How Do You Keep Making Music?
Making music for the long term doesn’t mean making the same amount of music all the time, or always making it in the same way.
There are periods when music takes up a huge amount of space. You play several times a week, rehearse with a band, spend hours producing, learn, experiment and meet people.
And then things change.
Work takes up more space. You move. You build a relationship or a family. You have less time and sometimes simply less mental space. An instrument stays in its case. A project stops. You don’t go back to the studio for a few months, and sometimes those months turn into years.
For several years now, I’ve watched huge numbers of musicians come through the Plug The Jack studios. Some come almost every week for a while and then disappear. And regularly, I see them come back.
It has taught me something: your musical practice can be interrupted without your relationship with music disappearing.
So continuing to make music doesn’t necessarily mean never stopping. Maybe it simply means continuing to leave a place for it, even when that place changes.
The place music has in your life changes
Between 18 and 25, many people have a particular kind of availability for music.
It’s a period when you learn a lot, meet people, build your identity and can sometimes devote an extraordinary amount of energy to a passion.
But that availability doesn’t necessarily last forever.
Life gradually adds other things: work, a relationship, children, a home, responsibilities and sometimes other passions or forms of creativity.
That doesn’t mean music has become less important.
It simply means that music has to share the space.
I’ve met musicians in their fifties, sixties and seventies who are still playing today. Yet very few of them have maintained exactly the same level of musical activity throughout their lives.
There have been very intense periods. Others were much quieter. Sometimes there were several years when they barely played at all.
And then something comes back.
A band. A meeting. An urge to play. A moment in life when music becomes necessary again.
A musical life can therefore have interruptions without being over.
Sometimes you need to change how you learn in order to keep going
There are also times when you still have the time and the desire, but your progress stalls.
People often start making music with a lot of energy. At first, progress is easy to see. You discover your instrument, your software and your first techniques. Every week brings something new.
Then you hit a plateau.
What worked until then is no longer enough.
You need to learn differently, understand something more complex, change a habit or simply accept that reaching the next level takes more time.
That’s a point where many people become discouraged.
Not necessarily because they no longer enjoy music, but because they can no longer see clearly how to move forward.
And that’s often where other people become important.
A teacher can explain something differently. Another musician can show you something you had never quite understood. Playing with someone can force you to actually use what you had only practised on your own.
You can learn an enormous amount from tutorials and online tools. But at certain points, getting out of the house and meeting other people can expose you to possibilities you simply couldn’t see on your own.
Be inspired by others without measuring yourself against them
There is a paradox here.
Other people are often what helps us progress, but they can also discourage us when we start comparing ourselves with them all the time.
Today we are constantly exposed to extraordinary musicians.
A guitarist sees perfectly executed solos. A DJ watches leading artists perform in front of thousands of people. A producer listens to tracks where every detail seems completely under control.
That can be fantastic for learning and inspiration.
But it can also completely distort the way we see our own progress.
We see the result. We see far less of the years and countless hours of work that made it possible.
When we are starting out or trying to reach a new level, we can unconsciously turn that level into our own reference point and wonder why we aren’t getting there fast enough.
Making music requires a certain humility.
Accepting that you progress at your own pace. Accepting that some things take years. And accepting that not everyone will become an exceptional professional musician.
And that’s fine.
It’s also why being a musician isn’t about reaching a particular level. The value of music doesn’t begin when you finally reach the level of the people you admire.
Music becomes harder when you always experience it alone
This is probably one of the things I’ve observed most often.
A lot of people learn, create and practise almost entirely on their own.
They produce at home. They learn their instrument at home. They work on their DJ set at home. Sometimes they accumulate tracks, ideas and skills without really knowing what to do with them next.
At some point, that can become a dead end.
Because music is a personal experience, but it is also a form of communication.
Playing with someone gives another dimension to what you are learning. A collaboration suddenly gives a track a destination. A band creates a regular commitment. Someone listening to what you make can give you a reason to take it further.
And the people we are looking for aren’t necessarily professionals expecting an extraordinary level of ability.
There are huge numbers of musicians who simply want to find someone to play with, progress with or build something with.
Two musicians at an average level can make enormous progress together.
Sometimes more than they would by each practising separately at home.
You also need the practical possibility to make music
Some obstacles are much more concrete.
Playing acoustic drums in an apartment is difficult. Getting a guitar amp to sound the way you want can become impossible when the neighbours are close. A DJ setup or recording equipment can also represent a significant investment.
You can therefore still deeply love music while no longer having the conditions you need to practise it in the way you want.
I’ve met many people who told me they used to play and then stopped after moving home or because their circumstances changed.
They hadn’t decided that music no longer interested them.
They simply no longer had a place where their music could exist.
That’s one of the reasons I strongly believe in places where people can simply come and play. Depending on what you do, that might be a rehearsal studio, a DJ studio or a recording and production studio.
Removing practical obstacles doesn’t create a love of music. But it can stop a musical practice from gradually disappearing under an accumulation of small difficulties.
I explored that idea in more detail in the Guide about what really makes a good music studio: a good environment also removes the friction that gets between us and the thing we came there to do.
Keep making music without making everything depend on success
There is another obstacle that can be harder to admit: disappointment.
When we start a musical project, we sometimes imagine it taking us somewhere.
A guitarist might dream of playing on stage. A DJ wants bookings. A producer wants people to listen to their tracks. A singer or rapper wants their words to reach an audience.
There is nothing unusual about wanting recognition.
Saying that we should only ever make music for ourselves and never care what anyone else thinks seems too simplistic to me.
Music is also about communicating something.
When someone reacts to what we play, when a crowd dances, when someone is moved by a track or another musician appreciates what we do, that naturally feeds our desire to continue.
But that recognition doesn’t always come.
And when it becomes the only measure of the value of our music, a lack of results can gradually turn passion into frustration.
There is probably a balance to find.
Having ambitions without making the entire value of your musical practice depend on achieving them.
Making a track because you want people to hear it, but also because creating it gives you something.
Going on stage because you want to share something, without deciding that a small audience means what you do has no value.
A musical journey doesn’t always lead where we imagined it would.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it leads nowhere.
Taking a break doesn’t mean you have given up music
There is no need to turn every interruption into a failure.
There are periods when music can become secondary.
And sometimes it is completely understandable not to want to do things by half. Someone who knows they no longer have the energy to finish an album or properly keep a band going may prefer to stop for a while.
Music can come back later in another form.
Maybe with less ambition.
Or perhaps with much more freedom.
The person who desperately wanted a project to succeed at 25 might, twenty years later, get enormous pleasure from simply playing once a week with three other people.
That isn’t necessarily a lesser version of their relationship with music.
It’s a different relationship.
If you come back to music, you don’t have to start by recovering your old level
If someone told me today, “I stopped making music ten years ago and I’d like to start again,” I probably wouldn’t tell them to begin by creating a huge practice schedule.
I’d simply tell them to pick up their instrument again.
Play a little.
And above all, try to find someone.
A partner. A band. A collaboration. Someone who also wants to bring a little more music back into their life.
There is no reason to assume that everyone looking for musicians expects someone exceptional.
Most of them are simply people like you and me.
They want to play. Improve. Build something. Spend some good time around music.
And sometimes hearing someone say, “Actually, we were looking for someone like you,” is enough for a musical practice that disappeared years ago to start existing again.
So continuing to make music may not mean never stopping.
It may simply mean leaving the door open.
Because when music has genuinely mattered to us, it sometimes has a very particular way of finding its place again.
Damien
Founder of Plug The Jack
