“Write drunk; edit sober”
Problem:
Sometimes during music-making, we find moments of amazing creativity and flow. But because we have in mind the ultimate end goal of “a great track,” we sometimes stop mid-flow to edit, correct, or otherwise disrupt the creation process. And once we do, it can be difficult to get back into the flow.
Creativity is an intrinsically messy and uninhibited process. Editing, on the other hand, is about refinement and order. “Write drunk; edit
sober”—a quote often attributed (most likely incorrectly) to author Ernest Hemingway—uses drunkenness versus sobriety as a metaphor about levels of self-control and the importance of working both with and without restraint. Both modes of working are necessary to create
something good, but problems can arise when we don’t keep a clear division between the two. Allowing them to overlap runs the risk of breaking our creative flow.
Solution:
Force yourself to compartmentalize your work into two discrete phases.
During the creation phase, your goal should be to capture as much
material as possible. Only move forward in time. Delete nothing. Once you’ve recorded something, consider it finished. Better yet, forget about it entirely and move on to the next thing. Aim for speed and quantity, judge nothing, and be prepared to make lots of mistakes.
Once you’ve captured a lot of material (maybe after a set amount of time, or simply once you get bored) switch to the editing phase. Now, your goal is to carefully refine the material that you generated during the
creation phase. Resist the urge to generate anything new during this process, and instead ruthlessly delete, trim, reorder, or otherwise curate the material you made earlier. It’s likely that you’ll throw away the
majority of what you made, and this is healthy. Most of what we make in a truly judgment-free creation mindset is likely to be terrible.
A side benefit of working so freely during the creation phase is that you may find things during the editing phase that are actually amazing but are unusable within the context of the project you’re currently working on. When that happens, just save the material that’s worth saving (but is wrong for the current song) into a “scraps” folder (see Scraps and
Sketches). Then the next time you’re beginning a new track but aren’t in the mood to start from scratch, simply pull something interesting out of your scraps folder. Depending on how developed your scraps are, you might be able to pick one up and move directly into a new editing phase.
A good technical approach to working during the creation phase is to always be recording. Even if you’re just improvising at the keyboard and have no plan or direction, be sure to capture every note you play. A
common working method for electronic musicians is to use the DAW as the recording device but use hardware or other sources outside of the computer to generate sound. A collection of synthesizers generating MIDI and/or audio lets you get your hands on something that doesn’t feel like an editing environment, allowing you to step away from the DAW (and its inherent bias towards editing). Press record, then play and tweak knobs, capturing everything you do as a kind of free-form jam. While jamming, try to forget that you’re recording. Don’t try to make something perfect. Simply indulge in the uninhibited freedom of exploring sound. Follow your instincts—if something is working, let that lead you in a direction. If something isn’t working, abandon it, but do so without stopping the recording. The trick is to stay out of
judgment mode as much as possible. Simply capture as much as you can, following your instinctive sense of what’s right. Don’t worry about hard drive space. If you really need to reclaim the space, you can do that later during the editing phase.
Even if you work entirely in the computer, try to find some working methods that are somehow analogous to this physical division between instruments and editors. For example, maybe use one DAW as your creation space and another as your editing space. By treating these as distinct virtual environments, it may be easier to switch between the two modes of working. Alternatively, find a collection of instruments and effects that allow you to create lots of material in an evolving, organic, connected way. For example, modular synthesizers and arpeggiators, even virtual ones, can be great sources of material during the creation phase. Start your recording even before you’ve started building a
modular patch, so that you can catch any happy accidents that occur on the way.
If your DAW allows for comprehensive routing options between tracks, try capturing both MIDI and audio simultaneously during the creation phase. This will give you more ways to edit later and provide more raw fodder for refinement. It will also save time in the editing process
because you don’t have to listen to everything twice—the MIDI and audio will contain analogous information, so you can listen through a single pass and then decide whether to rework the MIDI, the audio, or both.
The balance between play (creation) and work (editing) is necessary to generate good results. Like Subtractive Arranging, this approach works because it allows you to remove rather than create, and it’s much easier to decide that something is bad once it exists than it is to make
something good from nothing. It saves you from having to make the
“right” thing the first time, when you may be struggling to simply make anything at all.
Note: I wrote the first draft of this chapter in a text editor with an option called “Hemingway Mode,” which disables the Delete key. At the end of the creation phase, it was nearly 2000 words long. After editing, it’s about half that, and the paragraphs are almost completely reordered.
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