Insecurity

[vurt]

The more I studied music theory, less I liked to make music.. I actually quit making it for a year maybe? After that year I accidentally found the joy again and now the knowledge is just a tool, not that I'd know much but still.

thats sort of like anything when you study it. i love cinema and film but i hate the stuff i had to study. the mind always drifted to other types of cinema and films than the ones i had to study for exams because, studying is like work, gets boring after a while.

for me, doing a degree in music, as it got more intense, i couldn't enjoy even listening to my favourite music anymore as it was all about listening to the structure/timing/key blah blah...
i couldn't switch it off
once i learned how to just listen again it was ok

[jancivil]

Lotta people develop or receive a false sense of the necessity of the theory they receive.

I'm not a filmmaker, so my sense of a film criticism class is exactly that, though, I dropped it, I didn't want to analyze the film as it turned out.

The knowledge is just a tool, to take it as some other priority is a mistake. I didn't go for a degree as I'm just not that kind of personality, I moved away from Western Music after 2 1/2 years and I was sick of the regimen, I had what I came for.

Knowing what's specifically going on in a music can take the mystique right out of it, but that for me was a negotiation I could live with early.

[jancivil]

I did things like FAWM for several years in a row, and I noticed that each year, I made fewer and fewer songs. My first FAWM I did like 30 songs. The next year was 14, the year after that was 10, after that 6, after that 5, after that was 2, and then the past few years I signed up but didn't even manage to make a single song. I was too critical of myself.

Can't tell what the acronym stands for,

feb. album in a week month i think?
designed to get people hitting a wall, just to do something!

the idea being not to be too critical, an idea a day. get it down!

Having this as a metric and as a motivation to be less critical seems to have had 1) the opposite effect and 2) didn't work on teh Funky Lime.
I can't relate at all, anyway.
"Just to do something". Where's the actual problem there, I would ask.

[vurt]

yeah, didn't seem to work for funky.
was just letting you know the acronym, and explaining a little.
not trying to sell the idea

[vurt]

Knowing what's specifically going on in a music can take the mystique right out of it, but that for me was a negotiation I could live with early.

it wasn't so much that for me personally, just i found myself counting along and analysing everything, stood in queues in shops working out the changes for some shite piece of radio pop id hopefully never hear again. listening to music i liked became an exercise rather than a relaxation method

like i said, was just as it intensified, towards finals. but for a time it did worry me that id be stuck like that

[mdstudio]

Let me preface this by saying that I'm a total noob, especially when it comes to music theory, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

It sounds to me like you're letting external expectations and music theory rules dictate how you should make your music.

But here's the thing - no matter how good your (or anyone else's) music is, some people will like it, and for some others, it may not be their cup of tea.

As for the theory, it's just a tool, and what I mean by that is that, in music, the more complex doesn't necessarily mean better. It's kind of like the best public speech isn't the one that uses the longest words from the dictionary. The mastery of language (and music) helps, but sometimes simple is perfect.

What I'm trying to say is that these criteria are subjective and in your case, not only are they distracting, they're suffocating your love for music!

Make music that sounds good to you. Follow the rules or break them - it's all up to you.

Even if you're feeling discouraged and frustrated you can have those emotions inspire you and you can express them in one of your songs! Don't worry about rules or other people's opinions, just let the music flow straight from your heart.

Create a song that feels authentic and true to you. When you hear it you think to yourself: This is me! Or this is how I felt at one point in time.

And if you create a song like this, you may decide to never let a single soul hear it, it's completely up to you. But if you do share it with others, the authenticity and humanness will likely mean way more to the listener than a super sophisticated chord progression (But we are on KVR so you never know )

[jancivil]

There are no 'music theory rules'. If you want to adhere to a particular modi operandi, of a style and the procedures are known you have a set of guidelines.

If you take them as rules, you're inevitably going to find that the exemplary model (take JS Bach) failed in many cases to either know the rule or at least to care about it.

You can solidify your own ideas, finding them to work a certain way per se, in order to seek to replicate them in future and you're establishing 'music theory' for it. If you realize, 'hey, IV^7 to I sounds like this with only part of the chord changing, that's pretty cool', all by yourself you've done music theory.

[jancivil]

OTOH there will be reasons some things don't seem to work very well. This may be because the expectation of the style was not met. If you totally ignore the normal procedures some will call rules in part-writing, for the classical sort of effect, the classical sort of effect will tend to be botched.

I have no real idea what the original problem is technically, it's all speculative so I must deal in the general statements in the abstract.