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DJ Chien

a Man got to eat

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Hail everyone!

 

It seems to me that the question hasn't been risen yet and if that's the case, please pardon me.

 

This is the fatal question of combining Music-making as a need in life / and still owning enough resources to live.

The easy answer is : be a professional musician. Then you make music all the day and it brings you enough money to eat and everything else.

But first, who is a professional musician here and manages to live this way ?

And second, what does it precisely mean ?

 

I mean, there are countless ways to combine music and money-making.

 

- I think about Mr.Bill for instance,who makes amazing non-mainstream compositions - according to me - , and whose only resources come from the albums and producing-tutoriels that he puts on pay-what-you-want download on the Internet. And the guy manages to live like that. To me, this is against every law of probability but this man fucking exists.

- There is also this composer Tony William who also composes what he wants all the day, very strange and hard-listening music, but who earns his living by creating the soundtracks of every Foresight's ballet. That means that this guy can do what he wants and live, thanks to the fact that he met some ballet-creator one day and that was it.

 

The whole point here is a debate/recollection of ideas about : how can a musician make the music he wants and also live ? (assuming that the music that we love isn't necessarily the most money-friendly)

 

Especially in the world of Psybient/Chill-tempo, but the question is opened to every kind of experience, even for non-electronic music.

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 To me, this is against every law of probability but this man fucking exists.

 

This raises the question our faith in statistics is simply misplaced. Science has told us we live in a universe of impossibilities. Open the mind, rely less on the eyes.

 

Accept the uncertainty of life. The first step to living in order.

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interesting question, personally the idea of being dependend financially on my music creative process scares me. If inspiration and ideas are not there i would like not to force myself to produce. 

 

I think possible direction of combining music and making living can be:

 

1 - make living with related to music works.

It can be studio work in other styles, making soundtracks or commercial, sound ingeneering for live concerts , theaters.

 

2 - to work part time or freelance on some non-music job.

In western world the cost of living is very high, so this will probably require either to find a way of minimizing you daily spendings, either finding a higher payed jobs that will allow to work less (for example you work 4h in office and use free time for art).

 

3 - make music in commercially succesful genre. 

This one is probably the harders path. The first things that comes to mind is psytrance. It is incredibly competitive genre and find your way to the top will require many hours of training, but it can be well payed in the end. And the advantage of this path is that you will learn many things about the music and productions.

 

looking forward to read other thoughs about all this.

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I know quite a lot of local producers that has another part of even full time job in addition to making music... Being a succesful psy producer isnt easy ;).

 

Yea I think one's goal shouldn't be to make money from a musical career. Do whatever it takes to make music. If money comes then wonderful, otherwise its not overly important.

 

Or put another way, do what you got to do to feed yourself, if that so happens to be by what you are currently doing then great! :)

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Er...

 

Tough, tough... Ok like some of you fellas I'm also strongly against the idea of earning my living through the music I do. Years ago, I quit all the bands I was in, because they wanted to go professional.

 

Since then I make the day by doing music-related jobs as you suggested Gagarin (as a sound engineer for gigs, and instruments rental). The main issue in this is time. Over the last years the time I've managed to allow to music producing has been drastically reduced. Either I quit sleeping and compose during the night or I make ultra-intense geek-composing sessions during the few holidays my jobs permit.

I'm thinking about working less on gigs and much more as a studio engineer. Maybe it would be easier to find time to work on my own productions if I actually work as a studio producer. At least, all the gear would be close to hands, which is definitely not the case if I work in a concert venue or a tour bus.

 

Or maybe moving to a country where life is much cheaper :P

 

From what I see, doing a non-music related part/full-time job to get money is the most usual way and sometimes it seems more or less ok (I'm thinking about this man from Easily Embarrassed who works as an electrician and whose music is genius)...but most of the time I've heard very frustrating reports.

 

 

Also, money isn't the real deal here. I prefer the word " resources " because what we need is not money itself, but rather food to eat and sometimes shelter, medicines and music equipment. All stuff which can be acquired by other means (during some months I've lived with very few money but thanks to some people benevolence and squats I got something to eat and sleep under without that).

I'm not looking for a magic formula which would be 100% successful for the rest of one's life.

Just trying to gather experiences and ideas.

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Er...

 

Tough, tough... Ok like some of you fellas I'm also strongly against the idea of earning my living through the music I do. Years ago, I quit all the bands I was in, because they wanted to go professional.

 

 

 

Please don't mistake my posts as saying I'm against earning a living through music. I just don't think it should be the goal. The goal is to make music. If the only way to do that properly is by earning a living from it, then by all means do it.

 

Looking at the reality of the psychill universe, it will be very hard to make a living just on releases. My best guess is to combine with other offerings, like mastering, teaching (I for one am constantly looking for tutorials on music making and still haven't found any on psychill/psybient specifically).

 

Moving to a less expensive place, as you suggest, is certainly a good idea.

 

I've found that when one pursues what they love to do, in this case for you, music, the resources follow, however they don't come right away. Usually some disappointment is needed, some heartache, lots of hard work...the soul growth.

 

And even then, if it doesn't happen, as its not guaranteed, to feel blessed in doing what you love and sharing it with people for their own enjoyment and growth.

 

I'm sure there will be very practical advice to come here soon!

 

Pax!

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In my case... I have a full time Job, and yes... is frustrating, because i don't have time to do music, :-(, I don't know when will be the the day to return to the studio...
To me... if I could live with the money refund of my music sells and Live acts then for sure that I will leave any other Job, because the most I like is to produce music. But that is so difficult... I don't have free time to involve on these target.

 

Greetings!

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What Raul said applies to me as well, more or less... With that said, I believe this is perfectly normal for most us. Don't forget, its the meteoric rise of computer technology that enabled most of us to spend time with musical composition. Before that, it was way too expensive to get the necessary gear and you probably couldn't make them fit in your bedroom! So I find it perfectly normal, actually wonderful, to have a great many people coming home after their day jobs and express themselves creatively through music. In our day and age, with ever-longer work hours, ever-lousier salaries, passive entertainment and a mindless consumer attitude, every one should have a way to express him or herself creatively, be it music or anything else really. That's a huge accomplishment in itself and helps to bring balance back in to our lives.

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I agree with this one!

 

And I really think that this trend is gonna develop further and further. The.. mh... Music-production-just-needs-a-computer-nowadays Revolution has proven its efficiency so rapidly and in so many places that it has become a n°1 candidate to be the "normal way" of music emergence for the next generations. And it is still so young a movement.

 

But - unless the world is a weird fairytale and everyone in the next ten years will have a digital music workstation in their kitchen on the top of the dishwasher - I guess there will still be some people who use music (or any art) as a times to times way to express creativity ; and some others who got to do music as a primary activity in life, because they're fucking maniaco-junkies of the groove who need their dose (unfortunately I'm one of those).

Electronic music has created new instruments and open the doors for so many newcomers.

But the old issues remain.

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making a living off of music is really difficult in my experience... especially with this music scene. nobody taught me anything, every chance I could get I learned more and did experiments and tried to figure things out. I happen to have spent many years working on my craft and over time I've built up my music and worked on projects for free to learn and to hope to gain more experience so that I can make a living out of it someday in the future, when momentum builds up. my goal is to try to turn it into a business but I'm still in the early phases of it. however, I don't believe that making money should be the primary goal when expressing oneself, but if people believe in it and want to support it, that's always a plus... the primary goal is to learn and reflect, stay true to the music and what you want to emit

 

what's most important to me is the sound and the message of the music

 

I don't know where this life will lead me in the near future but I just simply go one step at a time..

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In my personal experience, being able to make music whenever I want has had the opposite effect to what I had wished for. Because it's the only thing I 'should' be doing with my time, there's this enormous amount of pressure to do it and I simply don't enjoy it any more. I'm really looking forward to starting postgraduate study, setting up a freelance proofreading business, or getting a part time job. I feel that, because the spare time available to make music will be reduced, I will treasure it more and get more out of it. Well, I hope that's what is going to happen, anyway! I also think it's essential to experience life as fully as possible, as part of mainstream society as well as being immersed in the world of psy music, in order to get the 'raw material' from which musical inspiration comes, and in order to spread the love generated through psy music culture back into the mainstream.

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I have to agree with snowdrop on this. I got in my most creative and musically productive period AFTER I got a full time job, got married and became a father! If you asked me 5 years ago, I'd say it's impossible to produce music under such obligations and time constraints. However, these obligations and time constraints forced me to become much more focused. Forced me to decide what is important, fulfilling for me to spent my little precious leisure time on. Video games? Sports viewing? Book reading (ok, I admit I should read more :D )? This decision made me realize how passionate I am about music, really. So, in a way, time pressure helped me find out a bit more about myself! And that is priceless.

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I have to agree with snowdrop on this. I got in my most creative and musically productive period AFTER I got a full time job, got married and became a father! If you asked me 5 years ago, I'd say it's impossible to produce music under such obligations and time constraints. However, these obligations and time constraints forced me to become much more focused. Forced me to decide what is important, fulfilling for me to spent my little precious leisure time on. Video games? Sports viewing? Book reading (ok, I admit I should read more :D )? This decision made me realize how passionate I am about music, really. So, in a way, time pressure helped me find out a bit more about myself! And that is priceless.

 

It's really good to hear that it's worked like that for you Spinnet - I'll remain more positive about my upcoming life changes in the light of this information :)

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I think you need to consider what it means to, day in day out, be making a living from making music.  How much of your time will be spent doing the making music, and how much time do you have to spend doing things that support that in order to turn your output in to dollar... this includes things like self promotion, self education, negotiating with labels, understanding what your listeners like, gigs, administration, keeping up with fans, etc.  I'm not in the business of music, so I don't know how much time and energy this would require, but it's surely stuff that needs doing in order to be viable.  Writing some tunes and putting them up on bandcamp is certainly not enough - you'll need to be comfortable with being an entrepreneur.  In my mind I can imagine, as a struggling musician, a tension... trying to figure out how much time to spend doing the fun stuff and the boring stuff... I imagine there's a lot more boring stuff to do than fun stuff!

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Since using Bandcamp and self releasing the music income now pays for music gear....software, synths etc. So it has become self supporting which is nice.

 

It's a little bit easier these days to combine creativity with a normal job as music technology is that much more immediate. For a few hundred quid you can stuff a pc with a fully functioning studio in a few hours. Back in the Atari / sampler / synths days putting a studio together was expensive and time consuming. Now you can lob a loop from Ableton into a sequencer and it will time stretch itself instead of spending a good couple of hours lining up a loop in a sampler. My first sampler had 8 mono samples, 30 seconds of mono sampling time and cost me £500 second hand. Do we appreciate this? Probably not, it probably just pushes our expectations up.

 

In general there are very very few people making a living from music nowadays. Even Philip Glass worked as a taxi driver and plumber while he wrote music for 18 musicians. Then within that larger music industry you have to realise that psy chill is a very very small niche. I think part of Ott's success (aside from writing very good stuff) is the fact that dub music has a certain crossover element. Dub and reggae is very popular with a broad range of people beyond the psychill community. He can tour America and play with other dub or dubstep artists as well as the psychedelic festivals. Good formula that.

 

Life did throw up the opportunity a few years ago to work more solidly on music. So I took it. And I can say that immersing yourself in something is a very worthwhile thing to do in life, particularly if it's something that you are really interested in. I definitely took my productions up to another level. Through teaching myself and asking questions on forums and now I know my way around the gear I can easily write good sounding music around a normal job (but then again I don't have children). But in terms of sitting down all day every day to write music, my experience is that it does suck a little bit of the magic or of it. But it also has its own rewards.

 

But that sense of achievement can be achieved in plenty of areas of life. Doesn't have to be music. Plastering, being a waiter, understanding finance... There's a joy in life from applying yourself to something and seeing the rewards. For sure. It makes more sense to throw that type of energy into something that you know will allow you to live well and enjoy your life.. But well...music has a beautiful lure. It may not be the sane or economic choice in life but, well, when that groove finally slots together, you can't beat that feeling.

 

My advice to anyone starting out in creating music is to enjoy the creativity more than the production, and allow the production side to gradually build up as you finish tracks. You can write /arrange good tracks without decent production (you can!) but you can't write decent tracks that connect with people if you've spent 10 years obsessing over compressors and limiters.

 

I hardly ever thought about production for years. I just made music. But when I heard Ott Hallucinogen in Dub I started to look more at that side of things. Ott definitely raised the bar in psychill..and I thought my music was pants in comprison. I had crap monitoring, terrible eq habits and hardly knew how to use a compressor... But you know what? It turned that Ott was listening to my first album (Dryads Bubble) in his car for ten years. For me that was proof that electronic music is still about creativity and expression... and not production values.

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My advice to anyone starting out in creating music is to enjoy the creativity more than the production, and allow the production side to gradually build up as you finish tracks. You can write /arrange good tracks without decent production (you can!) but you can't write decent tracks that connect with people if you've spent 10 years obsessing over compressors and limiters.

 

 

 

But I love my compressor and my limiter kicks a**!  :P:D

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If I might, I'd love to chime in with a couple of thoughts from the wider musical world :)

 

I'm writing a PhD in urban ethnomusicology/popular music studies, looking at psychedelic trance and related musics, and one of the things that we are really interested in in this area is professional musicianship. In fact, one of the first questions that ethnomusicologists like to ask - whether we are studying a tribe in the Amazon basin, or a folk session in Durham, or punk music in China - is "who gets to be a musician in this culture?" and "who pays the musicians?"

 

I think that in Britain we tend to valorise professional musicians, and sometimes forget the colossal size and power of amateur music making. I suspect that this is true of other countries, too. There have been some very good anthropology-style studies of musicians in the UK, and what we've found is that "amateur" and "professional" are more like ideas than actual types of musician. Most musicians are somewhere on a spectrum with these ideas at either end. It's very possible for new musicians to get paid for a gig (more so than most musicians would have you believe!) but very difficult for even the most professional of musicians to make a living from gigging, and most (in classical, jazz and rock music) also teach or have another job.

 

What strikes me about electronic music today is that more an more people are teaching it in increasingly formal ways. I know quite a number of producers who offer lessons - and DJs also.

 

(I am a terrible DJ, but I had a lesson once, and also once had a paid gig. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, but it was all great fun.)

 

The question is - how do you know if you are good enough to give lessons?

 

I'd love to hear your thoughts :)

 

G

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Since using Bandcamp and self releasing the music income now pays for music gear....software, synths etc. So it has become self supporting which is nice.

 

It's a little bit easier these days to combine creativity with a normal job as music technology is that much more immediate. For a few hundred quid you can stuff a pc with a fully functioning studio in a few hours. Back in the Atari / sampler / synths days putting a studio together was expensive and time consuming. Now you can lob a loop from Ableton into a sequencer and it will time stretch itself instead of spending a good couple of hours lining up a loop in a sampler. My first sampler had 8 mono samples, 30 seconds of mono sampling time and cost me £500 second hand. Do we appreciate this? Probably not, it probably just pushes our expectations up.

 

In general there are very very few people making a living from music nowadays. Even Philip Glass worked as a taxi driver and plumber while he wrote music for 18 musicians. Then within that larger music industry you have to realise that psy chill is a very very small niche. I think part of Ott's success (aside from writing very good stuff) is the fact that dub music has a certain crossover element. Dub and reggae is very popular with a broad range of people beyond the psychill community. He can tour America and play with other dub or dubstep artists as well as the psychedelic festivals. Good formula that.

 

Life did throw up the opportunity a few years ago to work more solidly on music. So I took it. And I can say that immersing yourself in something is a very worthwhile thing to do in life, particularly if it's something that you are really interested in. I definitely took my productions up to another level. Through teaching myself and asking questions on forums and now I know my way around the gear I can easily write good sounding music around a normal job (but then again I don't have children). But in terms of sitting down all day every day to write music, my experience is that it does suck a little bit of the magic or of it. But it also has its own rewards.

 

But that sense of achievement can be achieved in plenty of areas of life. Doesn't have to be music. Plastering, being a waiter, understanding finance... There's a joy in life from applying yourself to something and seeing the rewards. For sure. It makes more sense to throw that type of energy into something that you know will allow you to live well and enjoy your life.. But well...music has a beautiful lure. It may not be the sane or economic choice in life but, well, when that groove finally slots together, you can't beat that feeling.

 

My advice to anyone starting out in creating music is to enjoy the creativity more than the production, and allow the production side to gradually build up as you finish tracks. You can write /arrange good tracks without decent production (you can!) but you can't write decent tracks that connect with people if you've spent 10 years obsessing over compressors and limiters.

 

I hardly ever thought about production for years. I just made music. But when I heard Ott Hallucinogen in Dub I started to look more at that side of things. Ott definitely raised the bar in psychill..and I thought my music was pants in comprison. I had crap monitoring, terrible eq habits and hardly knew how to use a compressor... But you know what? It turned that Ott was listening to my first album (Dryads Bubble) in his car for ten years. For me that was proof that electronic music is still about creativity and expression... and not production values.

 

Also, I can't let this go, I'm sorry - it was Steve Reich who wrote Music for 18 Musicians :P haha

 

I'm not surprised that Ott enjoyed Dryad's Bubble. I've been listening to those drums on 'Moksha Journey' for sometime now and I must say, I have no idea how you made those :D

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Ha yes! Reich and Glass kind of mingle into one person in my head. I'm impressed you noticed! :-D I realised a little while after I wrote it that I had mixed them up, but then I thought no one would notice and I couldn't be bothered to edit it. :-)

 

the drums on Moksha Journey (so you're the other one who's heard the album!) ...quite a lot of them came out of a Yamaha Rm1x hardware sequencer and a korg 01rw through a Behringer DDX3216 cathedral reverb. And a few sample drum hip pop style loops, probably retrigged on the off beat (a nice way to get interesting drum parts) . Loads of parts layered basically. The korg 01rw synth module was a big part of the sound on that album actually. Nice pad and bell sounds. Why did I sell it? Aaarrrggh...

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If I might, I'd love to chime in with a couple of thoughts from the wider musical world :)

 

I'm writing a PhD in urban ethnomusicology/popular music studies, looking at psychedelic trance and related musics, and one of the things that we are really interested in in this area is professional musicianship. In fact, one of the first questions that ethnomusicologists like to ask - whether we are studying a tribe in the Amazon basin, or a folk session in Durham, or punk music in China - is "who gets to be a musician in this culture?" and "who pays the musicians?"

 

I think that in Britain we tend to valorise professional musicians, and sometimes forget the colossal size and power of amateur music making. I suspect that this is true of other countries, too. There have been some very good anthropology-style studies of musicians in the UK, and what we've found is that "amateur" and "professional" are more like ideas than actual types of musician. Most musicians are somewhere on a spectrum with these ideas at either end. It's very possible for new musicians to get paid for a gig (more so than most musicians would have you believe!) but very difficult for even the most professional of musicians to make a living from gigging, and most (in classical, jazz and rock music) also teach or have another job.

 

What strikes me about electronic music today is that more an more people are teaching it in increasingly formal ways. I know quite a number of producers who offer lessons - and DJs also.

 

(I am a terrible DJ, but I had a lesson once, and also once had a paid gig. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, but it was all great fun.)

 

The question is - how do you know if you are good enough to give lessons?

 

I'd love to hear your thoughts :)

 

G

With the teaching, I'm assuming you're talking about teaching from your home studio. I think if you were a techno / house producer (in a big city) with all the requisite production skills, that could be a useful basis to teach from. I'm guessing that's one of the more popular genres and a area where you got lots of dj's who want to get going with music production. Who wants to learn psy-chill?

 

The problem really with teaching on this basis is that if the student has Ableton, but you're an expert in logic, how do you teach? They might be better off using an online berklee course specially made for Ableton. There's millions of synths around too. How can you teach someone something if they have different synths at home? Tricky.

 

Also electronic music production can sometimes be a hit and miss affair. A decent track can sometimes take a good while of phaffing about and experimenting until it suddenly all clicks into place. You can't really go through that process in a short lesson. The best way to learn is from sitting down and producing with someone else for a good day in the studio.

 

In that capacity I have definitely learnt a lot from Ishq and the time we have spent in the studio together (he lives near me). I was wanting to do a deeper ambient project for ages but kept putting rhythmical structures in and formulating sequences. Matt helped me break through that by watching his approach to sound design and arrangements. A very loose, experimental, brave approach.. and then it clicked, and I put together my first Experiments in Silence album.

 

So as a teacher you may be able to teach or inspire an overall approach to sequencing, arranging, sound design etc. Rather than spending ages teaches the ins and outs of production, which can be learned from you tube now to be frank. (forums are a great place to learn and I learned shed loads from the psymusic UK Forum.)

 

In terms of the definition of amateur versus professional, I'm wondering if the definition now isn't based on whether you make your living from it, but by whether your music sounds professional?

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So as a teacher you may be able to teach or inspire an overall approach to sequencing, arranging, sound design etc. Rather than spending ages teaches the ins and outs of production, which can be learned from you tube now to be frank. (forums are a great place to learn and I learned shed loads from the psymusic UK Forum.)

 

 

 

I totally agree with this. Learning the ins and outs of ones chosen DAW and plugins is simply doing a search on Youtube. Those are just a skill set but have nothing to do with creating something worth listening too. Its like any useful profession worth doing, learning to do the basics is simple, becoming a master is a life long journey of dedication.

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