Get to know a few instruments well so you don’t have to think about how they work when you’re recording.
Choose minimalism over maximalism because you can make a piece with a single sound. Stuck? Do one thing.
Listen for the drama! Dissonance, surprise, rhythmic friction, and negative space—therein lies music’s energy.
Work patiently until you hear something compelling. This tends to happen just after the feeling that nothing’s happening today.
Follow your intuition for what to do, then note the results and repeat the process (recursive improvement). Intuition practiced becomes tacit knowledge.
An individual piece of music is like a fragment of a larger work that’s forever in progress. In this way, one’s art is self-similar or fractal (it has the same structure at every resolution of scale).
Finishing even the smallest piece of music is the most valuable kind of practice because you develop a feel for the gesture of getting it done.
Hacking is a useful metaphor for composing because you’re always piecing things together by exploring systems, modifying sounds and parts, and finding solutions to technical and aesthetic problems.
Most of what you’ll try won’t be musically convincing. But you always learn something from the effort, perhaps tacit knowledge of what doesn’t work?
A sustainable workflow is like the easiest run—you can do it anywhere and often and it never wears you out. Likewise, making art is infinitely renewable.
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