Separating yourself from your art

If you're a creative person and have ever released anything then you’ll probably know what deafening silence is like. However if you somehow managed to promote it to the level where people talk about it, then unless you have created a somehow perfect work of art, someone will think it sucks. I mean, fair enough if 99.9% of people think it sucks then, sorry, it probably does suck but even if it's fantastic, super-innovative and mind blowing there will be a contingent of people out there who think it's awful, the worst, and that it should be burned, and they'll happily go onto the internet to say so… repeatedly… whenever it’s mentioned.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of people will take that kind of behaviour as a personal insult. They think THEY are being insulted, that the poster's hatred is an indictment of their failures as a human being rather than an opinion on the art they created. Their self defence will kick in and they’ll start to feel hatred towards that person and, in extreme examples like the whole Digital Homicide / Jim Sterling debacle, they can go Captain Ahab like a motherfucker, become convinced that any criticism is an attempt to destroy them and manage to do a fine job of destroying themselves through their insane crusading.

While an extreme example, Digital Homicide are a good case study. Had they ignored the bad reviews they got, or took it in good grace they'd just be another game manufacturer with a bad rep, doing their thing (Of which there are many). But because they decided to viciously attack the reviewer, and even worse, attempt legal action, a ton of groups appeared on Steam to attack Digital Homicide and expose them for being assholes. All of this exploded in the end with Digital Homicide trying to get the personal info of a load of steam users from Valve so he could serve them with legal summons. Valve extended a gigantic middle finger and said, "fuck off, you're not selling your shite games here anymore" and boom. No more business.

Whatever art form you work in, this is a perfect example of how not to handle an audience. I've seen bands do the same and either self-destruct or get damn close because of it. And this is why you need to separate your creations from yourself.

Here's a few things to remember:

1) Exaggerating hate is a comic technique.

Ever since people hooked onto the idea that using vicious language can be funny, it's been used pretty much whenever something is seen as sub par. In fact it’s become a knee jerk reaction. "The new album by BottyChop is worse than the holocaust", or "I'd rather dine on the faeces of a rancid goat for three weeks than read that book again". This is pretty much a normal reaction now. Yes, the shit of a rancid goat is now normal.

So in truth, "The new album by BottyChop is worse than the holocaust", actually means, "I didn't enjoy the BottyChop album very much". But that doesn't gain any AWESOMEZ points or likes/retweets from people who found it funny, so the exaggeration comes out. This is simply how our language has evolved, nearly everything is hyperbolic. It's either so amazing it sets the sky ablaze or so terrible it raises demons made out of sick and dogshit from the bowels of the Earth.

2) Your mind will concentrate on the bad

The human brain is a wonderful thing, it's also a massive bastard, as pretty much anyone who’s ever tried to sleep can tell you. You can read 20 things saying how great your work is and then read one saying it's wank and it can send you into a despair spiral. All of the nice things people said meant nothing, they didn't mean it, they were just being nice, but this one person who said it was monkey turds did, THEY WERE THE ONLY HONEST ONE. It gets under your skin and plants a fast growing seed of self doubt.

Combatting this can be hard, obviously creating distance between you and your art helps, but sometimes that's not enough and it's why a lot of people don't google their work. Basically the old axiom of "you can't please everyone" is good to keep in mind here, even if it sounds lame. Because it happens to be 100% true.

3) Sometimes these comments are made with hope in mind

Sometimes the source of vitriol can be a perceived betrayal. They loved your earlier work but the direction you took your next piece in is pretty much anathema to them, so they spit venom in your face. As an example I'll give my own feelings on ReFX the plugin manufacturer.

ReFX once did innovative cool VST plugins like QuadraSID, PlastiCZ and even the oft overused Vanguard. Now those plugins aren’t even for sale on their website, as if they’re an embarrassment, and all they sell is their lame rompler, expansions for it and stupid sample packs for lazy arses who can't be arsed to make their own sounds. I've poured enough salty hatred on that company in the past for changing from a company that catered to people like me to a company that caters for people I have... frankly... not a lot of respect for.

So if ReFX did a 180 and went back to making proper plugins would it make me happy? Hell yeah, I'd jump right on that bandwagon. Because all of my hatred is, at the back of my hind brain, an attempt to get them to listen and realize their error. I don't hate THEM, I hate the decision they made.

4) Opinions change

Blade Runner, Considered a classic now, was universally panned upon release, and it took about 10 years for people to truly appreciate it for the masterwork it was. Maybe you're just ahead of your time. Maybe you made Blade Runner.

5) This is release focussed

If you'd brought out a different album they wouldn't be insulting you. They’d probably be praising you. This is pretty much the absolute proof of the need for art/artist separation. Think of Pre and Post-"Play" Moby. Before Play he was a techno artist with a good rep. When Play came out it was loved by the media initially and then it was severely overplayed so people started to hate him. Had he released an album nothing like Play instead, things would have been different.

6) Some people just ARE assholes.

Yeah, there's no avoiding this one. They're not assholes because they hate your stuff. The fact that they hate your stuff is immaterial. Some people are just complete.... unavoidable... assholes. And there's no excuse for that, you just have to write them off.

So I showed you earlier how NOT to handle your audience with Digital Homicide, so how do you?

You can choose to ignore it all, and that's a valid approach. You're a creative and you can let your art speak for you, and if this piece doesn't work for people, maybe the next will. The one thing you can't do is go in accusatory or turning it into an insult fight, well... unless you want to be perceived as an asshole.

Ok, strap your armour on, you're going in.

If you engage with someone who starts from a vitriolic standpoint, they are very unlikely to flip round immediately. It's more likely to be like trying to calm a wild animal. You have to keep your cool, treat them with respect, even when they're not treating you with it and eventually they come round. If you have a fragile ego this can be hard, because they may resort to personal insults (you may have learned to separate art from the artist but they may not have) and if you need a way out make sure you leave it friendly, DO NOT return personal insults.

A lot of the time people just want to be heard, they want to know their opinion counts for something. Show you’ve heard it and that you respect it and people who don’t necessarily like your work will be more in your court when the next one comes out.

Anyway, sorry this article kind of petered out. But the message is this:

You are not what you make. Nothing you make could ever contain all the complexities and contradictions that make you you. At best all it can ever be is a footprint in the sand, an echo of who you were when you made it. A person you no longer are as you are ever changing.

So don’t make the mistake others make. Separate yourself from your art.

How I started using Trackers again!

Yeah, so I'm back using a tracker again. Who would have thunk it? Not me, but then I can't even imagine what a wasps penis looks like, so what do I know? (is it black and yellow too? it's a fair question!)

So let me give you a bit of that thing called context, which sounds like a document full of lies but isn't.

CONTEXT! YEAAAAH BOY!

Back before the internet was "a thing" and before Bieber was even a sperm I started writing music on the Commodore Amiga using trackers like SoundTracker and later Protracker. Over the course of the over 400 tunes I wrote, the display that originally looked like a bunch of incoherent binary information became second nature and editing music became etched into my muscle memory. To paraphrase the matrix, "I don't even see the code any more, I just see Ab minor 7".

But time and tide waits for no software and by the mid 90s, a 4 track low quality sampler wasn't cutting the mustard any more and like most people I started moving towards the more "professional" music packages with piano roll editors and horizontal song displays and stuff.

Time moved on and I hadn't really thought about trackers for a while. I owned a license for Renoise it was more out of deference for history than to use as an actual DAW. Then there was a discovery....

A friend of mine found on an old hard drive, and on that hard drive were around a quarter of the 400 tracker tunes I wrote back in the day. It was like finding a hoard of treasure! Treasure that, sure, for the most part was actually gold painted horse turds, but if you were willing to brave brown hands there were indeed some gold coins to be found.

But in order to listen to them I needed to reinstall renoise, which I grudgingly did. I opened it up, and instantly understood the information in front of me, I knew which keys were which notes and how to enter patterns efficiently by bashing the enter key along with the notes for the correct timing, all the muscle memory was still there. It was weird, as if no time had passed.

I found the folder with the old mods in, opened them up and listened to them. Some were abysmal. Properly clown music offensive. Totally not worth saving, but some were nearly good, and some were pretty much already good. I was pleasantly surprised. The question was... What to do with them? The sound quality wasn't up to scratch, some of the composition was a bit iffy... Hmmm...

Thing on a Spring!

And thus, "Thing on a Spring" was born. I decided to take something old (Amiga Mods) and make them sound older (like C64 music). I dusted off my old copy of QuadraSID (a synth sadly no longer sold by the company that developed it, as they've become obsessed with instead making boring sample packs and adding to their EDM rompler for "instant EDM hits". Yeah, nice one lads, I'm not bitter about that at all.) and got to replacing the sounds and tweaking up the tunes to make them better.

I learned a lot about my old self.

I learned how musically naive he was and how the concept of "groove" seemed to be completely beyond him. But I also learned how that naivety would sometimes cause him to make structural decisions or note choices that I wouldn't have made now. How, through time, with all I'd gained I'd also lost something.

So I started to wonder... Was it because of the method I was using to write? Were all those piano roll editors and complex interfaces actually getting in the way and making me make safe choices?

So, to test my theory I started writing a tune for Thing on a Spring from scratch and it turned out that... yeah.. It was. My writing was a lot more dangerous on a tracker.

Trackers have changed a lot!

I absolutely have Renoise to thank for this. the newer features like the grid editor meant I could get into the nitty gritty of each individual column and unlike the old Amiga trackers which encouraged repetition, the way Renoise handles it's structure almost dares you to change with the wind and be more detailed with your songwriting rather than with your automation which is where traditional DAWs feel like they push you.

One of the best things is being able to see harmonically exactly where you are on one screen. So you can easily avoid (or cause) note clashes. You can instantly see where you can modulate to a different key because of the surrounding notes and create a more interesting musical structure. You don't have to painfully switch between 10 different midi streams to check all the notes, all of which makes you less inclined to bother. No, it's all in front of your face. It's just.... There!

Also, you want to do one bar of 25/16? Sure! Just make that pattern 25 lines long. Done. You don't have to piddle about with the DAW and make an individual midi stream for each instrument and then make sure you change the global time signature in both positions otherwise lining up where you are with bars will be a pain in the long run... ugh. Instead of fighting AGAINST you being creative with structure, it works WITH you. All of a sudden it totally makes sense why VSnares uses a tracker. How could he possibly use anything else? His stuff is too harmonically and structurally complex for him to consider using a "traditional" DAW.

Even things I thought wouldn't be possible in a tracker such as repeating contrarhythms are easy using renoises phrase tool. 5/4 over 7/8 over 6/4? Yep. Phrase editor will sort you out, at the cost of you not seeing the notes any more (but given you didn't see them in other DAWs it's not much of a tradeoff)

In short I suddenly feel like I have the tool that works the way my creativity works and, weirdly enough in a cyclic fashion, it's really close to the tool I started with.

But Renoise isn't perfect. The way it handles midi pitchbend is frankly rubbish and even with the workarounds there's no "perfect middle", so the closest to the middle of the pitchbend range you can get is either very slightly sharp or very slightly flat and without using some form of custom device to create inertia there'll be no smooth MIDI pitchbend for you anyway!

Also the way it records audio is pants if you want to use it like a traditional audio tracking machine to, say, record a guitar part over the whole track. It's so bad at that kind of thing it's not worth bothering.

However, those tradeoffs are totally worth it. If I want to make an electronic track that's harmonically complex and structurally interesting there's no better tool in my box (ooer).

So here I sit, in 2017, using a tracker for music, just like I did in 1990. I'm looking forward to seeing what it brings. But as a start, the Thing on a Spring album, "6581 Commodore Boulevard" which inspired this journey will be released by Component Recordings in February.

That's right.... *cough*

*breathes*

The Thing on a Spring album, "6581 Commodore Boulevard" which inspired this journey will be released by Component Recordings in February.

*clears throat*