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kleinbl00  ·  3406 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pre-Life Crisis (feat. 2 Years on Hubski and Making a Living) by Pabs

Logic inspires you because you're getting to do what you want in it, and you're getting to do it on your own time. Ask yourself

Self, would I still love Logic X as much as I do now if I had to spend fourteen hours a day, five days a week, building soundbeds for tampon spots and real estate infomercials for $75 a day?

If the answer is fuck yes, self, I have no self-respect, zero artistic spark and an eagerness to subsist near the poverty line for the rest of my life then you should absolutely grenade your plans and spend the rest of your life twiddling digital knobs. If the answer is LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE then you should probably continue to enjoy composition and music production as a safe-harbor avocation you pursue of your own free will for reasons other than remuneration, because lemme tell ya - the guys who make their living "programming" are few and far between and they're all in Pro Tools anyway, which is substantially less fun to work with.

All props to rezzeJ but he's six years of education down whereas my sum total music education is two quarters' worth of electives and I make a lot more money than he does. Will he eventually eclipse me? No. Because I'm union in the heart of the entertainment industry and those jobs aren't going to rezzeJ and they never will. Will he eventually become much more famous? I certainly hope so. I love and respect passion and champion the artist in all things but odds on, anyone with their jobby-job that regards music as a hobby is gonna come out financially ahead. You can beat the odds. It's been done. It annoys me no end that Death Cab has a new album blanketing the airwaves the week I bail on Hollywood, since I mixed Ben Gibbard's first album when we were both undergrads. There's an example right there where I'm wrong. But Ben Gibbard isn't the only musician I mixed when I was an undergrad and the people who come out ahead? They work HARD and they work OFTEN and they work ALL THE TIME. As Jack Nicholson said after The Shining, "It took me 20 years to become an overnight success."

It's a stupid discussion, though. I'm not sure why people always have it. There's this apocalyptic notion that you choices are "x OR y" instead of "x AND y" as if you can literally spend 16 hours a day doing one thing. Once more with feeling: my sum total music/mixing/production education is two quarters. I volunteered at a club because I got in for free and within a month, it was paying my bills while i got a degree in something that made money. I was hardly the only one. I knew bartenders studying for the bar, waitresses working on their MFAs in fashion design and barbacks with art spaces.

You're supposed to enjoy yourself. That's much easier when you know where your next meal is coming from. Don't be like the bassist I knew with an Einsturzende Neubauten tattoo who played in a reggae band to pay the bills.