track, you might succeed, but musical genres are limiting. There are people who can make a good, even sometimes great techno track. There are people who can make adequate tracks by conforming to genre strictures. But it’s never entirely your unique music if you’re trying to sound like other people.
Personally, I feel like I’m doing my best work, after 30 years of trying. That’s roughly 25 years of being a huge fan, and being frustrated by trying to be a techno producer, because the limitations to the form frustrated me. The people who are really good at making techno don’t feel limited by sticking to genre, and find a way to make their own best music within the limits of the genre. That wasn’t me, and furthermore, I’m a good enough judge of techno (and house & drum and bass etc) that I know my attempts at techno aren’t as good as theirs.
It may sound arrogant - and maybe it is - but I’m at a point where what I write in words is like the music I make: I try and make it as good as I can, but I think of how it affects other people last. I know what I like to listen to, and if I release something it’s because I like it enough to listen to it repeatedly myself.
I’m my own audience. Based on sales, what I do works for roughly 30 people worldwide. But making the music is the exciting part. I submitted this album for release in March of 2024. I’d listened to these tracks to death, but when I sent it to Robert at Component, I moved on to the music I was making in the present.
Listening to this now is surprising to me. I still like the tracks, but I hear things I didn’t in them when I was making them. And that’s another goal to shoot for in your music: Be able to surprise yourself.