How do you get out of that rut where your current setup just can't produce the sound you want?

InsomniaEmperor said:

I'm trying to get my cornets to sound as close to a live recording as possible but it's hard.

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Of course it is. You’re trying to mold a recorded performance that is not that performance and manipulating it into sounding like that performance. The only real way to do that is with modeled/sample modeled instruments that are well played/sequences and have great mixing.

What was it Charlie Clouser once said about trying to make samples sound real being a pathway to madness? Just focus on making it sound good in the context of your samples. Trying to sound just like a recording is folly unless you have samples of the recording.

InsomniaEmperor said:

Transcendent Journey by Rossano Galante

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Thanks for introducing me to this fantastic piece, good old-school orchestral writing in a film score manner. Your mockups are not bad though, in first example there is something ugly with that trumpet / cornet at 20second mark, maybe try different articulation there? In general if you have VSL don't be afraid of trying articulations that sounds off by name, like marcato, repetitions etc. Also VI player allows to layer two or more articulations into one. You have there pretty powerful tool to create and preview articulation mixes. AND if trill articulation works best for a string run just embrace it and move on

jcrosby said:

8 Examples of the Self-Sabotaging Effects of Perfectionism

Is your unyielding approach to success the very thing that’s holding you back?

www.psychologytoday.com

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Yep, but this is more about perfectionism as a disorder and not related to work ethics. For example, their claim "when you do tackle the task at hand, you get a little (or a lot) obsessive over getting it right, down to every last detail" is complete bollocks to label into the negative effects. This is in my opinion one of the things that separate the good from the mediocre. The devil is in the details!

A bit derailing on perfectionism, sorry in advance....

I have a friend who has become so obsessed for getting everything perfect for his long-awaited new album that he hasn't been able to release it in over ten years despite of releasing everything else in between. He just can't make that particular album done because there is always that mystical something that prevents him to finish, or even just advance with it. I won't go to details, but his is a good case of a problem that would definitely need some professional help in many levels.

I believe one of the reasons for him not being able to advance is that he is lacking a "vision" and can't define to himself what "perfect" means. And I think that is generally what makes "perfect" a very damaging and hindering path both work-wise and mentally. We should have a vision and a clear (imaginary) outcome, but most of all the means to achieve that. Then we do the necessary tasks to reach it as good as humanly possible and move on. A/B: ing on that final balance pass or spending three hours to mold a passable string run part isn't an "enemy of good"- in fact, it's what makes good freaking good and outstanding.

But if you don't know what you're trying to achieve you will fall into that trap of perfection-seeking without end. Sometimes, something just simply becomes better than something else in some other day. In that case, when we honestly think this is the best we can do and have no idea how to make it any better, we should accept it (or ask for help) and move on. Send or shelve, depending on the demands. But never dwell on it.

Henu said:

Yep, but this is more about perfectionism as a disorder and not related to work ethics. For example, their claim "when you do tackle the task at hand, you get a little (or a lot) obsessive over getting it right, down to every last detail" is complete bollocks to label into the negative effects. This is in my opinion one of the things that separate the good from the mediocre. The devil is in the details!

A bit derailing on perfectionism, sorry in advance....

I have a friend who has become so obsessed for getting everything perfect for his long-awaited new album that he hasn't been able to release it in over ten years despite of releasing everything else in between. He just can't make that particular album done because there is always that mystical something that prevents him to finish, or even just advance with it. I won't go to details, but his is a good case of a problem that would definitely need some professional help in many levels.

I believe one of the reasons for him not being able to advance is that he is lacking a "vision" and can't define to himself what "perfect" means. And I think that is generally what makes "perfect" a very damaging and hindering path both work-wise and mentally. We should have a vision and a clear (imaginary) outcome, but most of all the means to achieve that. Then we do the necessary tasks to reach it as good as humanly possible and move on. A/B: ing on that final balance pass or spending three hours to mold a passable string run part isn't an "enemy of good"- in fact, it's what makes good freaking good and outstanding.

But if you don't know what you're trying to achieve you will fall into that trap of perfection-seeking without end. Sometimes, something just simply becomes better than something else in some other day. In that case, when we honestly think this is the best we can do and have no idea how to make it any better, we should accept it (or ask for help) and move on. Send or shelve, depending on the demands. But never dwell on it.

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I get that. But there's a lot they describe in their post that also sounds like chasing after perfection to the point of self-sabotage. Or more accurately, getting hung up on small details, chasing their tail trying to find the perfect sound, resulting in not being able to finish what they're working on.

And I'm not saying any of this to be critical of them either, being stuck in a 'rut' that you describe as a 'major mood killer' isn't any fun. Perhaps they're projecting blame onto the tools when they really should be asking themselves why they're not enjoying the process, but instead getting stuck fiddling with mics and perfecting things for hours (as they describe).

Unfortunately I might know a thing or two about this, I've had periods of anxiety going back to grade school. In my experience what they're describing is the moment where you need to step back and ask yourself why you're trading the frustration of chasing perfection over the satisfaction of completing a piece of music.

InsomniaEmperor said:

How do you get out of that rut where your current setup just can't produce the sound you want?​

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Easy.. buy more libraries

just make sure they're modelled or else the merry go round continues

jcrosby said:

Perhaps they're projecting blame onto the tools when they really should be asking themselves why they're not enjoying the process, but instead getting stuck fiddling with mics and perfecting things for hours (as they describe).

Unfortunately I might know a thing or two about this, I've had periods of anxiety going back to grade school.

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I would love to hear more about this and especially about how you managed to escape that vicious cycle! I've read the article that you've linked and a lot of it sounds familiar.

jcrosby said:

In my experience what they're describing is the moment where you need to step back and ask yourself why you're trading the frustration of chasing perfection over the satisfaction of completing a piece of music.

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Bold assumption that there will be satisfaction at the end of completing a piece of music .
Maybe I just haven't achieved "completion" often enough yet, but my confidence of a reward at the end isn't super high, even though I would say that on average I am a lot happier with my own music than with my paintings for example. And at times I have listened to snippets of music that I made, and felt quite good about them. But still the process of composing seems to often be emotionally painful and draining for me, and I just don't do a lot of it. I know (by now) it's not the tools that cause this.

MartinH. said:

I would love to hear more about this and especially about how you managed to escape that vicious cycle!

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One thing that has a tremendous help at least for me is to have longer breaks, especially if I lack that certain vision what to do. And I'm not talking about a 15 minute break (though it's the absolute first thing to try) but an actual, several day- long break(s) where you concentrate on something completely else.

This will reset your ears completely with the current task and the next time you open up the project it's basically three options:

A. Hmm, this isn't half bad. Maybe a bit of that down and a pinch of this and we're back in business.
B. Okey, this is half bad. But it's because the strings are too loud and why the hell is that countermelody there.
C. Yep, still totally bad. Let's do a complete rehaul and leave it to rest if I get stuck again.

To prove my point, I just finished a title song today for a game I had worked for two months on/off. Asked to do drastic changes to the overall feel, I finally gave the song a 3-week hiatus after the changes (due to not being sure if the changes were for good) where I didn't even fart to that direction. When I dug it up yesterday, I realized that I need just delete some of the now futile leftover harmony lines, double the lenght of the middle part and was really happy with it.

Sometimes though it's just C, and when you're on a deadline, it's living hell. :D

Henu said:

One thing that has a tremendous help at least for me is to have longer breaks, especially if I lack that certain vision what to do. And I'm not talking about a 15 minute break (though it's the absolute first thing to try) but an actual, several day- long break(s) where you concentrate on something completely else.

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Yes - sometimes a break doesn't even need to be a break in time, but a break from the circular, automatic, semi-conscious thinking that sustains perfectionism (and friends, like rumination, perseveration, etc.)

I think perfectionism arises sometimes because we lose sight of the fact that we are constantly choosing how we spend every moment (or thought, effort, etc), and that whatever we spend on "perfecting" a project cannot then be spent on something else. When focused on a task, it's easy to think "should this be better?" rather than "is making this better the most important/rewarding use of time now?" Moving one's attention to that second question is, I think, a good way to distinguish between the kind of perfectionism that can power a talent, versus the kind that can squash it.

(BTW, I'd say that *doing nothing* is a vitally important use of at least a little bit of time every day. )

Henu said:

But if you don't know what you're trying to achieve you will fall into that trap of perfection-seeking without end. Sometimes, something just simply becomes better than something else in some other day.

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Definitely... it seems to me that binary or black-and-white thinking (or "splitting", in the theory) is commonly involved in the more "disruptive" brands of perfectionism. In reality, almost everything is on a continuum without achievable absolutes, but fully embracing that can be hard work... especially about the things one cares most deeply about.

MartinH. said:

I would love to hear more about this and especially about how you managed to escape that vicious cycle! I've read the article that you've linked and a lot of it sounds familiar.

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It is a cycle you can fall into, and it can really take the pleasure out of finishing something. It also initially serves a positive role by encouraging growth, motivating you to improve, etc. The problem is when it starts to mess with how you perceive your own work, which can get in the way of finishing things, cause you to procrastinate, etc.

Everyone does it to some degree too, so if you notice it happening only around a specific thing (like writing music) it doesn't mean you're beyond hope, you just might need help re-framing the underlying assumptions you have related to writing music... It's also usually a cue that it's time to step back, (or maybe even step away for the day). If it happens to me around work that's my cue to put what I'm working on to the side, and complete something else. It could be finishing another cue, working on something else related to the project, or even just listening to some music for perspective.

Mediatation's been really helpful for me as well. I don't know your familiarity with it (from an experiential point of view) so here's the cliff-note version in case you aren't already aware of of some of this already...

'Mindfulness' helps you learn how to become aware of your thinking, this helps you become more aware of overthinking, which can help you step back, and 'intervene' when your emotions are trying to run over you. That's obviously not the easiest thing to do, so you really need to approach it as a skill that takes practice and time to develop. (But, it shouldn't feel like work either). It's become part of many clinical psychology/therapy approaches in recent years (with extensive clinical research supporting its efficacy), and there are tons of resources widely available that make it easy to learn and practice on your own. I can link you to a few 'clinical' guided meditations if interested... (Clinical being key word, not the stereotypical new agey ones you might come across in YT or podcast search)...

Also, there was an interview with Trevor Morris where he talks about having to break down scores into minutes of music that need to be completed per day. I've found a similar approach really helpful for trailer cues if I start to feel pressure... I just remind myself that I only need to get through 30 seconds a day to be on schedule... That tends to put things into perspective, and more often than not I can get through more than that in a day...

MartinH. said:

Bold assumption that there will be satisfaction at the end of completing a piece of music .
Maybe I just haven't achieved "completion" often enough yet, but my confidence of a reward at the end isn't super high, even though I would say that on average I am a lot happier with my own music than with my paintings for example. And at times I have listened to snippets of music that I made, and felt quite good about them. But still the process of composing seems to often be emotionally painful and draining for me, and I just don't do a lot of it. I know (by now) it's not the tools that cause this.

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I get it, but isn't the assumption that there won't be satisfaction a form of internal narrative? Basically, it sounds like you judge your work before you even let yourself finish it, which isn't any fun... So here's a question for you to maybe reflect on (on your own, not necessarily reply to here)...
Why did you want to start writing music in the 1st place?

Another thing important to understand in terms of judging your own work harshly is that a large portion of 'perfectionistic' thinking is driven by you comparing your work to others, and/or worrying about what others will, or would think of it. (Which is a totally natural thing to do, but only up to a point).

As an example... Comparing your work to someone with 10, 20, or 30 years experience on you would be holding yourself to an 'impossible standard'... They're always going to have experience over you, so that kind of thinking tends to set you up for an internal dialogue where you'll never live up to your own standards. We all do this to some degree... When you notice any thinking related to that try to remind yourself that it's an impossible comparison, and that that artists work is really there for you to learn from, or 'inspire you, but not compare yourself to...

I really do hope this helps... And let me know if you're interested in a link to a few meditations...

Layering (and playing with mic positions, panning, further processing) and pitch shifting 1-2 semi tones down or up - usually prefer down - with percussion I sometimes go more extreme, up to 12 semi tones or more + layer the same patch with 2-3 other pitched versions. They have to be pitched apart 3-4 semi tones each if it's the same sound/patch to avoid phasing, in my observation. The pitching should be done in the sampler itself, not with a plugin as that would usually destroy the sound, unless I want the effect for sound design reasons. Pitching is easy in Kontakt with the Tune knob on each instrument patch.

As far as trumpets go, Sample Modeling or VHorns played with a good breath controller are a must. Either for the entire sound, or adding on top of other sample libraries.

@jcrosby: Wow, that was a lot more than I expected, thank you so much! Really! Your posts are always full of valuable insights, that's why I asked you in the first place. I feel bad not having replied sooner, but I've gone back and re-read your post multiple times since you wrote it and have been pondering on it intensely. I've also had a good talk about it with a friend of mine.

He made me realize that I need to re-evaluate my definition of what a "finished" thing is. And your post and that talk got me to question whether I really want to finish songs or not. The things I do finish tend to be sounddesign or mixing tasks. I never consider them as finished, more like fragments of unfinished projects that never came to be, but other people do manage to make money off of selling presets or pre-mixed DAW templates etc., so who am I to say those aren't finished things? Maybe I just think I want to finish tracks because reaching back to my childhood I wanted to "make music" and "putting out finished tracks" was my definition of what someone who "makes music" does. But maybe that's just not who I am and I'm more someone who likes to solve audio engineering problems with a creative spin on them? Maybe that's... enough? I genuinely don't know. I feel like I'm either having some creative growing pains as I gain a deeper understanding of my artistic self or sliding deeper into an existential crisis.

I should mention I was diagnosed with ADHD this year and I'm currently in the process of trying out the various new meds that have since become available to me, and that in and of itself is a profound experience as I peek behind doors that have so far been locked for me and experience new states of mind. I think the effect of these things on creative work can be quite profound, for us not-neurotypical folks at least.

I don't have a lot of personal experience with meditation, because trying to engage with it, it always has felt like I'm hitting a brick wall. But since I've spent vast amounts of time researching neuroscience stuff in the hopes of finding something that... helps... I have of course heard a lot about it. An article on a site for people with ADHD made the point that while meditation is especially beneficial for people with ADHD, the lack of stimulation while not doing anything also makes it extremely hard and unpleasant for people with ADHD. They saw "just listening to music" as a valid meditation-equivalent for people with ADHD. And anecdotally I can confirm that just lying down and listening to music for an hour usually has me feeling better afterwards. However it's still hard to do for me and I haven't been able to turn that into a regular practice. Please send me one of those clinical guided meditations that you've mentioned. I'm curious to see if it's any different than what I've already got with "Dr. K's guide to meditation".

I think I never reached the point of getting detached from what I think and feel, and rumination is almost a constant for me. It's very hard for me to turn that off or distance myself from it. I also can never quite accurately describe how I feel emotionally, because I'm not actually sure most of the time and mostly "feel" in the form of bodily sensations. There's a thing called Alexithymia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia ) as I learned recently and I think I might be somewhat on that spectrum as well. I just did an online self-assessment test (TAS-20) for it and just like with the ADHD test I once took (a clinical questionnaire one!) I barely made it into the "you probably have it" category.




@Henu: Thanks a lot for your reply as well! I always appreciate your perspective on things and what you say makes a ton of sense! Iirc you have ADHD too, right? How do you manage to get back to old projects in the first place? For me it's not a struggle to take a break and leave it be, it's a struggle to ever pick a project back up again. I have no shortage of old abandoned things. Almost everything I would consider "finished pieces of music" I've made in 1 or 2 days, often with some kind of time pressure applied to it. I have abandoned stuff lying around that is so old, I don't even remember writing it anymore. Zero desire to get back to work on any of it though.

This Saturday I dialed in a couple neurofunk basses, improvised about 10 minutes of wub-wubs over the most basic looped DNB beat and then added some random voiceovers with a "demonic" voice effect chain over it that I had made a couple years back. I exported that "jam", and it came out as -5 LUFS-I without me even trying to be loud and I almost posted a screenshot in the memes thread, because the waveform looked like a solid black bar in the Reaper export window.

I listened to it 2 or 3 times and felt quite good about it! I genuinely felt like in that incoherent mess there's a worthy neurofunk track hidden, if I just chisel away at it, slice, repeat and move around improvised parts to create structure and patterns... I went grocery shopping afterwards and still heard the wub-wubs in my mind, making me feel as if I could easily form a vision how I want to shape this into a track. Felt quite good about the whole thing! Been wanting to make a track in that genre for like 10 years or so, and this was definitely the closest I've come.

The next morning I tried to work on it again and all that positivity was just gone. It felt like "work" in a bad way. The music did nothing for me, sounded like the totally incoherent improvised mess that it's always been. I don't know what that means for me though. Is creating a vibe and listening to an improv once all I need out of music? Maybe even all I should be asking from it? Is it a pure skill issue that I struggle too much with navigating the endless possibility-space of bringing order to creative chaos? Am I a fool for trying to go for finished pieces when it's just not my thing, or am I a bigger fool if I settle for cranking out half-baked improvs that only ever could amuse myself? Am I a fool for overthinking something yet again? Or was the problem as banal as me making the mistake of trying to do creative work before the Ritalin kicked in?
I stepped away from the track and haven't touched it since...




@aldous Thanks a lot to you as well, the support you provide on this forum is truly appreciated! You've not only gone above and beyond with the outstanding tech-support in my BSOD thread, I've seen you help others as well and I'm really glad you joined our little community!

Perfectionism is a real issue for me for sure! I definitely miss-allocate effort all the time and it has ultimately killed many of my private projects. Professionally (not music, but creative work nonetheless) I do better with that because I'm always on an external time constraint, but that has in turn made me resent being under that kind of pressure. So naturally when I do private stuff I want to give myself permission to just dial in guitar tones for months if I want to, instead of settling for a reasonable "good enough" tone and just writing a damn song. I want it to feel decidedly different from work, even though that's not an efficient way to make anything.




Thanks again everyone! I'll keep you updated if I make any progress on this journey.

Ruts eh? ... well unless you are trying get a job with HZ or hoping to get big bucks for your project composition ... I would say just pack it up, save it and move on to the next project and go back if ever when you feel you have better solutions with what you have. Not sure we will ever find 1 vst solution that covers all scenarios unless you win the next Spitfire roulette wheel but then that is not 1 vst but numerous hungry animals that need hours of trying and researching whilst Homay just sits there and they reel off one by one - amazing.

MartinH. said:

Iirc you have ADHD too, right? How do you manage to get back to old projects in the first place? For me it's not a struggle to take a break and leave it be, it's a struggle to ever pick a project back up again.

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Yep, guilty as charged. To answer your question in a way that's probably not helpful at all- deadlines. :D

But in reality, it's not that simple. Deadlines are what keeps me coming back, but their existence already means that I have a purpose and a goal with the music I am supposed to make.

I have a lot of friends who are working with something for fun and no purpose or "for the drawer" as we say here, but I just can't work like that or I'd go crazy because I'd try to start working with a new idea every second day and would never be able to finish them all. And then feel overwhelmed and guilty about it. Sounds probably familiar to you in that sense? So what I actually do to tackle it, is that everything I seriously write or produce needs to have a clear goal and purpose. Otherwise I won't be able to finish it.

Note that "purpose" doesn't mean "a client". For me, it simply means that unless I aim to release stuff in a form or another, I don't even start doing it properly- I only start what I intend to finish!

Now, all this is much easier to say from someone's perspective who composes music for living and thus always has some sort of "goals" in mind. It doesn't help much if someone's in a situation where he/she doesn't have deadlines, right? But actually, it does, because it's more of a state of mind. Goals are not deadlines: goals are a purpose for you to devote your time to the project. Deadlines just happen to be someone else's goals you've promised to reach for them.

If I was to give you one advice, it would be this: to get the projects actually finished, shelve the ones you don't find any utility for, and concentrate only on the ones you could see yourself releasing at some point. Got that great Doom- styled track you've been working on lately? Finish it, release it... and release your inner peace at the same time. When you find a purpose and goal for your project, you are able to finish it! Before that you're stuck in a forever limbo. Been there, done that.

As Solstice said it, "One at a Time", which for some reason started to play in my head when I was writing this down.

MartinH. said:

Thanks again everyone! I'll keep you updated if I make any progress on this journey.

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Thanks for your very kind words to me personally, but also for a very open and honest post all-round: I can't really do it justice right now, but a lot was familiar. In particular, I'm really hoping they develop a mind-reading interface for DAWs soon, so an idea that sounds great in my head can be rendered reliably outside of it...

MartinH. said:

@jcrosby: Wow, that was a lot more than I expected, thank you so much! Really! Your posts are always full of valuable insights, that's why I asked you in the first place. I feel bad not having replied sooner, but I've gone back and re-read your post multiple times since you wrote it and have been pondering on it intensely. I've also had a good talk about it with a friend of mine.

He made me realize that I need to re-evaluate my definition of what a "finished" thing is. And your post and that talk got me to question whether I really want to finish songs or not. The things I do finish tend to be sounddesign or mixing tasks. I never consider them as finished, more like fragments of unfinished projects that never came to be, but other people do manage to make money off of selling presets or pre-mixed DAW templates etc., so who am I to say those aren't finished things? Maybe I just think I want to finish tracks because reaching back to my childhood I wanted to "make music" and "putting out finished tracks" was my definition of what someone who "makes music" does. But maybe that's just not who I am and I'm more someone who likes to solve audio engineering problems with a creative spin on them? Maybe that's... enough? I genuinely don't know. I feel like I'm either having some creative growing pains as I gain a deeper understanding of my artistic self or sliding deeper into an existential crisis.

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Thanks Martin, and no worries... I'm sure you have plenty going on outside of this little corner of the web.

There's a great phrase (which perhaps you're familiar with) regarding the conversation you had about 'what a finished thing is'. It gets to the heart of what I'm assuming you guys talked about... :

"Art is never finished, only abandoned".

That's obvioiulsy philosophical, but it is a great phrase to think of if/when you toil over small details... It's also a lot easier to finish something when someone puts a deadline and consequences in front of you. Even if you're not fully happy with something but the client, library, publisher, etc are happy, then whatever you deliver is as finished as time & circumstances allow it to be...

Sometimes you're fully happy with what you deliver, other times you feel it could have been better if time were on your side... But ultimately if the person you deliver music or art to is happy that's really what matters most... "You're your own worst critic" as the saying goes...

MartinH. said:

I should mention I was diagnosed with ADHD this year and I'm currently in the process of trying out the various new meds that have since become available to me, and that in and of itself is a profound experience as I peek behind doors that have so far been locked for me and experience new states of mind. I think the effect of these things on creative work can be quite profound, for us not-neurotypical folks at least.

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Join the club! I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 12, dyslexia a year later. (It's fairly common for them to co-occur, roughly 1/3 of the time...)

ADHD is such a misnomer. It really should have been given a different common name when it was finally accepted as clinical condition, because people with ADHD tend to have incredible focus once you put something in front of them that makes sense to their brain...

The name carries some baggage with it IME, especially if it's something you're diagnosed with at an early age. When I was younger I found that no matter how many people told me that ADHD isn't actually a 'deficit', or a condition of 'intelligence', I found it hard to not let the label cast a stigma on the way I viewed myself intellectually.. Anyway, digression over...

MartinH. said:

I don't have a lot of personal experience with meditation, because trying to engage with it, it always has felt like I'm hitting a brick wall. But since I've spent vast amounts of time researching neuroscience stuff in the hopes of finding something that... helps... I have of course heard a lot about it. An article on a site for people with ADHD made the point that while meditation is especially beneficial for people with ADHD, the lack of stimulation while not doing anything also makes it extremely hard and unpleasant for people with ADHD. They saw "just listening to music" as a valid meditation-equivalent for people with ADHD. And anecdotally I can confirm that just lying down and listening to music for an hour usually has me feeling better afterwards. However it's still hard to do for me and I haven't been able to turn that into a regular practice. Please send me one of those clinical guided meditations that you've mentioned. I'm curious to see if it's any different than what I've already got with "Dr. K's guide to meditation".

I think I never reached the point of getting detached from what I think and feel, and rumination is almost a constant for me. It's very hard for me to turn that off or distance myself from it. I also can never quite accurately describe how I feel emotionally, because I'm not actually sure most of the time and mostly "feel" in the form of bodily sensations. There's a thing called Alexithymia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexithymia ) as I learned recently and I think I might be somewhat on that spectrum as well. I just did an online self-assessment test (TAS-20) for it and just like with the ADHD test I once took (a clinical questionnaire one!) I barely made it into the "you probably have it" category.

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I totally understand the way you feel about meditation, it's the same way I felt, and is also why I do/recommend 'guided meditation'. That said, I can say for sure that meditation is not only possible for people with ADHD, it is in many ways the ultimate 'case study' of the 'type of mind' that can benefit from meditation significantly.

The types of mindfulness meditations used clinically tend to frequently remind you that the mind's favorite activity is to 'wander', be 'lost in thought', 'distracted', etc. (Sound familiar??? ...) I.e. "mindfulness" is very much for the 'easily distractible' mind. It happens to be incredibly useful in reducing anxiety as well, which is a common emotion people with ADHD struggle with.



Anyway... That's my elevator pitch, and I personally have found it to be incredibly helpful. It took me a good year to be able to 'enjoy' meditating. (In the sense of it starting to feel like I wasn't constantly wrestling with distracting thinking). That said, there's also something really encouraging about 'mindfulness' meditations frequently reminding you that that is the entire point...

The mind's default behavior is to 'wander', be 'lost in thought', etc.
So much so that buddhism refers to it as "monkey mind".


I'll reply back with a link to a couple meditations... Let me just go through the ones I have (that can be linked to), to see which ones seem like an 'easy' place to start. I.E. they won't feel laborious, and they contain language reminding you that the mind's default behavior is to wander, to learn how to notice when your mind wanders, and encourages you to reserve judging yourself when you've noticed you've been lost in thoughts....

P.S. I'm not familiar with Alexithymia. I can relate to some of it in the brief section I read. Thanks, I'll look into it, as that's something I was completely unaware of...

Cheers!

CatComposer said:

Currently there is no sample library that could convey the beautiful smooth sound of a pro trumpeter, such as this:

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And I seriously doubt there ever will be. That's why people study and practice trumpet for years. If your goal is to sound like the real thing, you'll never achieve it with samples. Fortunately, you don't have to, because most people listening to your music won't know or care about the difference, as long as the music itself is something they get an emotional reaction from.

You don't need to sound like a real trumpet player. Make that trumpet something different. Do things a real trumpet player could never do. Same with every other sample library you use.

But if you want to sound like the guy in that video, buy a trumpet and practice for a couple decades. Or hire him.

Lots of really interesting insights here. It's not so much aiming for perfection cause it stops sounding real if it's too perfect. It's more like I'm unable to make my mock-up sound convincing enough. It's particularly discouraging and burning out when I try adjusting so many parameters like mic levels, EQ, expression slider, use different articulations, etc. and it still sounds synthetic while demos of other libraries just sound so good.

I guess demos can make convincing enough mock-ups because they're tailor fit and written with the library's strengths and weaknesses in mind. The Synchron Smart Orchestra demos sound fantastic and realistic enough despite the very limited articulation set because they're written with the library's strengths and weaknesses in mind. I thought the VSL VI Series would have me pretty much covered on all fronts because it has so many articulations and dynamic layers and it's dry enough to allow whatever level of reverb you wish so it's really flexible on paper but I still run into cases where it sounds synthetic.

Perhaps I should make more music that are more tailor fit to the library's strengths instead of trying to force it to fit where it doesn't belong. A lesson learned here is you're quickly going to run into a library's limitations if you try to make it do music written for human players in mind. I tried Composer Cloud before but was frustrated with it because it can't sound good on the specific music I want to do but now I realize it's not the type of music the library is built for and I was trying to make it do things it wasn't meant to do. I could get more libraries so I have a much larger toolbox to handle more cases but that's really expensive and I would just end up accumulating more libraries than I will ever need.

robgb said:

And I seriously doubt there ever will be. That's why people study and practice trumpet for years. If your goal is to sound like the real thing, you'll never achieve it with samples. Fortunately, you don't have to, because most people listening to your music won't know or care about the difference, as long as the music itself is something they get an emotional reaction from.

You don't need to sound like a real trumpet player. Make that trumpet something different. Do things a real trumpet player could never do. Same with every other sample library you use.

But if you want to sound like the guy in that video, buy a trumpet and practice for a couple decades. Or hire him.

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Ironically, I bought this:


Well, actually I needed some amount of Brass Libraries & this can contribute, more or less.