*** This is how I have made autistic logic out of music production. Everything makes sense to me now ***
*** Hopefully it will help other people who can't figure out what is missing ***

I can never learn Tutorial stuff because I just can't connect with what people are teaching. I learn differently. GHOST ARRANGEMENT is one of those things that I just can't follow and I probably figured out why. There's no emotion attached to it, but the process kind of imitates emotions. I can't help seeing through that. So for my autistic head I can never copy those emotions, because its fake.

We learn in one of two ways as far as I can tell...

1. Remember / Repeat
2. Deep Learning / Understanding

Most people seem capable of just copying and keep producing until they get good at it, but I don't think that we ever truly learn anything until we actually understand it. Music is full of brilliant people who have made decades-long careers out of hands-on experience, but never really knowing what they are doing. They have a process that works and shitloads of brilliant experience, with success at the end... So why change this? This is the imposter syndrome that you will hear them talk about. They can be brilliant people and still have no idea what they are doing...

I can't keep running on luck until I finally learn it, that doesn't work for me. I have to know why it works and be able to create deliberately. I need a vision and a direction. Then it makes sense. I have just tweaked my outlook to visualise music as a sound stage, with characters that come in and out of the scene and with positions in the mix. The track has to be a storyline and it has to make some kind of progressive sense from start to finish. When I try to copy that, with all of the dynamic changes, I can't connect with what people are teaching. So with a storyline, when I have written lyrics they will follow a logical path. The blurry line from here is learning how to tell those stories in my own style, which is all brand new because I only just figured out the general outlook... If you can help to advance my vision, please chip in.

So I mapped out a soundscape to make my Busses sound 'how they are supposed to'. Its an accurate term for me, because these positions tally to what they are. Backing belongs in the back and Leads should lead out front. Its still early stages, but the concept is what I have been looking for. Visually it works. I can see music now. This might help other people to see it too so this is as good as I can get it right now...




I've seen people talking about colouring music, which goes over my head. I can't hear the brightness of different sounds and paint that way. We all have to produce in a way that we can connect with and this doesn't connect with me.

My new vision goes from light to dark. That might seem like the same thing, but it comes back to either remember/repeat or understanding. I'm approaching this visually now. I look at my DAW and I can see where Backing Synths go - clue is in the name... And now I have a soundstage. Not just positionally, but also coloured so that the Backing Synths are dark, just like distant sounds lose brightness and feel dark.

Everything beyond the green is Special FX. They can move across the soundstage. I've made Macros for this. I still haven't fully figured out how to create Depth on those Macros, but its sounding decent and the effect is what is important. Its basically abusing the Transients, EQ, Volume, Panning and Reverb as a wet/dry, with additional EQ to control the reflections. The vision is to move a sound across a Reverb so that its reflections start off dark in the background and the dry sound becomes light as the sound gets close, but the reflections will change in the Reverb, so I'm struggling to figure that bit out. It probably relates to setting up Pre Delay better and its probably easier than I'm making it right now.

*** Most people don't seem to understand what I'm talking about here, so if you can help to tweak these Macros get in touch ***

So how this works in practise is very new to me. I have only been using it for 2 days so its still overwhelming, especially since all my colour scheme has changed, but where I am now writing Backing Vocals, I can see where they go and how full the mix is and hopefully I'll be able to catch myself overloading a track and just see the logic that its already full in certain areas, so I can move on to the next section... and start to create music in this logical progressive storyline way. I have habits of throwing in the kitchen sink and ruining mixes, because I can't hear what's wrong with sounds. Now the Backing Synths can't be bright because they sit inside a Buss with the brightness taken away. They're pushed into position, where they belong. And instantly, instead of fighting and second guessing myself about how those Synths should sound, because I have no idea what good should sound like, I have balance and logic...

I still have to see how this plays out, but the point is that music suddenly makes sense. A lot of this was born out of accident, from trying to understand teaching through making it visual and I was shocked at how it lifted all of the curtains for me. It might not work in practise, but I'm certain that it will for some people who see a different world and are struggling because of this lack of connection to convention.

How it also helps is by showing me how the contrast is changing. This might seem obvious to most people but how I've always had my Arrange View set up is just basic stuff, like starting with the Drums, which go at the top when I start making a track, and get coloured Red. Then Bass below that, which is Brown. Already I have zero logic behind any of that, so I've been fighting battles that my autistic mind can't win. Green for Pads, fuck knows why, its just not logical. Its a Bright Green that I usually use. I'm familiar with it, so I've always just assumed that I have that connection programmed now, so it works... But I think that this is exactly why I feel these psychological barriers. Nothing has any logic to me. I can't see any reason for Pads being Green. I can make something up, but then I'm adding in more variables that need learning and more diversion paths to figure shit out. Its madness to me.

Watching tutorials it has recently become clear to me that barely anyone knows what they are doing because they have no proper understanding to teach and no vision. Some can have shit tonnes of experience as amazing Engineers or Producers, but I never see anybody producing with a proper vision from the outset. Any kind of reason for doing all of this shit. It always comes down to luck, and maybe decades of experience. You can't teach experience, so I can't build the connection to their brilliant instincts, and I'm sure I'm not the only one... Those that actually understand things on the deeper level are usually shit at explaining, like me. Most tutorials are soundbytes, remember/repeat messages and for most people that seems to work. I can't learn that way. I need to understand it.

As an autistic, I think I write scripts for variables - for everything in life - before I can do anything really. This takes a long time and I think that this is how my learning difficulty works. Without a script for a variable it is unusable so I can't move forward with certain aspects if there are hurdles that keep slowing me down. I can't just wing it and hope that eventually it will just become natural. It never does and I have come to realise this. It makes me want to quit, because I am not capable of learning how convention is set up... Until I actually understand it I can never repeat those processes and this leaves me feeling hollow. So even if I could copy Ghost Arrangements, I couldn't take a track to a finish when it has no emotion in the arrangement. It wasn't me that created it and there was no purpose behind that creation...

So really its all about Depth, but its more than that. People try to teach this stuff, explaining how the background works, but then they don't produce like this and they have no visual logic to follow, so they make it ridiculously difficult to listen to the rest of their advice. They defy the rules and make a nonsense of their teaching to me by screwing up the soundscape and making it illogical - then usually excuse it by saying that its art, its not precious, it can be whatever you want it to be. Yeah cool. If that works for everyone else, then your life is easy. But this kind of teaching is so confusing for the likes of me. I take the whole process and try to employ it, but once again its hollow so it doesn't work for me.

So although this is all new, I can now see an arrangement as changes in Depth, Colour, Emotion probably. Where we need contrast between sections this is easy to say for most people because they just connect with those principles. for decades I have struggled with this, because my 'Backing Synths' had a shit tonne of brightness on them, so they were sitting up front, as 'backing'. It wasn't that I couldn't hear EQ, I can hear the smallest of details, but it had no logic attached to what I was listening to. So I have always ended up muddying up mixes by adding the wrong things as 'contrast', so obviously it doesn't make sense...

How I see this now is by seeing that there is a Lead Synth in this section, so I can't have a Lead Vocal there at the same time, or they will fight for attention. I need to contrast background focus and maybe groove up front against sections where the focus becomes the Leads again. I can see this with this setup. Its driving the focus with purpose. Its an entire blueprint for how to make music and its something that I have never seen anybody explaining in tutorials (probably because there's no profit in teaching autistics). Most of these concepts (except for the colour coding) is scattered across different tutorials, but its a headache going through tonnes of stuff I've already understood just to learn these small pieces.

This year I figured out a way of pre-producing in advance that I have been calling PBN - Painting By Numbers. Most of this concept already works and I can use it to Ghost Arrange. Its fast and I can make a track in 1-2 days, and it sounds decent I guess. Everything is filling spaces in advance and I can bring in replacement parts at speed, so I can take an old track and follow a Ghost Arrange at speed. But its emotionless and because of that I feel the disconnects. There's always small issues that feel like they need addressing, but I could never figure out what they were. Ghost Arranging for me is creating Pinnochio.

The Busses are what is set up for Depth and Width. The PBN parts are Wav Loops that you can see in the Busses. They sit as placeholders in the 8 bar loop to be dragged into each section depending on where the focus and contrast is on each new section. They can be pitched at speed to a new track by highlighting multiple instances and just shifting the semitones up or down. Its best to label these parts in advance, both Tempo and Pitch. I just use single notes on every sound. They serve both to give a perspective of Depth and how the track will sound from the start, and to be deliberately shit throughout the creative process. This stops it from ever getting old. Its just static hits on the 4/4 etc. It works and it works really well.

With this new Template, I start the same with a bunch of sounds in place on every track so that I can fill all of the soundscape, but this is just as an 8 bar loop. In the examples above it is copied across to fill out the whole track and I'm not sure yet about the best way of tackling each section. This track might be different though, because I'm building from the Vocal and no music at all yet. I have a feeling that I might have been better off adding in this aspect as I put the Vocals down, but its still a WIP and its still very overwhelming. If you have any ideas for improvement please chip in.

As an example of why this should work for me and why I can already hear the difference, if somebody points out that my EQ is wrong at a certain frequency, I can hear that stuff, but I have no idea what the tweak should be. The options are endless, and aimless. And I have no vision of how the balance works. But having sounds in their Depth positions I can hear levels now. I have been taught that stupid shit Pink Noise Levelling, which is some artificial crap that doesn't make any sense when mixing. I tell myself that it sound fine, but its just as fine as any other balance to me, because I just can't hear it... But reflecting now, why would you want every volume level to be the same and the mix to have no Depth? As I said above, sounds need to be in focus and if they're all the same level, they are all the focus. So when people are teaching me this type of fake crap I keep wondering why I can't learn it. Most of the time it is because the people teaching don't understand their own concepts and how they relate to other people understading them. They just remember/repeat. They have no vision that they show us, other than copying current trends, which works, so there's a profit in teaching people how to repeat.

Library is key as well. I need to have all of the tools set up and ready to work into track. I have all of the sounds that I designed as Audition Wavs, ready to scroll through with the down arrow as the track plays. The Macros are the FX that I default to and then I have my Template and current tracks so that I can dig into previous saves and recall single lanes as fast as possible without losing attention. I also have ADHD, so this is a killer for me. Building focus in advance makes everything reliable and what might feel like a bunch of static processes gives me the freedom to experiment.



Most of these Macros are mapped with the most effective parameters for creativity at speed. Again, sorting out these things in advance changes how we can produce (whether we're any good after that or whether it works is a different story that still has to play out). I have found that I need to eliminate as much distraction as possible, because I lose focus so easily so these processes have been what I've trialled and failed with all year. When I saw this Depth thing, it solved my inability to hear Compressors and EQ and to hear how they relate to the Arrangement. I knew that these were related somehow and I thought that learning them would unlock it for me, but I can see now that it wouldn't. Without this concept I have no direction and this turns Compression from a dark art of trying to figure out what sounds should have what kind of Compression, into controlling the Transients to position sounds in the mix. It becomes deliberate, so there's a detail to focus on, learn and improve. EQ is the same. Instead of listening to different Frequencies and thinking that I like them all, just having a position in the mix gives it perspective. If this is a supporting Backing Synth, how much of that sound do I need to hear anyway? How many hours would I have tweaked and recorrected that sound, second guessing because I have no idea what I want from it? If I know that I want it to sit in the background and just add some harmonic warmth, then the EQ is quick. It just needs to sit in its position.

My parts are individual to me, so I wouldn't suggest copying my front to back precisely, but do consider how I set my Busses up because they are logical. I still can't get the Ableton colour scheme to work properly, it doesn't fade out as ideally as I would like so if you have the solution it would be awesome to share it back with me. When I got to brown and dark blue they keep clashing however I positioned them, so I dropped the blue and this was the best concept that I could come up with. The way you see the fade into darkness will probably be different to mine so I'm interested in other people's perspective...

This is a really long post, but its pretty much a complete vision for how to produce deliberately. This vision for me is the difference between giving birth to a real boy or creating Pinocchio.

Hopefully people can help to develop my vision from here so that I can make it even better.

 

seems to me, you are beeing very hard on yourself in your musical adventures.
Try to let go, and just Be you. PLAY music. Have fun.

just because some folks talk about "seeing" music as/in colors, does not mean You *HAVE* too be that way. everyone of us are unique. Only you, have Your voice and experience.

 

Interesting post - nicely done.

You seem to be describing visual metaphors which you personally find useful.
We ALL work with metaphors in all aspects of our thought - not just music/audio production - but much of that metaphorical thinking is buried in our subconscious and we remain unaware of it. Good teachers often try to work explicitly with metaphors and try to build bridges between schemes that you already have in mind and the schemes they are trying to help you to understand. Bridge building via connecting metaphors is key.

When (as you described above) you try to make some visual (colour and space) metaphors explicit as an aid to your audio work - you may be on very solid ground - but it will be VERY personal, VERY subjective. Some people may legitimately get very excited and support your insights, and other people may be baffled by your metaphorical techniques and may even think they sound weird. I'd suggest you carry on developing your novel personal approaches if they seem to be working for you and with luck they might help others and/or be supported by others enthusing over similar ideas.
It will be nice if others report similar benefits from similar metaphors - good luck.

 

You don't understand one thing. Their brain just work this way. They, or we I should say, simply cannot let go, because when we let go, we do nothing. Our emotions don't guide us, we're more just aware of them than we feel them.
And for us, fun is in understanding. So you're spoiling the fun for us and your "advice" isn't only useless, it's marginally harmful. I'm not saying this with an ill will, I just wish you'd understand.

 

Ordering tracks/buses in a certain way, or Coloring them,
could make things more handy/practical in a visual sense, and thus improve/ease your workflow..

But it's not completely necessary..
I personally don't color tracks, and only order them in terms of instrument Type..

For instance my Mix/Master session is something like: (simplified)
>Master Bus -> Out
Bass
Strings
Brass
Woodwinds
Melodic/solo instruments (flutes, clarinet, oboe, violin etc..)
Piano/key instruments (orgue, harpsichord, kalimba, harmonium)
Harp/Stringed instruments (guitar, oud, saz, sitar, kora, santoor, cimbalom, psalmodikon, kantele etc..)
Choirs
Tubular Bells
Timpani
Regular Drums/Perc
Gongs
Tribal Drums/Perc
Bass Drums
>Reverbs^

But this is only for Practicality,
and has no relation with how loud/quiet, close/far, bright/dark instruments need to be/sound..

When I Compose, Mix or Master, my focus is 100% on the Sound/Music,
not where the track is placed, or which color it has..

And so I adjust everything, every plug, instrument, note and hit, by Ear.

There's no need in complicating myself in how are things ordered/colored, (beyond basic practicality)
because that doesn't translate to the final result.. (Sound/Music)

(When Composing tho, I prefer to have Bass Drums, Bass, Strings and Brass in close proximity,
as being the basis of the track is more practical..)


The only part where I might use more visual instincts is with the note editing itself,
or ofc the envelope automation of volumes/pans and expression (CC)..

But then again, I compose/write the stuff with the keyboard/piano,
so I know exactly which notes I've played on each part/instrument and why..

And everything, including envelope automations is very closely adjusted by ear,
so the visual aspect of this gets reduced to a minimum..

I just don't need to highlight anything on the Screen,
because I'm already visualizing it in my Head all the time when composing/adjusting/playing it,
in this matters Ears are more important to me than Eyes.. (but ofc ymmv)

 

Last edited: Sep 8, 2021

Oh totally agree man. Thanks. Yeah in most cases people don't get me at all. I'm on a different planet generally, but if this vision can be what helps other people to fill in the gaps as it has for me I'd be happy. I think it might be deeper than just metaphors though.

Generally if you relate something to something else I think it needs two scripts to process. One to convert it to the metaphor and another to convert it back to the process. But I don't think that the darkness to brightness needs two scripts. It might not even need one, because it just connects directly to emotion and I can instinctively feel the different levels of Depth through sight. Maybe that is zero latency if its a script. We experience so much of this throughout life that we just know what is close and what is far through a combination of senses. So I don't have to rely on sound plus mental processing to visualise it. It can be an emotional connection instead.

As you said, most people will follow the remember/repeat approach and it works. Everybody gets amazing results that I've tried to emulate for decades and just failed and that made me feel like I'm just not good enough and just don't have the ability to do those aspects... Its because I can't see the normal way of thinking, so its impossible to connect to it.

They say that when you finally understand something you should be able to explain it, so its a good sign that it makes some kind of sense so thanks for that.

Cheers for the good wishes.

 

People generally don't understand. It just is how it is. Many people misunderstand learning difficulties. It really doesn't matter though. Its important that we keep reaching out and don't get shot down with misunderstanding and find the things that matter and that we can relate to.

I was encouraged to make a post about this point after speaking about it yesterday, more to get help and support really, but I think I'm finally at a place where I have a path now. If I can get advice that improves things then brilliant, but there's definitely something about changing perspective and having a clear vision before we start. It can make all of the difference and fill in the gaps. So if we then discover that we need to understand EQ, we can search for the knowledge knowing exactly where it fits into the gaps within the vision.

Most people don't need this kind of outlook, they're perfectly adept at winging it, so why change a winning formula?

 

Wall of text

 

It might not be 'completely' necessary, but even if its a marginal gain it can be huge if you already struggle. I've struggled for 35 years, so I'm in a place to say where people who can't build these connections might need as much help as possible. I have ADHD, so if I turn my head I'm often distracted already. So having something that instantly drags me back into creative mode is a game changer. I can't state how huge that can be. Turning my head could mean doing nothing else with music for the day, for the week even. The track could be ruined and unfinishable from something so ridiculous...

So this is why having as many anchor points as possible is worthwhile for someone like me. Even across the spectrum everyone is different, so my vision won't help many people on the spectrum. They won't even see the connection. Doesn't matter though. Its about sharing the concept with anybody that can benefit from it. There's nobody out there targeting tutorials at a marginal audience so we need all the help that we can get.

I totally get your approach. I've used similar for a decade probably and thrown things down at random for years before that. It creates a mess for me and slows everything down. Its why setting everything up in advance is vital for me. But having a vision/path ties it all together.

Its not about complicating things for myself, even though it is complex to set up and difficult to adjust to. In the long term it will speed up and then I'll see the marginal gains payoff.

The stumbling block for me has been arranging my tracks out emotionally. I have never been able to connect with that aspect, because I just can't see, hear, predict or even follow a preset pattern of working. I just can't connect with it. Nothing can ever change that. But I can adapt, which is the point here. I have found a way to break down those barriers and now I can see and hear what is going on, because now I can focus on the Depth, rather than a set of random sounds that are scattered across a mix with no organisation and no idea what to add in next and having shitloads of ideas to explore, so I just throw them all in at once. I have no moderation basically. So these anchor points are an autistic miracle for me. Not just the Depth as a sound, but a visual aid that makes it visually clear where the carnage keeps happening.

 

I'm not capable of simplifying it unfortunately. This is the carnage inside my head.

 

You do not need to understand music/ it is, not a language nor logic(it is not a story). Language and music are different animals (language and music live in the different parts of the brain). There are many famous musicians who had a stroke(where half of the brain was dead) and never spoke after the stroke, but they still could play and compose wonderful music.

 

That's not even it, I'm afraid. Most people don't need to have the whole track visually structured in their DAW in order to understand how and why their track works. The only purpose of colours is to be different from each other, the only criteria for a proper track arrangement is to be swiftly navigable with a mouse. THAT'S IT.
There's no other logic behind their specific arrangements because there isn't supposed to be. I'd say the reasoning goes like "nobody will hear your track arrangement, only the final result", but there's not even that much reasoning. And this is a best-case scenario
I've had a misfortune to work with some neurotypicals' projects that were a total and complete mess. Especially in FL Studio, boy is it easy to turn a project into fucking Kowloon there. No words can describe the disorganization I've witnessed.
The point is, people ignore this kind of order because they don't need it to properly understand the sound. That's why you couldn't find any help until that point. Nobody is familliar with what you're facing
I myself had a luxury of not having it as hard as other folks with autism, and that allowed me to train myself over the last nine years to be less susceptible to disorder, to see the bigger picture in full and delve into details only as much as it doesn't hurt me. I do feel feel dumber than 9 years ago, and I can't even say I got happier, as I came to comprehend the distance between me and others, but I certainly feel freer, more at peace with myself. So I don't have a system of my own in that regard, and even if I had one, chances are it wouldn't've suited you, since I clearly see that your system wouldn't suit me. So the only advice I could give is, take meds, but only after consulting the specialist. Then your brain won't fry itself over things it can't control.

 

Also don't expect neurotypical people to understand you ever. They just feel.

 

Hi. Also on the spectrum + ADHD here.
I find it interesting that you put kick + snare the brightest and last. I used to do the same, in reverse. Kick + snare darkest and first. I say used to, because I switched from Live to Bitwig about a year ago and haven't bothered much with color coding. Incidentally I also haven't finished a track in a long while hehe. But Bitwig gives me some sort of freedom I couldn't find in Live. I can get deep into sound design and make loops much more easily -whereas I used the arrangement mode almost exclusively in Live.

I noticed that depending on how medicated I am the whole template thing can be an obstacle in itself. I know I've spent days just tweaking the visual aspects of my projects, cleaning things up, re-ordering them etc.

Nowadays I'm off my meds (got past the abuse point, can't go back) and my mind is a mess. Can't produce a thing if my life depended on it, only weird sound design, drones (very soothing) or creating fx chains for ambient guitar. Hopefully it will come back some day. If not, life sucks

 

Do drone-ambient-orientated music. It has its value.
I sometimes render cool chords with weird synths and distortion at 196kHz and paulstretch them, then play with panning and reverb in IRCAM tools. Easy way to make ambient.

 

Re : reverb brightness, I don't know if you want to constrict yourself to Live's plugins only, but FabFilter Pro-R is an excellent reverb that seamlessly blends early reflections with late ones using two knobs very practically called dark/bright and near/far (or something like that). Highly recommend it.

Oh yeah totally, any kind of spectral tool can get unexpected results that might (or not) work perfect for ambient. Playing with FFT buffer size can also create nice surprises.

 

What I see in the images you showed (I don't know this DAW, just try to interpret) is an architecture, a clever architecture that could help a composer to better understand what she/he do and why.

It's a repetitive architecture, composed of similar patterns, colored in a way that certainly makes sense for you, but it's the organization / arrangement / superposition of these patterns which is interesting and game changing, and could be applied to many genres of popular musics, which is often composed of... patterns.

Your colored patterns could be called "elements", because they are like molecules, then they are assembled / superposed in different parts, that we could call "cells", cells are then assembled in a architecture that we could call "buildings".

What is interesting, is that your architecture also includes the lyrics, and that alone is really game-changing. We could perfectly apply this architectural notion to lyrics and even poems, who are also often composed of... yeah you got it, patterns.

When a songwriter creates a pop song, she/he doesn't really knows what she/he's doing, she/he certainly applies so-called "recipes" (sounds, gimmicks) that have worked very well in the past, or simply follows a thread, guided by her/his emotion(s), but there's no real method nor theory, other than beat / chords / melodies / words, etc.

If we all could be able to conceptualize (at least in our heads) a precise representation of the architecture of the music we are about to create (like some brilliant classical / contemporary composers of the past and present, from J-S Bach to Iannis Xenakis for example), and more importantly change it, make it evolve, pop songwriting could change radically and explore unknown, new territories.

Years ago, I heard a particular song that really changes the game (unfortunately it remained an isolated example in a sea of banality and apathetic consensus), a non-linear song that explodes all the classical structure of the pop song as we know it... Here, there's no more question of real "Chorus" or even "verse" nor "bridge", it's an always evolving structure, comparable to that of the traditional African music, a structure that is similar to a spiral, which takes you gently from the Earth, and carry you to the stars...

Live version

 

Last edited: Sep 8, 2021

If you've got ADHD I can kinda understand better where you're coming from..

I used to be a quite "disperse" individual before I got into music,
high IQ but unable to control it/myself.. if something didn't Interest me naturally,
it became the most Dreadful thing, and I just couldn't do it.

But if something Interested me, I could just get into it and concentrate like Forever..

And so I found music/guitar was my thing, I loved it and could focus into it all day long,
it was an interesting mix of technique/knowledge/ideas/intuition/visualization/sound/feelings that I found very interesting/appealing, even addictive..
And even more so when later on I got into Composition. (after a long process..)

So yeah, I can see where you're coming from,
but in my case the problem is actually the opposite.. I can just Focus for days/weeks/months on end,
get into the routine, and meanwhile life just passes by without me noticing/savoring it at all.. lol


However it's also a matter of Age, the older you get the more you can Control your mind..

And also your autism/social awkwardness will diminish over time,
when I was 22 I was too Sensible to even bear the weight of this world, or just merely interact/integrate with society.

But just a few years later at say 25-27 I improved considerably, because I was older,
and also after socializing more, living/experiencing more, and inevitably eating more life traumas..
(traumas suck and can bring you Down considerably in Mental terms, (also illnesses like Mono)
but they also make you stronger/wiser and that's a factor that defines mentality/character too)

Now I've got no social awkwardness problems whatsoever,
and what's more, after so much dedication I've Conquered my own mind..
I can be all asperger/focused when I need to (as long as the topic interests me),
or I can be (almost) as impulsive and brainless as anyone else if necessary.. lol


So my advice for you will be, focus on what's Necessary and elemental for you and your goals,
not on what Conditions/limits/controls you.. because that is unnecessary.

Only focus on what Limits you in order to Break it away..

And ofc, whatever floats your boat!
Do things the way you think/feel is better/more optimal,
but don't let the compulsion control you.. Conquer it, and your mind!


In the end tho, it doesn't matter what you do..
with Time/age it will slowly and eventually fade away, and you will normalize. (at least to a point)

So gather what you can from the actual state of mind, and don't worry,
time/life will change you like it changes everybody else, and you will adapt and improve..

 

Last edited: Sep 8, 2021

Autism is not "social awkwardness". It's a brain that's hardwired to process emotions differently, on top of numerous possible deviations in the way mirror neurons work, on top of wiiiide array of possible deviations in the way our inner correlation engine works. It won't diminish over time, and controlling it isn't always physiologically possible.
Also OP is at least 35 y.o., judging by their words.