A short lesson in not overthinking my beats...

If you don't know, this is Soundcloud's little waveform image that they generate for each uploaded track.

Listeners can leave comments at specific timestamps to call out things they like about a track as they hear them. Sometimes, they leave the comment near the end of the track because they've listened to the whole thing and are now leaving their praise... in the case of my STBB950 entry, these are all comments on my second beat in the track.

I worked on sequence A for a few days (in my usual 20-30 min bursts, with the occasional 1-2 hour session). While Sequence A came out really decent in a technical sense (good chops, chop arrangements, dope bassline, good FX processing, etc), it's really not... me. Stylistically, it's not what I like to do and it's not the kind of sounds or vibes I gravitate toward. I like Sequence A, but I don't love Sequence A.

Sequence B, on the other hand - the comment-heavy side of the track - is what I like. I love the grimy, the filthy. I like bleak vibes, minor keys, dissonance and discord. Sequence B was a rush job because I had put so much time into Sequence A and I had planned this entry to be a two-parter from the start, I was nearly out of time, so I went with my instincts to push me through the process and land me with something half-decent. In a technical sense, Sequence B is absolutely not what Sequence A is - I simply didn't put the same careful thought, or the same amount of time, into making it. It's just what came naturally to me, with some light processing to have it sound decent... and it got more attention than Sequence A, which I poured most of my effort into.

My 949 track - the one that gave me my first STBB win - was the same deal. I spent several days trying to construct a track by forcing my way in a direction that just wasn't me. I like to submit evening before deadline for STBB because the deadline is morning local time here and I hate doin shit in the morning. The day leading into that evening for 949, I had scrapped what I had been working on and just did my fuckin thing. In a few short hours, I came up with something better than what I had to show for the last several days.

My first instinct is to over-complicate shit. When I was doing tech work, I had a tendency to over-engineer, to try to cover every imaginable base and think way too far out ahead of what  was actually needed. Apparently, it wasn't just something to keep an eye on in my professional life.

It's a matter of identifying when I'm doing Sequence A when I should be doing Sequence B.