I was a MA/MST student at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics.
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It takes me a long time to write music. I think a lot of this just boils down to inexperience. Like most songwriters in this day and age probably do, I carry around a small voice recorder so I can sing or play in some quick notes if inspiration strikes at an odd time. I have a couple hundred of these lying around (notes, not recorders) including some duplicates if I was refining an idea. Combine that with other sketches and unreleased pieces I've done since I started using computers to make music (around middle school) and I probably have about 300-400 ideas and short pieces. Mind you, most of these are only a few seconds long. Then I remember reading this interview with Moby: http://dancemusic.about.com/od/artistshomepages/a/MobyInterview.htm where he says "I've got, altogether, around four to five thousand unreleased songs." That's right, THOUSAND. Complete songs, not just ideas (I probably have about 40-50 complete songs, including covers and released songs on my website). Now, volume isn't everything of course. But maybe one of the more important distinguishing features between professional composers / songwriters and, well, me is that they have written literally one hundred times the number of songs that I have. Chris Carlson is very fond of this segment by Ira Glass: "Ira Glass on Storytelling, part 3 of 4" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY which you should probably listen to if you are in a creative field and haven't already, but the relevant section to my point is where he says "the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work." And I think about people like Jonathan Coulton and his Thing A Week, or Jake "Virt" Kaufman whose website enumerates over a decade's worth of consistent work, or Andrew of "Songs To Wear Pants To" and one thing is clear - regardless of if you like their music or not these people made a conscious decision to produce a lot of music and I would classify them as objectively successful in that they 1) are making enough money to get by, 2) have fans and 3) seem to be doing what they love. So back to my original point. It takes a long time for me to make music. But what I should really say is that it takes me a long time to make music and I'm still generally not that satisfied with the result. But I still enjoy it a great deal, and maybe by the time I've written 5,000 songs I'll be more pleased with my work. Hmm, if I get into algorithmic composition I wonder if the generated pieces will count... Anyway, keep checking back. I'll get some chiptunes up as soon as they are ready. And as always thank you for reading my blog.