listening to your own tracks

shane9689

i wouldnt usually listen to my own musc...but after making a track, the few days following ill obsesse about listening to it, and trying to improve it and see if i can get an outsider perspective as in "if i was someone else, what would i make of this" sort of thing....
is this normal? anyone else do this?

WasterEx

Kind of do the same myself. I make a track, finish it and then I suddenly think of so much things I could have done differently to make it sound better or more interesting. That's why it can be good to 'finish' a track then leave it a few days. Start working on some other new tracks and by the time you go back and listen to it you can get lots of ideas that you can add to the track.

If you listen to a sine wave long enough it starts to sound good too so I guess giving your ears a break from the same sound over and over again is beneficial. Once you listen to the track with fresh ears it's almost as if you were hearing it for the first time so it's easier to judge in that sense.

Listening to your own music as someone else would can be good and bad. It's important to not to take your own sound away from the track so that it's unique.

Neurojazz

My 2 cents.

I make all my music so I enjoy it - all the time... As I learn new techniques or get new gear then i'd revisit older tracks and totally revamp them.


During the writing process I tend to switch off and put all I can into the music - then afterwards wonder how the hell I did certain sections of it.

Every now and then i'll buy something nice off the Beatport top charts and place it next to a track in the daw when making something close to that genre and see what i'm doing wrong - It all helps make the final thing enjoyable and a constant learning process.

Sky King

I find that if I listen to a track on the DAW I am satisfied with it, then as soon as I bounce it and listen to the WAV there's a hundred things I want to change!

I also stand up and look out the window when listening back- or stick listen to it in the car or on headphone or on a different system - you hear new stuff every time

I too like working as hard as i can as fast as i can so that i get a good shot of work done on a track before it becomes stale to my ears... then i go off and do other stuff and come back to it in a few days.

i also like having a reference track by someone else in the same genre that i can play every few mins to compare and contrast.

soundsofgeisha

I listen to mine all the time... I find it useful for learning for sure, but also I hear new things each time, esp if you have complex pieces of music with lots of tracks and samples and so on.

I find that if I can't listen to it for pleasure then I've done something wrong; why would I make it if I didn't like listening to it? So in most cases I get pleasure from my own music and listen to it, still, in many cases years after its been made.

I too get that "how did I make that?" feeling - which is great. It shows you are transcending what you think are your own abilities. But I also feel that after you've done it, and time has passed, that it is "out there" - its not even yours anymore. So it is like listening to music made by someone else - and it was, it was made by the past you, rather than the present you.

One thing I like to do is, having worked on a track all day, is to leave it for a few hours then listen to it in a different setting - in the garden, on different earphones, or with a glass of wine - you get to hear it from a new angle, and you think of new ideas, or suddenly hear things you don't like or want to change - or, and this is best part - you can say "its finished!"

Lbeard

Neurojazz wrote: »

Every now and then i'll buy something nice off the Beatport top charts and place it next to a track in the daw when making something close to that genre and see what i'm doing wrong

You've downloaded the wrong sample pack.

Neurojazz

Lbeard wrote: »

You've downloaded the wrong sample pack.

I have most of them (brought) and also make my own

Some of the top ten stuff is awful - but occasionally there are some nice ones

Lbeard

Neurojazz wrote: »

Some of the top ten stuff is awful - but occasionally there are some nice ones

I hate listening to music with critical ears on. It's not pleasurable and you'll often hear things wrong. But for production or figuring out some sounds you need to.

I think it's why two man (or more) teams work so well. In Daft Punk Thomas Bangleter does all the twiddling, the other guy is the ears. I've seen video of Bangleter doing live hardware improvisation - it's stuff I really like, but on record it would really just sound a mess - certainly not day time or even night time radio.

Having two people tasked with different functions, I think is all the difference. Even if you partner just smokes jays all the time, and says things like "the kick needs a little more flimp", because maybe it did need some more flimp.......And you were just too busy fiddling with your plugins to notice. But if you're smoking jays you'll too monged to add the flimp, even though you know it's missing.

jiltloop

Definitely listen back to my own stuff, I love listening to older stuff especially. My favourite thing which happens on occasion is I get a song in my head that I really like the melody of but can't remember who it is, after wrecking my head trying to figure it out for half the day I suddenly realise it's something I made months or years ago.

Hayte

I think this is a thing you have to do but you will never think of your own songs in the same way other people do.

After so many years I've come to the realisation that I am making auditory illusions. They are like magic tricks except they are designed to trick your ears. You deliberately emphasise certain sounds or certain parts of a sound at certain times to focus the listener's attention or lead it away from the obvious cracks and joints that would give away the illusion.

But like a magic trick, once you know how the illusion is performed, it no longer inspires wonderment, at least not in the same way. Part of what I like about other people's music is that I haven't "figured it out" and they do things which surprise me. Often they do things with sounds that I would never think to do myself. So I listen to their stuff over and over trying to figure it out.

The danger of obsessing over tiny details in your own music is that other people will rarely think about and listen to your music in the same way you do. The more you understand how your tricks work, the more you see it as a technical exercise whereas other people will respond to your music based on the way it makes them feel. In many ways they don't care how you do it, as long as it makes them feel good.

Sometimes its really easy to miss the forest for the trees. I try not to obsess so much about tiny details now and try not to stall when I reach a point where I don't know what to do next but it still happens fairly frequently.

I still find myself tweaking the attack of a kickdrum for half an hour, having spent a week on what amounts to a skeleton track. I can sometimes convince myself that its the best skeleton track I've produced to date but when I show it to someone else they go "wheres the rest of it?"

SuprSi

I find listening to my own stuff makes me less productive! Honestly, when I've written a decent part of a tune, enough that I could audition it (it might be missing the middle or end) to a friend, I find I just end up listening to it over and over as I'm usually so chuffed with what I've done! Last night I spent about an hour trying to get the next part of my current track completed, and although I made some minor changes, I couldn't stop myself listening to one particular piece that I just think is the best damn piece of dance music I've ever written!!

I find it so easy to get sucked in, and when I should be creating synth patches or learning how to do something, I load up the tune and just have a listen for 30 minutes to see if anything new happens! I guess I'm searching for that extra spark, that lead line or bit of percussion that will pop into my head the next time I hear it, but generally it doesn't happen and this current track could go the way of so many other incomplete ones where I just ran out of ideas and just spent ages listening to it. Which will be a real shame as what I have so far is very good, at least to my biased ears!

mordeith

SuprSi wrote: »

Which will be a real shame as what I have so far is very good, at least to my biased ears!

I find that if you are happy with a track or the bones of a track, the best thing to do is leave it alone for a few days and then have a listen. I've often done that after writing something I thought was the dogs bollox :rolleyes: and then revisited a few days later and thought 'what a load of ****e!) . If it still sounds great after a few days break then you might be onto something.

Dramatik

Usually I will listen to the track once it's finished, a load of times before I go to bed, I write down any alterations or ideas that I think will benefite the track into a little note pad, ready for the next time I open the project. Things like automation and volume levels ect.

I usually spend a day getting the layout of the track done, then spend the next day doing all the automation and mixing and mastering it. I then put it on my phone so I can listen to it on the bus ect. and also play it on different audio systems. I spend about a week listening to it whenever I can and then I go back and adjust whatever I think needs to be fixed. After that I tend to just sit on the tracks for a few months, this usally helps me hear things that I may have missed previously, also i find it gives you an idea of which tracks of yours are the strongest as you don't get sick of listening to them as quickly as some of the others. This is important if you're planning on releasing an ep or album as it will help you decide which tracks are your strongest, which is often a hard decision as usually you like all of them since you created them.

Miloglow

I think listening back to your own tracks is fine but as mentioned already, listening to it too much can be overkill and you can start to think the track is better than it isn't.

Do not send it or play it for your close friends and they will not give you honest feedback. Your best bet is to send it to people you only know online or people you know who also produce.

Listen to your track in different environments, this was also mentioned previously but it is very important not just for mixing but for general listening. Put your track playing walk out of the room and close the door. Walk around the house while its playing. Play it in your car, hi-fi, mp3, phone etc. Also if you have a friend who produces and has a set of monitors, go to their house and listen to it there, you will get a different sound from different speakers and it will also be in a different environment with different acoustics.

A lot of the stuff I have mentioned has been said already but they are very important when it comes to listening to your tracks.

paulo6891

Miloglow wrote: »

Do not send it or play it for your close friends and they will not give you honest feedback. Your best bet is to send it to people you only know online or people you know who also produce.

I don't think it's to do with dishonest feedback. It's more a case of friends not being producers and therefore not having (in most cases) the necessary trained ears to hear when something is mixed badly etc so they aren't in a position to give constructive criticisms. They wouldn't be listening out for the same things that a producer would be.

Although if they like it you're probably on the right track

Miloglow

paulo6891 wrote: »

I don't think it's to do with dishonest feedback. It's more a case of friends not being producers and therefore not having (in most cases) the necessary trained ears to hear when something is mixed badly etc so they aren't in a position to give constructive criticisms. They wouldn't be listening out for the same things that a producer would be.

Although if they like it you're probably on the right track

Oh ya 100% i'd agree with you that they cant give you mixing feedback if they are not a producer themselves.
What I meant was that just for looking for general feedback its a disaster. I remember when I started out messing in FL Studio about 7 years ago, id send stuff to my friends and they would all say "oh ya that's brilliant" or whatever because they are afraid to say that sounds like utter garbage.