Finishing Songs

 This year I finished 39 songs, 35 released. Most are on Bandcamp, some on SoundCloud, three on streaming platforms.

I say this not flex like some 100 beats a day, Bro, but more to log my progress, and talk about my process and goals for 2025.

There are three things that made this level of output possible...

1: Inexperience - I’m new to electronic music having completed my first year of taking it seriously on 21st this year. Being inexperienced, or a newb if you prefer, has allowed me not to get hung-up on perfectionism. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t spend too long on each song, or treat it like your darling. If there is only so much you know, there’s only so much you can do with each song before you throw it out into the world, rough and unready, far perfected, but finished in terms of what I’m currently capable of.

2: Experience - Though new to electronic music making, synths, drum machines, grooveboxes, and DAWs I’ve been a muso off and on since I first started on guitar in 87, wrote my first song in 1990, I played in local scene bands in the early 90s. So I knew more song structure and songwriting, and never had that trapped in a loop experience when I started with electronic music, because I was always aiming to write songs in the traditional structure that I knew.

I was also lucky in that I had previously learnt the benefits of quantity over quality for people starting out in an artistic endeavour. For a short time, I was part of a hard working writing group that specialised in short form literary fiction, or short stories in a less pretentious nomenclature. 

The teacher encouraged beginners not to write that huge doorstop novel they had in them, spending years slaving away perfecting and workshopping your story, falling into all the beginners’ writing mistakes and traps, but to churn out short stories in the 4k word range, one after another, write, edit, submit, forget, move on to the next one, repeat until you get the feedback, experience, and publications you need to grow as writer. You can learn so much more, and do it a lot quicker this way, and this is what I’ve been doing with my songs. Churn to learn, I call it.

There’s also the matter of taste. I don’t have the best, or even great, or good taste in music, but my taste in music, though similar to many others with similar background and mindset to me, is uniquely mine, and taking those tastes into my music makes my creativity uniquely mine too. Which is quite handy for an artist.

my music

3: Discipline: This year I put my creativity on a schedule. Every day, ‌I went into our little box-room and made music for two hours. It worked wonders. I never had to wait for inspiration. I never sat staring at an empty timeline, wondering what to do. Again, part of this is being a newb to electronic music making. There were always so many genres, techniques, sounds, and VSTs that I wanted to try out and experiment with. My afternoon sessions became more like play than work. I would constantly get drawn into what I was doing, hit flow state and before I knew it, two hours had flashed by, and the only thing making me stop was my puppy whining to be let out of his crate. Before I knew it, going into the spare room to create music every day had become a habit, and I’d learned to love the process. 

So, that’s how I could churn to learn and finish 39 songs this year. Of course, I do not claim that all, or even any of these songs are great, but most are okay, and one or two might be almost good (ish). But they’re finished, and I learned a lot about creating them.

I do not expect to put out that many songs in 2025 for several reasons. First, I need to delve deeply into the fundamental basics of making electronic music, which involves slowing down, experimenting, and approaching things more in terms of exercises, tutorials, and learning through play, without intending to create a song or any finished product other than knowledge and experience that I can use in songs later.

I’d also like to work on songs that are based on guitar and lyrics, and those will take me longer. Writing songs with a guitar, an A4 pad, and a pen is how I started out what seems like a lifetime ago. Not only do I have to grease the creaky and rusted gears of my lyric writing machine, I have to learn how to record those types of guitar and vocal based songs. Oh, and yeah, I also have to learn how to sing to a standard that doesn’t make me want to die, when I hear it played back. That or find a rare singer that can’t write lyrics.

I also need to find time to work on my ‘writing’ writing this year as the royalties from my TTRPG Wulfwald are funding this experiment in music making, and they won't last forever, so time to write the next adventure.

So, whatever happens, I’ll be in my tiny box room that doubles as a home studio and writers den, every morning and every afternoon, but I doubt I’ll ever see a year where I churn out 39 songs again. Whether that’s a bad thing or a good thing, only time will tell. 

Guess I’ll do another Blog in 2026 and let you know. So here’s to a creative 2025 for us all, and I hope whatever you do in the creative sphere brings you joy.