Getting into music. Having the "wrong" career.

How I re-found my love of writing music after (too many) years of thinking I didn't want to write any music

I used to love making music. It was the only thing I would think about.

Walking to get a train. I’d think about it.

Doing school work. I’d think about it.

All the time.

But at some point I got distracted.

I found myself, like many, in a job involving computers and coding and business and stuff. I was - and am - pretty good at this. I like problem solving. I like translating between people to solve problems.

A job can take all your energy. It leaves you at -10% at the end of the day.

You throw yourself into making sure you’re doing the job well, even though this is just a temporary thing. It’s not my “real” career.

And because you don’t want to get things wrong, you throw yourself in so thoroughly that you leave work shattered. Heart racing. Brain at zero.

When you try to write music, you have no creative brainpower left. So you drink some wine. You open your DAW, sit at the piano or grab your drumsticks.

And you do something that passes for playing music.

In reality, it’s more like pretend. It’s the theatre of doing music, not really doing music.

I’m not trying to hone my craft or improve my timing or get the performance excellent.

I’m just blowing off steam.

Trying to shake off the day.

And trying to remember who I was before I put everything into the job.

This can be temporary while you get through a big project. Or, it can be for years. You accidentally fall into a career which was something for now.

Getting out of that and getting back into music can, at a certain point, feel impossible or just confusing.

You have the basis of the skills but no network of people, no specific industry knowledge. You are lost.

This was me a few years ago.

I still had the love of writing music. I loved the joy of mixing sounds, creating arcs of rhythms, building up tensions. It’s so much fun.

But I didn’t know where to start.

Where do you start?

I think the answer to this is not to get too hung up on exactly what you need to do because, in truth, every music career - whether professional or amateur - is not linear.

The place you start is solidifying your motivation. Building a practice habit and a professionalism which allows you to focus on the craft and, hopefully one day, to be professional.

But being professional - earning money - is not the first step.

In fact, it’s probably more important to act professional and to aspire to professional levels of quality than to worry about the specifics of the business. At least to start with.

For me this all started when I asked myself this question:

What would I do if I was serious?

This began the solidifying of my motivation. And it’s this that I’m sharing in a series of posts.