Any Regrets?

[PleaseKeepUpright]

God I hope this is in the right subsection. I don't like to be made into an ass on Fridays............................only Mondays. Anyways, there's a lot of interesting topics around these forums in regards to the music scene that pose a lot of good questions for composers. Such great topics like "how do you start a song?", "how'd you come up with your name?", "how many wives have you had?" and "what's your social security number?". As we discuss these topics, we find that a lot of us show great passion in what we do and what we produce, right? I mean, this is what we do to fulfill our creativity, and we can achieve very positive feelings from it. Positivity is cool and all, but I'm a narcissistic pessimist with a warped sense of humor. So I'm here to spoil the party with this super downer question:

 

Any regrets?

 

What I mean by this is, as a composer or a writer, is there any piece of work you made that you put out in some way and then looked back in retrospect thinking, "yeah, that was a piece of shit"? It could be a song, a collection of songs, or even just a handful of lyrics or a bad middle eight. Just anything you made or put out that you regret letting make it past your fingertips into fruition. Now I know it's easy to just kinda shrug and say "nah, they're all my babies, I'm immortal, blah blah", but I want to tap into your inner critic. Mostly 'cause I'm sadistic, but besides that. Acknowledging our shortcomings is pivotal in us improving and achieving our greatest potentials. So, how about it? What are your musical regrets?

 

For me, personally, it's my band's first two albums. Everything on Synergetic and Metamorphica is absolute crap. I sincerely think they're both poorly-produced and poorly written albums, and I never recommend them to anyone. We weren't in a position to produce much better, though, at the time. We were using very cheap programs and preset sounds to make our music, and our experience with production was limited. It wasn't until after Metamorphica that I bought a Yamaha DGX 650 and could actually use quality sounds for the recordings, and then luckily our compositions started to improve around the same time as well. I haven't been very sour about too much of Seismosphere's work since. Enough about me, though. What's your two cents? 

 

 

[MikeRobinson]

The royalty checks come through just the same ...

[Rudi]

about 50% of what I do

 

[Ray888]

I as a lyricist I am always taking a chance when working with composers, producers and artists and the reality is that they don't always turn out the way that I imagined.

 

Do I have regrets? of course I do but it's all part of the business of songwriting. When you write a song and pitch it successfully to an artist you are relying on their producer and you may or may not like what they do with it. I've written many songs that were produced by a labels producer which the label refused to release. I've sold songs for little money that ended up as worldwide hits and it kills the spirit for a while. The way that I look at it is that it is all a learning process and at the age of 67 I am still learning lifes lessons. I'm sure I will have many regrets to come in the future.

[Just1L]

No regrets music-wise. I've always looked at life as "The more mistakes you make the better you'll become." Everything is a learning process and mistakes should be made. I've got many more mistakes to make in me just dying to get out. LOL

 

Of course I have no skin in the music game. Haven't spent any real money on it. Now, say I spend a grand on something that flops and there are things I know I should have done differently, I would regret that.

[scotsman89]

as a none performer . musician. singer  and someone who writes because I can  .not because I think much of it is of great quality . how the hell can you say you regret making people who enjoy (  whatever crap ) you put out there.  most of us listeners only  ( I believe ) think to ourselves wish i could do that > play >sing  make people happy to be there watching 

or listening on our headphones  at home . so regret to strong a word maybe  thinking it could be better  .but that's about it 

 

john

[Ray888]

52 minutes ago, scotsman89 said:

as a none performer . musician. singer  and someone who writes because I can  .not because I think much of it is of great quality . how the hell can you say you regret making people who enjoy (  whatever crap ) you put out there.  most of us listeners only  ( I believe ) think to ourselves wish i could do that > play >sing  make people happy to be there watching 

or listening on our headphones  at home . so regret to strong a word maybe  thinking it could be better  .but that's about it 

 

john

 

May I ask what you do with your songs apart from putting them on Soundcloud or other platforms?

[Peggy]

A while back,  i had a piece of work, a lyric, I heavily modified to change the direction because folks saw no "hope" in it's conclusion.  It has bugged me ever since.  The original is stuck on a device that is going to have to be pulled off professionally. Until I get that lyric back to it's original intent I have haunting regret.

 

That in itself made me a stronger writer. So regrets aren't always bad.

 

Peggy

[scotsman89]

Ray 

this is it just a way of releasing them or my head might explode . that would not be a pretty site all the stuff that is crammed in there .  this is not stealing  please keep uprights post

john

[Ray888]

2 hours ago, Peggy said:

A while back,  i had a piece of work, a lyric, I heavily modified to change the direction because folks saw no "hope" in it's conclusion.  It has bugged me ever since.  The original is stuck on a device that is going to have to be pulled off professionally. Until I get that lyric back to it's original intent I have haunting regret.

 

That in itself made me a stronger writer. So regrets aren't always bad.

 

Peggy

 

Hi Peggy, It's important to understand that there are as many opinions as there are people in this world and I include songwriters and A&R in that statement. I have seen first hand on many occasions where top industry people have been wrong in their opinions. It is the reason why I will listen to what others opinions are but will go with my gut feeling in the end.

[Ray888]

2 hours ago, scotsman89 said:

Ray 

this is it just a way of releasing them or my head might explode . that would not be a pretty site all the stuff that is crammed in there .  this is not stealing  please keep uprights post

john

 

Hi John, I'm not understanding your last part of your sentence "this is not stealing please keep uprights post"?

[scotsman89]

ray

did not want anyone to think we were going off topic is all

 

john

[Ray888]

1 minute ago, scotsman89 said:

ray

did not want anyone to think we were going off topic is all

 

john

 

Yes, I think that I am easily distracted and have a tendency to stray off topic. I used to regularly get caned back in my school days for not paying attention to the boring teachers and RC Nuns. Hopefully John Moxey won't cane us but I haven't been around long enough to know what punishment he may inflict upon us. Expelled maybe? 

[Peggy]

1 hour ago, Ray888 said:

 

Hi Peggy, It's important to understand that there are as many opinions as there are people in this world and I include songwriters and A&R in that statement. I have seen first hand on many occasions where top industry people have been wrong in their opinions. It is the reason why I will listen to what others opinions are but will go with my gut feeling in the end.

 

You're right. W.I.P. with me so 99.999999% of the time there's something I probably just don't see in my writing (yet)  

 

So to John's point .. regrets

 

[starise]

My biggest regrets are not letting something iffy sit for awhile. I have put out quite a few tracks and some of them shouldn't be out there. I usually go for a very human feel. Sometimes that can go too far the other way. You can't hide everything by saying, " I wanted it to sound real". Sometimes no matter how much it hurts the song needs a retrack.

 

I know why I do it. I spent hours on it and there's only a teenie tiny mistake in there, but to change it I need to do major surgery because parts have automation and melodyne or something similar written to parts. It isn't as easy as cutting and pasting. It might take several hours to unfreeze a midi track, go deep into the midi and edit it. If it's a vocal part, the mics were set and adjusted a certain way. Tracking over the bad part might need lots of tweaking to get it to sound like it fits into the slot.The longer I wait the more difficult it can be.

I spend WAY more time mixing than actually making music.

[Sreyashi Mukherjee]

I regret not getting actively into music earlier. But no, I'm not moping over it.