(11-21-2018, 01:22 AM)findingme Wrote: Matt, I'd like to share something with you. I listened to about 4 of your songs yesterday on Soundcloud before heading in to work. I actually remembered and felt something while listening.
Roughly 20 years ago, I was on a music scholarship at my community college. I didn't have life goals at that time, but I could play my French horn for them, and it paid for school. This is when and where I did a lot of music mixing in my head. And......I failed music theory. Fear of success won that time.
While listening to your songs, I read the titles, and tried to pick up the feel of each to see how they clicked. I suddenly remembered my college days, where I lived in fear daily. I remembered how I'd feel a beat, follow it maybe 2-10 minutes, and consistently, repeatedly, and even daily fear would kill my ambition and dreaming to create and expand. This was all in my head yesterday, but I believe I sensed a familiar hesitancy in a few of your songs. Did I sense this correctly? If not, please let me know. I, myself, can be very sensitive and attached to personal creations. I'm desiring to be objective.
Why I brought this up is my willingness to open up and be creative is surfacing once again. I feel a strong motivation to achieve and succeed on USLM, and even after listening to your songs.......I imagined singing and rapping (what?!) to an old black coworker who loves to laugh and socialize, me imagining myself making stuff up on the spot. Fear has sat on my creativity for eons, and I'm loving this door opening wide.
We're both INFP's, and I'd like to encourage you in your music creations.
Note: I said I failed music theory. It was like taking chemistry, but naming it "theory". I'd go back now.
Thanks for the listen! Yeah you pretty much hit the nail on the head with that one. I picked up music production when I was 20, but it took me till I was 22 to start really working on it seriously and I'm 27 now. Even after the fact I always really struggled with expanding ideas and developing songs. I'd find myself avoiding it even though I wanted to enjoy it. The hesitancy is a good way to put it. I was actually thinking of that yesterday. I've been too afraid to just make stuff and let lose with it. It's almost like this restrictive feeling where I want to break out and express myself, but at the same time I'm never too happy with what I create. Part of that is this initial burst of creativity and energy, but as I work on the song more I realize that even if it's a catchy riff or a solid drum groove there's still more to a song than that.
I guess there's a mismatch between what's in my head and what I can actually create at times. And it's that ongoing frustration when I end up working on a song that results in me being disappointed that I couldn't get it to sound like what I wanted. I've been telling myself it's my knowledge for years now, but I realized recently it's just experience. I've been too afraid to make music consistently and overcompensated by swamping myself with knowledge having to do with music theory and sound design. Thinking if I just learned a few more things it would unlock this key for me and I'd be able to create more easily.
Update on USLM. I was driving home today and I was thinking about the work week. I just thought to myself, man this sucks. Thinking about all the work I'm doing, all the time I'm putting in, and I just don't care about any of it. A lot of my motivation has been fear in life. Hell, I'd force myself to learn challenging concepts and stress myself just for the sake of being able to say I'm not an idiot. But lately those fears are fading away. I don't care if people think I'm dumb, that I'm not some technical genius when it comes to computers, that I'm not doing something challenging in life.
I feel like I dug myself a hole. Lately my mind has been like "Why are you doing this? Do you even want to do this?" I think of the next level beyond my current position as a system admin or something and think of all the work I'd have to do to learn more and how I'd have to be in charge of all this stuff. It fills me with this stressed out feeling and an almost visceral feeling of being repelled from it. Computers have always been something I've been good at. But not on a ridiculously good level like some programmers or computer science guys. It's pretty much what my parents encouraged me to get into when I was younger. To a certain extent that's all I was good at. When stuff broke or needed to be fixed I fixed it and got praise and I think on some level I just hung onto that. I told myself that this was my worth, how good I was with technology and computers and whatnot.
Overall I got security with this job. I got money, I got health insurance, and for the first time I felt like I was gaining experience that would make me valuable in the work force. But it feels restricting, I don't want to be tied to this route just because it's the safe thing to do now. It's hard because I've never been the type of person that can bounce back from stuff. What I mean by that is I've faced so many challenges in my life and getting from point a to point b sometimes is a huge ordeal. Sometimes going back to point A and starting all over is just so terrifying, I can't imagine doing it again.
I'm just really lost is all. Or maybe I'm not lost and I just have fear blocking the way from doing what I really want to do in my life.
INFP
