did you...

[Dave S]

On Sunday 03 January 2010, Andrew Tarpinian wrote:
> See I have been struggling with this, with music, with art. Who is it
> for?

I started getting somewhere with my music when I decided to just write it for 
my own enjoyment.  I found that other people started to enjoy it a lot more 
too when I did this.  (Including tunes that I thought sucked but played to 
them anyway.)

It's true, when I'm working on a track these days, I am thinking "will this 
work for a DJ to play?", and so I do end up structuring it a little bit around 
something that can be built into a DJ set.  I also stick to pretty standard 
BPMs.  This is when I'm doing my dubstep-ish kinda stuff, anyway.

So I am writing to a genre (though dubstep is actually an incredibly loose 
genre - there's loads of people doing very interesting things with it around 
the edges of what's going on in the middle), but the single most important 
thing is that I enjoy myself while I'm writing.

Once this release I'm working on is out of the door, I'm definitely going to 
break a whole lot more of my own "rules", including scrapping ideas about 
"genre" and particular BPMs and so on.

Influences, yes.  Rules, no.  (Or something like that!)

> There are things that can be good enough for you but not for others, and
> things that are good enough for others but not for you. What is the divide?

The one in _your_ head which is currently stopping you seeing that the divide 
is imaginary.  :-)

> it is all just a compromise? One can say rely on yourself as the prime
> audience, but that can be just as hard. As well as there are many documented
> cases of artists working in to much of a closed environment and not able to
> judge their work properly.

It's true that this is difficult.  I have a small-ish-time DJ friend who's 
opinions I really value, and who nearly always gets back to me in much less 
than 24 hours.  I always send him stuff before I send it to anybody else, and 
I take his feedback seriously.  He includes nearly all my tunes in his online 
DJ mixes, which are becoming reasonably popular.  :-)

I've found that building up one or two of these kind of producer <-> DJ 
mutually beneficial relationships has really worked well for me.

So I guess ultimately I *do* care what "other people" think of my music, but 
first and foremost, it's for me, and only for me.

Cheers,

~Dave