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by puranjay 2148 days ago
As a part-time musician, even a single track can take tens of hours of effort - depending on the genre and the track.

Sure, you could strum a guitar and sing and have a decent song wrapped up in an afternoon.

But if you're creating anything more complex, you will spend hours finding the right sound, more hours creating the right arrangement, and even more hours fine-tuning the vocals, sounds, and final mix.

Something as simple as getting a snare drum right can take a ton of time. You don't hear it because you don't know what the bad snare sounds like.

2 comments

I agree, but 10s of hours of effort isn't anywhere near "more than I can imagine" as the OP said. I don't think anyone here is claiming it's easy
Again, it all depends on what kind of music you're trying to make. If you're copying an existing style, it's not particularly hard. I can make a Drake-like beat in an afternoon - a quick search on Splice will even show me the exact drum sounds to use.

But if you're creating your own sound? That takes effort and experimentation.

Creating a song - easy. Creating music that's distinctively your own - tons and tons of effort.

+ 10 years crafting a unique sound.
Tons of amazing music with totally new sounds comes from people 16-20 years old. For the right person, it doesn't take a decade.
So these people just woke up one day and knew exactly how to make music?
And I bet they started at 10 or 12. I know I did.

Also, "tons" is amazingly overstated. Very few of those 16 year olds are producing "good" music that appeals beyond their immediate demographic, and that's to say nothing of how low of standards many youth demographics have.

It probably took me about 10 years to get good at programming. Sure, I could create programs pretty quickly---but making something like [1] is another matter altogether.

[1]: http://regent-lang.org/

But I'm guessing you were paid for programming during those 10 years.
I guess it depends on how you count, but not really, at least not for the first 6 years or so. The first two-ish were high school, the next four were college, and the next six were in graduate school (so on a grad student's salary). After that I got a "real" job.

For what it's worth, I do other artistic pursuits as well. I did music for about 15 years though I wouldn't say I was ever good. I've been writing for about 10 years. I would say I'm just now barely at the point where I think I can write half-way decently.

To be clear, I am very aware, and very grateful that one of the things I happen to like doing also pays well. I was responding more to the "you can't imagine the level of effort required to do this work" aspect of the ancestors' comments. Yes, I can imagine, thank you very much. While I don't like where we're going with funding models for art, that doesn't mean that understanding the effort is the limiting factor.

You think most developers learn programming from scratch at a job?
Key word:

> during

I've been paid far more for software than I have for music in the last 10+ years. Spent about equal time/effort on each.

ROI is better with software (I can afford more synths and records).

Artistic endeavors always take me a long time, but then I read about people like Kanye who puts down a hit track in 20 minutes (he’s apparently known for working this way). You may not line rap or him, but he has a knack for hit beats.

https://www.okayplayer.com/news/heres-the-story-behind-kanye...

This is probably similar to the apocryphal story about Picasso:

A woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”

“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.

“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”

Yeah. Many don’t realize he was making beats for well known rappers before the general public knew who Kanye was. I still think his best talent is as a beat creator/producer.