Developing Your Artistic Voice: Taste, Execution, & The Gap

For a lot of artists, there is a struggle early on in their career where what they want to produce is nowhere near what they can actually produce. This is true across all mediums, but especially so in music where what we do when we’re starting out is often very different approach than what we’d do at an elite level. Sample libraries are expensive, we often do everything (writing, production, mixing, etc) all on our own as an individual, and this is even further complicated by the fact that the music theory most people learn is not the type of music theory that applies to the music they want to write. This is called "The Gap" and it is something that can definitely be worked on.

I’ve previously mentioned “so good they can’t ignore you” in other posts, but today I want to talk about the other side of that journey: how tough it is to even get decent and why you shouldn’t give up.

Starting out as a composer is NOT easy.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” - Ira Glass

I came across this Ira Glass quote recently and thought it was an excellent description of the challenges I personally face as a composer and thought others may too. In it’s simplest terms, being an artist is just two things: taste and execution. Taste is what we like, what we gravitate towards. It is the pattern of decisions we make, whether or not we have a conscious reasoning for doing so. Some people have a very wide taste with lots of influences from different genres, eras, or mediums, and others are hyper fascinated with a very particular niche. Your taste is personal to you and the first element of defining who you are as an artist. The second part of this execution: this is how we actually go about achieving what we set out to do. This is our craft, our practice. All that we study and attempt as artists fall into this category.

The space between these two is what Ira Glass calls “The Gap” and this is where many artists feel lost, get frustrated, or quit. And this is not a new or a revolutionary concept: other artists have said you need to write 200 songs before you write 1 good one. Others say you need to get out all your cheesey and cringe before you can hit your cool. The beauty of this Ira Glass is that instead of being a quantifiable but unverifiable number or a vibe based feeling, it breaks down the real issue many artists face and how to get better: you need to close the gap.

Closing the gap

We will talk about taste next week, but unfortunately you can’t close the gap by improving your taste. In fact, the more refined your taste the bigger the gap likely will be. So instead let’s focus on execution.

As composers, the best way for us to work on closing our gap is to write and to write CONSTANTLY. Every time we write, we are learning things subconsciously about what works, what doesn’t and what we can try in the future. Each piece, cue, or project we tackle adds to our experience and slowly chips away at the gap between our taste and our execution.

The second best thing a composer can do is to keep learning. Study other people’s music. Learn new mixing and production techniques. Figure out what works for you and then try to figure out how and why they do. Your goal should be to try and pick up as many ideas as possible, and try them asap in your own work. This will do wonders for your growth, and you will learn so much by doing so. You may be on a project 5 years from now, and remember that one technique you experimented with where you put a contact mic on a piece of plywood, ran it through a bunch of guitar pedals, and the effect that that created musically. This may be a perfect application for it - so suddenly it’s within your reach and something you totally want for this score. Aka, the gap was closed!

This is why studying with someone can be so beneficial to any artist: When you study with someone, they have all the knowledge and tools of what helped them and can share them with you to directly close the gap much faster than curiosity and self study ever could.

Some exercises that would be great for media composers specifically:

One scene three ways: take one scene and only changing the music put it in three different moods. Maybe it’s horror, comedy, and drama. Maybe it’s 1920’s, 1950’s, and the future. whatever it is, get familiar with what the different effects your music has on the picture and how you got there. Bonus points if you re-arrange the same piece of music multiple ways rather than starting from scratch.

Covers are an amazing way to get better at music production. Instead of worrying about the composition AND the production - you are isolating out as few variables as possible so you can really focus on the arrangement/orchestration/production rather than everything at once. Try to think of it as X in the style of Y. For example orchestrate happy birthday in the style of the avengers, or take a jazz standard and try to make a cover of it in the style of taylor swift.

Want to work in video games? Come up with a scenario for a game, and then figure out how to make music interactive with the gameplay. Get deep into it. Write the music in layers, branches, or whatever system you use and do an implementation mockup in wwise, FMOD, or any other software you would need to do this on an actual project. Be sure to double check your implementation worked as intended.

One last practice idea: sample flipping. Take a single sample recording and try to turn it into a whole song. Maybe you recorded a train passing by. Load that sample up in kontakt and make a drum kit, pads, a melody instrument, etc all from one sound.

As you can see, there are a LOT of ways we can practice very specific skills as a composer. At the end of the day, the more we practice the smaller our gap gets and the less frustrated and discouraged we become. If you enjoyed this, consider signing up for access to our composer resource library where I share PDFs and supplemental material from these blog posts and the youtube channel absolutely free.

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