Half Shrug
By ineff on September 11, 2022 8:23 pm
I feel like I'm probably where Jimmac was last week: Q3 has been rough.
Until now it's felt worth it, because each week the payoff from WB has been getting more obvious. For a while now, each new track has been noticeably better than the last in various qualities―sometimes much better. But the flip-side is that every track has felt like a tougher act to follow. There's an expectation to continue to improve, to grow, and to never regress (whatever that would mean).
› Click here for four paragraphs of additional musings
‹ Click here for four paragraphs of additional musings
Those expectations feel like a trap. They aren't rules, and I never (consciously) decided to follow them. In reality, they aren't even defined―I discover each new expectation when I feel disappointed that I didn't meet it.
I intentionally started Weeklybeats with no expectations at all. In Q1, every finished track was a victory because the deadline was the goal. I had one (soft) personal challenge going in: I'd make every track on a hardware tracker until I was proficient enough to finish any song inside a week without major challenges from the technical aspects of constructing it. The fields was wide open in terms of quality and technique: There were 40–50+ weeks to come and time enough to do anything.
Now the year is 2/3 over, and things are different: I've finished 35 tracks (joined during week 2). There are 16 weeks left. I sometimes catch myself considering what I want to do with them. Writing a song a week is still very challenging, but not from a lack of technical proficiency. The deadline is still the goal, of course. But now it has invisible friends: targets I implicitly expect to hit, even though I won't know what they are until I miss them.
These undefined expectations have real effects: They make otherwise successful tracks feel disappointing. By Q1's standards, this week's track would have rated the same satisfaction as all the other tracks―but here in the middle of Q3, part of me wonders if its shortcomings hint that I've mis-judged my recent tracks progress (maybe I've just been lucky). But progress isn't defined either.
My guess is that this reaction is probably wrong, and probably normal. But just at this moment, it's a big challenge. Dealing with it effectively is probably one of the next skills to build, just like technical skill was in Q1. But I do wonder how the veteran WBers dealt with it.
100% made and mixed on a Dirtywave M8 Tracker.
