Welcome to Why Make Music… a podcast where we dive into the world of creativity and inspiration,
and our host ThinkTmm, we're all coming from planet Earth.
Now, without further ado, let's take a walk on a journey to think, to talk, and to explore
Why make music?
Yeah
Hello, hello, hello to everyone out there listening.
I'm your host, ThinkTimm.
That's T-H-I-N-K-T-I-M-M.
I will be your host for our podcast, Why Make Music?
Why Make Music… is a podcast that I came up with where I like to discuss the inspiration,
the idea, the birth of creation of my idea of music.
Why make music is a question that I greatly encourage anyone to ask a person that they may be considered
a creative person to answer.
Why make music…
The reason I make music is because, I kid you not, I have no choice.
The majority of my life I have spent being intoxicated, hypnotized, and listening and creating sound
that can influence or be influenced by the world around us.
When I was younger, I grew up in a musical household where music was playing,
whether it be records, tapes, I can say eight tracks, but I'm not completely that old, but
live performances, I had family members that had bands, bands that rehearsed inside my house.
Music I listened to that influenced me to want to pick up those instruments, plug them in, and learn how to play.
My instrument of choice that I like, that I go to first as a traditional instrument is the bass guitar.
I can throw down on the regular six string guitar, acoustic or electric, you take your pick.
Keyboards, piano, synthesizers, drum machine, programming.
In the light of the year 2024, the digital audio workstation that is supplied by most computers, laptops, or tablets
are very, very functional when it comes to being a creative person.
It allows you to create a world all by yourself without having to involve other musicians
thinking about timelines or scheduling to get things done.
To show you that I am serious about the craft that I embarked on as a hobbyist musician,
all the sounds you hear in the background of a podcast are created, produced, or programmed by me.
ThinkTimm… That's T-H-I-N-K-T-I-M-M. ThinkTimm.
The podcast is called Why Make Music….
This is episode 11, and in this episode, entitled Me, Myself, Versus I,
I'd like to get into the psychoanalysis of an independent musician slash artist
and why we do what we do and what it takes to live life and walk that tightrope
and balance your life and your musical life.
Like many people, I have responsibilities. I have a family. I have people who I'm responsible for.
And I have things that I must find time to do and take care of.
Like everyone on this planet Earth, we are all gifted 24 hours a day to get it in.
And when I say it, I mean life. What do you do with your 24 hours?
I tend to want to spend time creating music in my downtime.
My goal is to always create free time that I could never take away from my family
and I could spend creating.
As a independent producer and artist, my material is available on streaming platforms
distributed through United Masters.
It is a service that I pay a fee to, to distribute my material to platforms such as
Apple Music, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon, just to name a few.
I hope if you're curious, you will find time to go there and listen, download,
and take a listen to the tracks.
Currently, there are three projects that have been released.
It's only 2024 and it is the first day of November.
And currently I have Demotional…, Caught Feeling. That's one project.
The second project is called Beatanical, like beat,..tannical, Booming, Bouquet,
so play on words.
The third one that was just released in October is called SuperlaBass,
Reality Affect.
Each volume of songs contain 26 instrumentals that will be considered multi-musical genres
from hip hop, pop, R&B, alternative.
I hope you like it, for that is what I do.
Eventually I will venture into more traditional vocal tracks as time goes on,
but right now my goal is to put music out.
I am aiming to attempt to reach out to sync agents and music supervisors
and hopefully my sound can be placed in projects such as the music that you hear
in the background of a commercial or music that you hear on a television show or movie.
I am not necessarily going for streaming revenue because in order to create a good revenue,
you must have a good community of audience and I know I'm new to the game,
so therefore I am not delusional, nor am I dreaming,
and there's no way in the world that I will ever get a million streams.
And if you know anything about music business, a million streams only brings you $3,500,
and that's not a lot for a million streams.
I am also pursuing ways of contacting college radio and seeing if I can get my tracks played on the air.
Traditional airtime pays more than streaming.
Traditional airtime has a higher rate of return financially if you are trying to work that financial angle.
With all said, let's get into the guts of this episode, Me, Myself vs. I.
The title is going to be an exploration into the mental of the time spent as a creative force
trying to balance life, everyday life, and the tight production schedule that you run
as an independent producer and artist. I say tight schedule because the previous three volumes of music
I put out which totals a complete 76 songs I put out within three months.
26 in August, 26 in September, and 26 in October.
I have two more slated to come out in November and December, which will top off my year of 2024 with 130 distributed tracks.
Talk about trying to play the lottery to find something you like.
I'm quite sure that out of 130 tracks, there has to be something that will catch your ear.
Wink, wink.
So, let me talk to you about the importance of organization.
There's a certain significance when it comes to organizing and composing music.
You understand, especially if you're doing it yourself and you're not locked into a jam session.
You have to have a plan of where you're going to start.
No matter how much you might feel as though the thought is up your eyes, you may not say it out loud.
But I know that there's a plan inside my head that allows me to have a starting point to jam, to get the idea down and out.
So, I traditionally, as I may have said before in past podcasts, I tend to start with the bass, the rhythm, and then I move on to the melody.
I tend to like to find a good drum track, a good drum beat, a good drum sound, and I will start off with the kick drum, the bass.
Popular bass drums they use are the 808, the 909.
You have a kick drum, and the amount of them are endless.
The sounds that these DAWs, the digital audio workstation gives you, are endless amounts of sound that you can put together and you can compose your own track.
I tend not to use samples, meaning I do not sample a beat that another song has.
I do that for personal reasons because A, I like to program or play the track, the beat, the drum myself.
And also when it comes to a business situation, when you sample someone else's song, you must give them credit.
And that means that in the long run, if this were to ever generate any type of revenue, that person also will get paid from what you're doing.
And I'm not saying I'm against it, but if you can create on your own, why would you want to sample someone else's sound and then be responsible for paying them?
That is part of the music business part that you must all learn if you are venturing into music making.
There is a hierarchy of payments that go on.
So I know to the novice or the layman who likes music and listens to music, they might assume that, oh, a truck is going to pull up at your house and drop a bag on your front lawn if you make a hit song.
But that depends on who you are in the chain of creativity.
Producers, writers and record companies get the bulk of the income.
The artist, the front person who is singing the song or perhaps just fronting the band that did it that may not necessarily have written the song, they do not get paid from the publishing aspect of a song.
A lot of times artists tend to get paid from the touring level, the face to face interaction that the audience slash fan gets to see.
I at all times of my creative life never wanted to be the front person of a band unless it was my own band and I've done that a few times.
But I tend to want to be the person more so responsible for the production and the writing.
It's one of those things when you should know where you should fit in or get in.
I believe that understanding the process is also part of the organization skills that comes to you when you are trying to compose and produce music.
You have to be good with your time management and balancing your life with music.
As an older person, meaning that I am not a young man, I am not an old man, I've said this before and I will say it again, I probably have more years behind me than I have in front of me.
Meaning that I am just living life, enjoying life and as much as I love to do music, I also love my regular everyday life and I would do nothing to jeopardize that time I could spend with my family.
So time management is something that is very very important when it comes to being an independent producer or artist.
I say that because it's always best to find time to throw yourself into a project because you never know how long the project itself may take from beginning to end.
And fortunately, I am not one of those creative people that has to take a long time to put an idea together.
Meaning that I've been kind of always on a good situation that I've never had a mental block or a reason to shut myself down and not be able to create music.
Time management segues into a situation of creative block.
What happens when you can't find that consistent inspiration to put forth material or to put out material or spend hours at a time trying to create things.
Like I said earlier, I'm calling out the year of 2024.
Most musicians or most recording artists right now that are on a, I would say professional and even semi-professional level, use these digital audio workstations.
And what that does is allow more time to create where I would say years ago people used to have to spend money to go into a recording studio to get a quality sound album or song done.
And you had to pay by the hour that you spent there.
So think about the money when you think about, oh, I'm going to the studio and you don't necessarily have an idea of what you're doing and you have to spend that time putting together ideas.
The clock was just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, ticking.
And while that's ticking, you are ringing up a bill and people are getting paid money.
And that's why albums' budgets were so large because you had to compensate for all the time.
Where nowadays you can independently at home put together a piece of production perfection without ever leaving your house.
And all you're really paying for is the PC, laptop, desk, computer, tablet program that you were using.
You can get a good microphone, some good headphones.
You can soundproof your room, your basement, your closet, wherever you decide to get your jam on.
And you can record.
The creative block is the one thing that you may not have control over because sometimes it's mental.
Sometimes you may feel uninspired.
Sometimes you may not have a subject matter that you want to write about or sing about or write and play or create music to.
Like I said, unfortunately, I never had that problem.
That leads me back to the me, myself versus I.
Me, myself versus I.
I say that because, like I told you, there is a hierarchy of creativity in you.
Now, when you write something, the best thing you can write should be for yourself.
That's the me, myself.
Why do I say that?
Because I say it from experience.
I like to write music and I like to make music and I tend not to want to make music for other people besides myself.
Now, when I share with other people, is it worthy of being shared?
Yes, it is. But at the same point, I'm sure that I've made things that were questionable that you may not want to necessarily hear or listen.
I know that the project that I'm the projects that I'm currently doing right now, which are musical instrumental tracks,
a lot of people need to have lyrics to steer them and guide them and tell them what songs are about.
I'm not saying that the songs that I'm putting out now did not have vocals or will not have vocals in the future.
But currently, I am going without the vocals because, like I said, my goal is to test the waters in a certain field.
And right now, I feel as though instrumentals is cool.
There are plenty of platforms that cater towards producers who are making instrumental tracks.
There's United Masters, which I am with, that does the beat leasing.
There's Beat Stars. There is TrekTrain. And there is also Air Bits.
There are so many different platforms if you were to search that you could basically lease the beat,
meaning that if you are a creative person and say you want to rap or sing or whatever it is that you do and you need music to do it for,
you could lease a beat or song for X amount of dollars and they will allow you to download the stems and mix it how you want to mix it,
as long as you give credit to the producer who put the music together.
It's a great, wonderful thing and it is also another way of passing them to come for the creative to put their music up there.
The only situation that I find to be kind of interesting is that there is an over saturation of musicians, producers, placing tracks online to be listened to and be sold.
Just like everything is a business, I find that these sites also encourage you to dive into commercial marketing and paying more money to basically move your songs up the chart where they will be viewed by more people.
But it is what it is, like I said, it's not called music business for nothing. There is a business aspect of it and there should be no reason why you as a musician,
if you were putting yourself out there, should think that you would get something without paying money into it.
Because if you understand how the music business works is that even people who you think are I guess overnight sensations,
their team has worked hard to put them in that position and to make it look easy.
And that's why I say, another reason why I say the artist is the last one to get paid because there are marketing people, there are record executives,
there are lawyers that do a job to try to network and connect and put people in the right position and to make it look easy.
And I tell you as an independent musician and an independent artist that it is far from easy.
You find yourself limiting your time with things that are important to you outside of the music scenario,
which is something that I and many other creatives love to do, but you find yourself working hard like it's a job to try to get these things done.
So if you're using a digital work, a digital audio workstation, a DAW, you have to worry about making sure that you have all your files organized,
you got to make sure you label everything so this way you can pull your material.
Most of these programs they categorize everything in the files for you, you can go back into them and pull the things up as you need it.
So that's pretty much self-explanatory if anyone knows how computers work.
So you tend not to lose things as long as you tend to label things.
I tend to have a system that works for me that very well of labeling my materials this way I can always go back and revisit it and re-look at things.
And labeling an organization is a pet peeve for me.
I'm not saying I have OCD, but I take pride in organizing all of my audio files and project folders.
Collaboration issues, collaborating with other artists, just the simple fact of trying to coordinate with another artist because you have to understand
it's going to be a rare situation that you want to find someone that's willing to work when you want to work or work as hard as you want to work.
And no one wants to be outworked by somebody else and also it's hard to confess honestly what you want to do.
Like what's your goal?
Like if I were to collaborate with somebody my question would be, hey, would I be satisfied with the lyricist who put lyrics over top of a track that I like?
Or would I just back and say, oh, I'll take it because it was a financial transaction. So you have to be true to yourself.
Me, myself, versus I. And me, myself, versus I. I is a play on the id, the ID, the id, the one driving factor that you have as a person.
If anyone is taking a psychology class, you understand that the id is what drives you forward.
It's the inner drive thing. It's the, I guess, the hard wiring programming of a person.
Those are the things you may not be able to change. You could change your clothes, you could change your shoes, but you may not be able to change your id, your inner personal personality, the thing that drives you.
So with that being said, I would think that most people who venture into a creative space and create music and create art, if they were not doing the music, the art, the writing, the dancing, whatever it is that you find your thing to be, if it wasn't that, it would be something else.
These are people who have to find some type of driving force to keep them going. This is leading me into a situation of goal setting.
You have to define clear and achievable goals of what you want to do. You should never go into something blindly and not know the direction that you're heading or what your end game is.
Prior to starting this, like I said, I will always, and I have always made music, and sometimes it was a goal for writing lyrics for a band.
It was a goal for self-recording. I'm like, and granted, I may not ever wanted to share this material with anybody, but in my head, I am notorious, and I say it out loud a lot of times to my family and friends.
I am working on a goal line. I am working on a timeline just to complete a goal that's only important to me. There is nothing crazier than trying to explain to someone that, oh, I have to meet this goal that no one knows about.
But I think that is part of some of the driving factors that creative people have. You just can't throw the line out there and just cast and let it sit for hours. You want to give everything a chance to reach a final point.
So, like I said, the last three months, I have put out 26 songs per month, and I have more to go, and I am currently still working on more.
So even though I can sit here and tell you right now, the first five of my 26 is complete, I am now working on number six, and number seven is already slated to go.
So I am constantly, constantly writing and making music, and I am just so fortunate that I have time to spend to do this where it's not taking away from my everyday responsibilities.
So always set yourself a goal and try to reach that goal. It could be something small, it could be something large, but you have to always have yourself a goal.
And you have to also think about it. What are your resources that you need? Like I spoke of it earlier, you got to make sure you have the proper software, the proper equipment to make yourself able to compete out there.
Me, personally, you have to understand, these digital workstations and the things that you can do as far as editing and mixing is wonderful because I am from the generation that the TadScam 4 track recorder was my first crown jewel of recording.
I was bouncing tracks back and forth and slowly losing quality each time you bounce a track over. And once you mix it, it was stuck, it was concrete, it was there. So you got to think, you have four tracks.
Unless you plug two of them up together, three of those tracks are left for vocals and you had to bounce the vocals down to one track and add a few other things. So as time, the more you bounce, the more quality that you may have lost.
So now that you, I went from the four track recorder to I think it was a Roland XP-50 keyboard workstation where at least musically I could put down as many tracks as I wanted to put down but still, I still bounce those vocals and figure out a way to do that.
So technology right now where you can record everything onto an endless amount of tracks digitally and lose zero quality as you do it is the greatest thing in the world.
Consistency. How to maintain consistency. That goes back to the whole, I guess, creative block thing. I'm like, if you want to be consistent, you have to be able to create. When will you be able to put your ideas down?
That goes along hand in hand with setting a goal. If your goal is to record a song a week, that is your consistency. If my goal is to record a song a day, that's my consistency.
I'm like, you can't be pressed by other people's production rate because everyone is different and everyone's skill is different. There are more, more, more, more proficient musicians than I.
I know that they are and their output might be triple my output. So more power to you when it comes to doing that. You have to do everything.
One thing right now, currently, I'm not really too concerned about is another pressure, another stressor that might come to a independent producer or artist is the performance pressure because there is nothing that I am doing alive anywhere.
So I don't feel the pressure to go out there. The biggest pressure I feel is the attempt to try to market myself and try to elevate myself on social media.
I say that because I am very much so a private person and I do not necessarily want to put my life out on social media. So I tend to find other ways to try to get known or try to get my thing out there.
Lately this week, I decided I'm going to combine a whole bunch of different things together and see how it goes. So I also do digital illustration and I am a big fan of Star Wars and Marvel.
I love to draw and I love to create things. So basically what I'm doing, I am putting out digital images, which I've always done now for the past couple years, and I am putting my music in the background and I am making the hashtag Star Wars Marvel and music friendly.
So therefore hopefully this will be something that someone will pay attention to because I could not go 100% hard on just the music aspect of social media because like I said, I'm old.
I'm not dancing. I'm not going to sing. I'm not trying to put myself out there and do these things because like I said, I am not trying to be the front person of anything right now.
I am just trying to get my goal accomplished and my goal doesn't necessarily mean that I need to be known. I ain't going to lie to you. If someone is listening and you are in the music industry and you like what I'm doing, you will be shocked at how low of a price I would be.
I would sell all this stuff for it because a millionaire I am not and a millionaire I may not want to be. I will be happy to be on someone's payroll and be a happy ghostwriter for a percentage of what the total take is because I'm going to be honest with you.
If there are any mathematicians in the listening audience or if there's anyone out there who is thinking about the business aspect of what I'm saying right now, I'm just going to tell you that 100% of zero is zero.
So if somebody did a 50-50 split with me, 50% is better than nothing. You know what I'm saying? So like if you have a way and you have a will to make things occur, I am willing to work with you because I kid you not.
My venture into this independent artist, producer space makes you realize that oh, a lot of people that you see out here doing something, they have a team of people behind you.
I'm like, you have to think about it. Sometimes it's because you're good at writing and producing does not necessarily mean that you're good at marketing or it doesn't mean that you're good at social media posts or whatever.
I tend to wear a lot of hats and I know my limitations and I know that I'm not saying I have ADD, but sometimes it's hard to stay focused on a goal because you're supposed to post and present yourself and market yourself and make sure you hit all the different social media apps.
There are so many of them out there to name and there's no guarantee that you are going to keep up with the person who has a team of people behind them when you know, when I know all this stuff is coming out of my head.
No one else's head. This is my thoughts, my ideas, my head. So I want to thank goodness for the technology that's in music production because it allows me to do so much.
So, so much.
Once again, the vein of my existence, the algorithm to control all algorithms, social media and branding.
How do you begin to sit back and say you want to master social media for an artist. I don't know, like think about it. I have a think Tim, which is strictly music I have WDMN, which is music and art graphic designs, the digital art things I'm doing for Star Wars, which I can't really take credit for because it's not my intellectual property.
All I'm doing is basically drawing and redesigning things that I like to see on TV or see in movies Marvel.
A few tributes to entertainers that I like and so forth.
We have this podcast, why make music.
Yeah, you know Why Make Music. It's the thing that drive us all. It's the question that you ask anybody. It's the question that you ask any soul. Why do you do what you do.
Why, why, why.
And just how I asked that question and I go into a 40 minute rant about making music and why I enjoy it.
I am for you. I asked you.
Go ask someone that I go like, go will be fly.
Realistically, not realistically, but in my mind fantasy realistically.
This somehow segues into a television interview show called why make music. And then I can interview other creative musician people and hear their stories versus listening to boring old me who finds time weekly to put together an hour podcast to talk about why I make music.
Maybe I could get someone else to come on here and I can ask them and I can let them talk. I'm sure 11 episodes and you guys have to be bored of me.
I try to keep it fresh, but there's no guarantee, you know, because I'm human. And as most humans do, you get bored rather quickly. I'm never really bored. I always wanted to do something else.
You know, so I guess that's never bored when you want to do something else and I have other things to do.
My newest and my newest creation shot out to.
It's a very funny story how I came up with this shot out to Tamron Hall.
It used to be on today's show on NBC one day on the day show. She was telling a story of how she uses name this name when she checks in the hotel and I took it and I ran with it. It was DJ warm cookies.
I thought that was the coolest thing ever and I snagged it up on social media and now I created a character and this character will be the representation of warm cookies.
And whenever I get into my cyber space as far as DJ and doing some cyber things.
Oh, listen to that. If you're listening to some headphones. This is a track I actually just mixed together yesterday. I like how the drums are pailing from side to side.
Oh, how easy I am distracted.
It's off of something else that's problem played it more so into 2025 as I'm previewing drum tracks that I already put together.
Anywho, but yet, Tamron Hall DJ Warm Cookies. Yes.
I hope she didn't have a copyright on it. Hope nothing. I hope I never get sued by anybody for it.
You can have it right back. But I encourage listeners to connect with all these platforms and engage me.
Give me reason to be engaging with you because that's all I really want to do.
All I want to do is share my time and share any ideas that I might have of being creative.
And if you don't attempt to do this, it will never get done.
So thank you to all the people who tune in and listen from week to week.
Listen to me rant and go on these long tangents. And I hope for all you independent musicians and all you do it yourself producers and all the people who are sitting in their homes that create music and try to do something.
I hope this is somewhat inspiring. And you realize that for years I wanted to put together a podcast and talk about music.
And it seems a little crazy when in retrospect you're sitting here by yourself and you're speaking to no one and you're talking to people as though they're here.
Yeah, I even pause like you want. I want you to say, yeah, I'm here. I'm listening.
You know, hit me up. Come and leave me a post.
Leave me a like on something, you know, because I really hate it.
But this whole entire game is ran by algorithms that want you to like interact and follow and play games and try to figure out how to put your how to put your song on a playlist and how to get people to listen.
And my idea, maybe my goal is not to have 100,000 listeners. Maybe my goal is not to have a million streams.
Maybe my goal is to have one person like my song and that one person have a project they want to put the song in and my song can help their project will be an accompaniment to what they're doing.
I don't want the highlight. I don't want the spotlight. I'm like, I could be bored off very easily. I'm like, you will be shocked.
Think about it. If I originally my plan for putting out music was going to be if I could do 261 songs a year because I figured 261 songs Monday through Friday is like working a job.
So right now, I'm three months in and I'm sitting on 130.
And I can easily do a song a day.
And I'm sure that somewhere down the line that can account for something. So if you out there and you're listening, then you need a good person to do production or you need someone that can fill up your ideas and put things down.
I might be a person. I don't really want any shine. I'm like, how? I'm like, what's the average salary for a working class person?
A strong six figures a year would tie me in nicely and I will give you like don't hold me to it.
But I know there's production deals out here where people get a 50 50 split.
And I guarantee you that I can give you my money was involved.
I might give you three, four songs a day. But right now, for free, like when I'm doing this for nothing, I can happily do one song a day. So listen, I want you to like, subscribe, leave a comment, tell a friend.
Listen, Why Make Music? Why make music hosted by ThinkTimm, the weekly podcast and every week it gets a little better.
Episode 11, me, myself versus I, the psychological dive into the mind of an independent music producer, artist, creator, a lover of all things.
Peace and be wild. Don't let the boy hit you with a good noise picture. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.
WDMN and what you're going to do when the law finds you. I say that because I'm not religious, but let me tell you.
Praise be, praise be.