2 parts. First to op and then a general discussion about autism. I am 40, formally diagnosed. Which means very little given that autism is just a set of general behavioural traits and does not preclude you from having normal people issues.


To op

I went thru 8 years of post highschool learning not being able to really learn from professors. It always frustrated me. It was not that I didn't understand, I just didn't understand the reason they would explain it the way The did. So I learnt from books and my own abstractions. So this is absolutely normal for anyone with autism. There is no consensus for why. I think the general inability to be flexible like most people is a good behavioural observation but drawing a line from that to neurology is about 20 years away.

I would extend the same feeling of not being understood to people classified as neutotypical. It is a waste of calories trying to defend your process. The process is the goal. Not the result. Enjoy the struggle.

To everyone

The problem with autism is that you can't seperate the initial wiring and the resulting compounding effects over decades.

For most , the akwardness at least perceived feeling of being awkward increases. This is just a well known concept of regression due to avoiding things that make you anxious. You feel akward , you avoid situations that will result in this belief which makes leads to more akwardness.

Autism usually gets worse with age. Trying to overcome a hill with mud. There is a tipping point where the effort to improve is just too many calories and that is why the interplay between wiring and experience make it extremely complicated and sadly hard to treat. By treat I mean try to integrate with a world that doesn't really care you are autistic.

In the end it is a balance. The problem with most kids these days including neutotypical is this early cowdling wasting the best years to make the habits that will make it exponentially harder.

I'm 40. Autistic. I have a career, a house and could have ended up homeless many times if I didn't have help. One thing I did have were parents that realized how the world actually is and tried to prepare me by essentially riding my ass pushing me every day to do things I would never do.

The people that wear autism like a badge are usually self diagnosed millenial and younger that need something to supplement their public domain personality. Mostly not autistic but watched some terrible rendition on TV and associate it with quirky. If you haven't thought about killing yourself by grade 7 , wondered what it is like to have a friend .... You don't have autism.

Sorry about that. Any talk about autism always gets me a little amped as people are just clueless. Most experts are not able to understand, normal people with Wikipedia is honestly worse than any awareness at all.

Autism is Faustian bargain where some potential benefits come at a terrible price. But such is life. I also happen to be the best looking guy on this forum. You with with what you got. And as someone that as I mentioned was ridiculously good looking , the mask mandates are taking away my edge.

In conclusion , call your local representative and demand an end to masks and the pernicious unfairness it burdens really really ridiculously good looking people. First beards , then masks ... When will society stop attacking the most valuable members or society. The handsome men around my age.

Insert Zoolander gif

 

Last edited: Dec 10, 2021

It seems that you are being very hard on yourself in your musical adventures. But you shouldn't. Try to let go and just Be you. PLAY music. Have fun. Enjoy the process. And about the thing, you said about teaching something. I agree that to learn, we have to understand it first. Until I gat some 上門補習 by some great teachers, I didn't like physics at all. Mostly because I didn't know anything about it. I didn't understand how can it be possible for the distance to be negative. Apparently, this is how it works in cinematics.

 

During all my childhood I was a "regular" autist: completely "shelled" into myself, I lived in my world and most of the time ignored the outside world during years and years.

The real problem at these times (think seventies-eighties) for people like me was that in my country, autism was almost ignored, misdiagnosed, victim of the ignorance of the medical institution. No formation, no teaching about it existed for medical workers.

The worst? Freudian psychoanalysts was persuaded that autism was the fault of the mother! They have a shitty load of arguments to accuse mothers, to make them feel guilty and doomed!

When I think that in America, autism was discovered and well known since... 1940!

In my country, when my autism was diagnosed by a (at last!) competent psychiatrist I was... 50! Yes, 50 years of doubts, of therapies, of sufferings, 50 years of ignorance and incompetence...

And saying that here, I don't think about my insignificant little me, I think about families, I think about mothers that had to handle alone these syndromes during years without any help...

But I had two big lucks in my life: the guitar, and the radio! I started playing guitar, sing and compose during my childhood, and when I was twenty I participated to the creation of a local radio. I created a weekly emission about Poetry, Rock and Science-fiction. The fact to be able to speak about my passions progressively "unblocked" me and, week after week, windows opened on my shell, I started to really communicate with the outside world and to pay interest to other people around me.

Regarding music in general, and composition in particular, I learned one thing: the best songs that you can create, the ones that actually are the best reflect of yourself... are the songs you create without thinking.

Just let your fingers or your voice do all the work, don't try to obey to a system, a genre or a style, don't try to imitate anything, and above all, don't think, feel!

After the composition, arrives for me THE big problem: from my instinctive, primal point of view, DAWs are absolutely not adapted to this particular way of creating! They are all confusing, anti-intuitive and time-wasting!

I didn't found (yet) the ideal tool for me, the only thing I can imagine is a sort of super-intelligent, super-sensitive quantum robot who could be capable of capturing all my notes, all my moments of inspiration, then mix them accordingly... without any human intervention!

Without wires, without microphones to place, without screen to watch during hours, without any keyboard to hit and mouse to agitate in vain!

A silent co-worker who could help me to achieve and publish my works without complaining that "some samples are missing" or whining about "hard disk failure" or "Windows update" or whatever a computer usually complains about...

...I hate notifications!

 

Last edited: Dec 17, 2021

Yeah this was really why I shared my vision here. Most people might prefer to look at the mix as top to bottom, Hats at the top in white, Sub at the bottom in black, but its worth sharing if anyone connects with it.

I have split my process into 4 Templates since, using dual screens in Ableton. Session View for Theme Generation, drag the printed loops into Arrange View for a Structure session, draw in automation for all the transitional energy in the third Template and then Engineer in the 4 session, pretty much back in Session View, using the Faders for balance.

Each session splits processes and focuses what I'm doing. They're different mindsets, so splitting arrangement like this and isolating the processes makes everything logical. Structure is quite a rigid process so its makes no sense to mix in the creatives in sessions 1 and 3 at the same time. Its an internal fight between what I'm doing, like trying to ride a bicycle whilst washing windows. Its insane. 'Just get off the bike, wash the windows and then ride'... Having 4 Templates and loading things up sounds like a pointless PITA, but its actually shifting mindsets. Swapping views in Ableton also helps to isolate the mindsets. It seems to all revolve around heightening senses using visual cues.

Whatever your ideal process turns out to be, as well as your tools, its probably going to come from challenging conventions and asking why you are doing each process and what you hope to get out of it. As I try these things and find failure points, it gives me ideas about how to solve them. My third Template is carnage at the moment, it needs simplifying, but its the result of seeing what the issues are and figuring out the solutions and I'm pretty sure that now that I've seen my failure points this approach can address it.

 

Since the beginning of this thread, when I saw your thought-provoking templates, I said to me: I should make templates... I should make templates... But the fact is: I can't!

The act of composing / writing is done far from my computer, with my old acoustic guitar, a pen and a piece of paper. Then, when it's time to arranging / recording / mixing, I always start my DAW with an empty project. Why? in fact, I see every "object" on the screen as an obstacle! I need the screen to be as empty, virgin as possible.

I know this is stupid, because it is equivalent to reinvent the wheel at each song. NOT using templates is like walking on a desert with no camel, no water, no plan, no structure and hem, well... no future (Punk's not dead )!

But I really appreciate emptiness, it's the condition to make me actually do something with my DAW, I'm a big (disillusioned) procrastinator so I see any object on screen as an additional difficulty... I know it could sound strange... Or perhaps bizarre... Weird... Both?



...Whatever, thank you sincerely for this thread, it brings me a lot of things to thought, meditate and evaluate, what you have shared is precious to me because it's an invitation to evolve and to look at music as a form of architecture, for people like me that didn't make real studies these kind of discussion is also a way to learn.

 

Sorry for chiming in again.

Don't be judgemental towards yourself. If something doesn't work for you, then it doesn't work for you, regardless of how "helpful" it's supposed to be, end of story.
We all are different. I don't use templates eather, building each project from the ground up as it goes. I can't do it any other way, templates stifle me and force me to do the same thing. See, I do the same thing you do on the surface, but even that for completely different reasons. We all are different. If something isn't objectively harmful for you or others, you shouldn't refrain from it just because it's not the "right" way to do things.
The actually right way to do things is the most effective one in practice. If the "right" way hinders you in practice more than it helps, how is it the right way at all? No point fantasizing about how it could be more effective if you were different either, because you aren't different. You are the way you are. And you'll have to make do with what you have.

 

I saw a discussion recently talking about Templates and the restrictive aspect and someone mentioned that Templates could mean just organisation with something prepared in advance. At the very least, a Library Structure of the sound you want to dip into for speed is what everyone should do. There is no rule that you have to use them, but if you have a basic set of tools that you can grab from at speed it means less thinking time and staying in creative mode is key. If you are in a creative phase, the last thing you want is to become a Librarian for 2 minutes on a good day, or 2 hours surfing online samples or whatever people do.

Part of the key to this topic is that I see things hugely differently to most people and my outlook here is suited to me. We have to find the way that is suited to all of us...

I look back at my historic tracks and they blow my mind. I've always been the same as you, carnage everywhere. I just throw things down at speed and its incredibly creative, but it will take a day sorting through everything to reload that track. It means old plugins, old DAW... Nightmare. But its just stuff chucked onto the page and no idea what 'Random Pulse' means. Its it Percussion, an Arp, a Lead Synth, a Bassline? Who knows? So organisation on reflection would have changed everything... But that can't be during the creative phase and it needs addressing. Its why having Templates that take away the thinking process is so important. Whatever these Templates are, they have to address 'Admin' on a single occasion, so that we can do the organising in a separate state of mind and with no impact on the creativity.

But I totally get your creative side, it makes sense. I also use a dictaphone to throw down ideas then bring them into my setup. The issue you have is not having any organisation at any stage and its why the second Template onwards makes so much sense even for you. If you set things up with folders for example, with a bunch of tools already set up, they can all be collapsed and pushed out of the way at the top. Then bring in your natural creativity and organise straight into your 'Template' once you've reached the end of that session. I'm noticing now that there's a time and place for each process. Engineering is rigid in a sense. Its not really the mindless stuff at the beginning where we're thinking about mixing notes and grooves. Its more the critical listening aspect, where we stop bouncing around, sit still, and 'listen for' the best balance. So it makes zero sense to do both at the same time, even if you're good at it. If it ends up needing tweaking later that time was wasted. I guess if you have a working formula already then why change it, but even then, I've heard people at the top of the Industry talking about hitting these procrastination points or 'imposter syndrome' etc. Its probably a reflection that they don't really have a clue what they are doing, but its always just worked out, so why change it? Makes sense. But it also makes sense that having no organisation is why they feel like an imposter - because essentially they are. They have no specific formula that they can teach and share, in a way that other people can with 100% certainty follow and have success. That's not to say my own approach here is foolproof, its full of holes. But some of those holes don't matter, such as creativity. I have no idea how that happens, it just does, so its not worth questioning. I'm not taking interviews on how I do that shit, so I just don't need to explain it. But some of the other aspects do need addressing for me, probably because of the disorder shit and I just can't accept this approach of 'fake it til you make it'. Doesn't work for me and it always needed addressing.

So in the same way, the library kind of moment, sorting the loops you just created into regions like Highs and Lows or Front to Back is Admin really. So you'd be right to work this way if its the fastest way for you. But it makes sense having some organisation at some point where you can heighten your senses with visual cues and make things flow much smoother, going into the engineering side, or the structuring of the arrangement, so that you can think less and react more...

The point is that I have never figured this out in 35 years, what was causing me these failures, why tracks never get finished. Even finishing tracks, which is supposed to be a silver bullet to improving, doesn't work. I learn nothing from it. But facing up to these issues all year long has made each failure show up to me, so that I can figure out ways to tackle them. I can't recommend that outlook enough. Failure is awesome, we can learn so much from it. Just blagging it and having success we learn fuck all. There are times when I just can't see solutions and I have to put it in writing and reach out. Sometimes just writing it will make it clear a day later.

Its probably a multi-tasking thing where we try to make things move faster. Sometimes the fastest route is by going full speed and taking a short break to reset, when it feels like pushing on through is the better option. We always make shit decisions when we've been doing something for more than a couple of hours or so. So it might seem weird that having 4 Templates could be the fastest way to work, especially if each template is complicated as fuck, but I'm starting to see it much clearer now because of how each Template addresses every failure point that stops things from flowing.

What I've been finding this year every time that my latest setup fails, there's always a snag point and a reason why it doesn't work. I was trying to set up a single Template from the start and there's reasons why that doesn't work for me. But every failure has brought something into play at this stage where I'm at now. There's always a positive aspect that got me inspired to think I'd cracked it and I'm ready to flow freely now. All of these failures seem to be getting included now at the stage where they make sense. For example I noticed that printing to audio is really creative in Ableton because you can reverse quickly and get fast accidents happening with very little effort, but that didn't fit into the whole workflow because it requires some engineering balance, Reverb reversing which in the new outlook doesn't get addressed until the track is already structured. Even EQ doesn't get touched until Stage 3. This isn't really a Structure tweak, making the end of the bar have something change so that it sounds exciting. Its a massive distraction for me from how the Phrases contrast, so the contrast ends up getting neglected and my arrangments end up sounding flat and uninspired... So obviously that 'flat' aspect needs addressing. It needs a single focus, where I isolate my attention onto the Structure of the track and nothing else. Even dropping the beats is a massive distraction and I'm even wondering if I need to not add any Transitional FX until Phase 3, because of how distracting they can be. Its something I'll figure out by running the process a few times and tweaking as I go.

So if you think of Templates as maybe 'Preparation Files' or something different then maybe that could squeeze out some bottlenecks that you didn't realise were there. I have noticed that the words that I apply to things is hugely important for me as well. I realised that 'Arrangement' is a poisoned word for me, so the process that I have been using probably for decades even, includes automation at the same time and it just takes too long. I think its a long (and poisoned) process for me because there's too much involved in it. My attention is all over the place because I'm not concentrated on a single aspect. How does each phrase contrast against another? Then how does the energy flow? Totally different aspects to me. Separating these makes it so much easier to focus on them, at the right time! I've noticed that making the energy flow before I've even got a structure laid out makes the whole process take so long and it ends up losing inspiration. Each aspect defeats the other.

Even if I end up dumping this whole process in a couple of years, because I get to the point where I don't need to make it this complicated because I learned about production and got good at it as a whole, it has to be worthwhile as a self-teaching tool. My 3rd Template is carnage right now and it will need some simplification at some point, but its pointless removing anything until I know its not necessary. It has already been massively simplified as well, but just like you seem to like to work, the carnage helps me to figure things out and to reject them as either failures or overkill. I tend to be unable to see the overkill until I've run through the process and just let the simplification take its own course. Its always dumb as fuck on reflection that I could have made things so much easier, but its just the way my mind works best, so on the balance of creativity its probably the best option.

Its normal procrastinating I think and I totally get the objects holding you back, but the process of making a track doesn't have to be singular. Separating the Templates into mindsets is taking this to another level for me and the organisation of all the visual cues, its just so much better knowing where I'm at... But you have got me thinking actually that it might make some sense during the first creative process to not have the folders open at first and just let ideas flow. Then bring them into regions as an Admin session at the end until it becomes clear that some regions will be empty and therefore I'm missing some parts that need creating before I start Phase Two etc... I'm recycling old Theme Generations (fully arranged and finished but sounding very average) right now until I get a feel for how this process works. I've run about 10 tracks into printed loops to take through these other processes. I built these Templates in reverse, starting with Engineering using Stems from pro tracks, but none of them are to my music taste, so its difficult to hear how my tracks will slot into each process until I've done each phase a few times... I realised when I got to Template 1 that I needed to be using my own tracks to build the balance properly, so I've seen how each Template works, but still have no idea how they play out with my own creations. They work with Michael Jackson creatively, but they end up distorted for example. So tweaking the Template will probably take me away from my own sound... Which comes back to wasting time in the creative process and why Templates are the answer for me, and I think for everybody as some kind of preparation. Even those people who show a Tutorial on the fly have years of experience using the tools that they default to, so there's a Template way of working in a sense. Acoustic Guitar is even a Template way of working. It has no sound design process so there's little preparation to do, but a palette of colours once its inside the computer makes a lot of sense if it speeds things up. Why surf through sounds that we don't know during a creative? Why not set up some defaults that we already love and tweak from there?

So as I go through these failure points I can see improvements in workflow and why its worth taking some time to make these tweaks, because of the endless times that I've lost the creative moment by working for too long on a track, because things weren't ready in advance to grab and go...

So I totally get what you are saying creatively, but the organisation can totally change the game for you if you can figure out what organisation looks like and how it can improve things. I swear by failures. When I accept failure into my life it doesn't matter. And I swear by shit tracks too. They're the best because it doesn't matter if you destroy them. They make the best practise tracks to learn from. It probably all sounds like I'm a total nobhead for doing everything wrong and not singing my own praises but I get nothing out of showing someone a good track. I can't improve from that and I can't fix any issues from accidental success. The best solution is accepting failure and facing up to the crap.

In the end you'll do what feels right to you and what makes your inspiration flow, but if you do have bottlenecks, procrastination and things that are holding you back, its better to face them head on and ask those barriers why they are fucking you up. Having a tool set up in advance has to be better than turning up at site every time and searching for a twig that you can crowbar into your process. Just get a crowbar and put it somewhere convenient :D

With regard to building a User Library, I think the best way is as you go, starting with your first track and then keep saving sounds and FX as presets. If you reuse them and hear that they're shit you'll be improving that sound all the time, or swapping it out. But you'll also be learning, about yourself and about your sounds. Almost all of my first Library sounds are gone, but they served that purpose of building the Library and adding focus. I realised pretty quickly as I kept improving my hearing that my sound was shit and it deflated me. But that was a good thing because I'd have settled for it otherwise and kept telling myself, along with people around me, that it didn't need fixing. They're still not great and there's loads of room to improve, but there's so much involved in making music and finding our own balance that it just has to happen gradually, with small improvements. It all comes back to facing up to the truth, seeing my failures, accepting them and dealing with them.

With outside influences, I've had a lot of bad outside advice that doesn't address the issues properly. The mantras are always things about me being 'addicted to failure' in a roundabout way, which is a track I wrote about a few years ago, so I clearly blamed myself. Its easy to fall into these states of belief and as a result to not see what the real problem is. That itself is amateur psychology and doesn't take me into account. I am genuinely feeling that there are issues along this journey and I just can't see what they are. I reach out for help and get this kind of psychology in return and it can be unhelpful, despite the opposite intentions. We sometimes have to face up to these things and accept what is wrong before we have any chance of solving it, so knowing that our track is shit is helpful, if hurtful, but its much more important to know 'why' the track is shit. What is holding it back? What is stifling creativity? When I saw how this mixture of mindsets is crippling me I couldn't see a solution at first. It seemed impossible. The whole process has so many options that its impossible to deal with at once. But separating Structure from Energy makes it possible by understanding what the aim is... Today I'm the Electrician, tomorrow I'll be the Plumber. I don't want water in the electrics, so it just needs to be this way. Knowing that 'water in the electrics' will lead to disaster is key. Knowing that 'I've burned down the house before trying to multitask' changes the game. Its not just about seeing the disaster and the carnage it caused, its about seeing how it came about. Trying to multitask took my focus off the game. I have ADHD so I don't have enough focus to pull that off successfully without a bit of blind luck. So that needs addressing as a multitasking issue, not as something that practise will fix. It might work. But its fuckin stupid (theoretical scenario if anyone missed that point) ... So the only way to deal with this is to face up to it and spend some time improving the whole workflow, which sounds like some avoidance or procrastination. It just isn't. There's an issue, I have spotted it, I even identified how its coming about now (ADHD) and I have a solution that I can tweak from here. So these failures end up being a huge success because they identify these kind of bottlenecks and they never really get solved with feedback. Its probably only ourselves that can offer that advice as well, especially if we aren't normal to begin with and people don't understand barriers that generally don't make much sense.

 

Yeah there's material in everything. Every negative is great for creatives to turn into something, so embracing it is the best solution for me personally. I write lyrics so it goes straight into that angle.

 

Thank you again @reziduchamp to take the time to share your thoughts about your creative process, you're very lucid about many aspects, about what you manage to handle and what you not (yet), this is a continuous work in progress, I hope you'll never stop evolving and progressing like you do!

You're absolutely right! In fact concerning music I'm like a gypsy who plays what come to mind at a precise moment, in a totally anarchic way, and then when the time comes to try to make my modest creations enter inside a DAW (whatever the DAW is) is like trying to make a circle enter into a square of the same size! The two processes (creating outside the box, then recording and mixing inside the box) are so different than they become nearly incompatibles to each other!

Very true and very close to what I often feel, mainly when I work with others, but alone too! Years ago, I had the surprise to discover that I can work quite well as a part of a team, in studio for example, because other persons are like clear limits and guides and know exactly what we have to do in what time and where we go, this is exactly the opposite of my personal anarchy! But it feels well, overall.

Alone, I often lost conscience of time and limits so this "constraint" to have to work with other musicians are in fact very positive to make me advance from the beginning to the conclusion of the work, but then arrives the impression to not have done enough and to be a sucking amateur in a world of professional studio musicians...

I think that in very few words, you summed up the heart of the problem! And you're right, the words we adopt to name steps are very important: "preparation" doesn't sound / feel the same as "templates". I will think about it, because of course, as you said elsewhere in your message there is an aspect every creator / producer / mixer have to pay attention to: the incredible waste of time an anarchic process implies! After all, our life is limited, at almost 60 it appears to me like an clear and unavoidable dead line!



..And also thank you @justwannadownload for your kind words!

 

Last edited: Dec 18, 2021