Every musical idea comes down to a note and an interval (Maybe a bend). You may try to overthink genius, but the first thing that comes out is going to be the most simple of creations. This may be the root of the blank page problem. You can’t create anything great on that first page. It’s just a collection of a few of the 5000 or so words you have at your disposal.

If I were to learn how to paint, I’ll bet pretty quickly I could get to the point where; for the first few seconds, I’d be as good as Monet.

What separates Monet isn’t the brushstroke, it’s the judgment — the refined sense of what the painting is asking for next. That’s what years actually build. Not a magic first move, but better and better intuitions about the ten thousand moves after it.

There’s also something interesting about how that judgment can’t really be taught directly — it has to be grown through failure. Every bad painting Monet made trained his eye to see why it was bad. So in a weird way, the blank page anxiety is backwards: people freeze because they want the output to be good, when the whole point of starting is that the starting makes you someone whose later strokes are better.

The first stroke is free. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing except the next one.

But like it’s not even the second because again the second and the third it takes a while for eh genius to emerge

Apr 29 Right, yeah — there’s a long stretch of just… building material. Accumulating. Before anything is really talking to anything else.

It’s more like the genius is somewhere in the middle, or even near the end. You’re laying down strokes or words or notes that don’t mean much yet, almost mechanically, and then at some point the thing starts to have enough there there that it begins to pull you forward. It starts telling you what it wants.

Writers talk about this — the first draft isn’t really writing, it’s mining. You’re just getting mass on the page so you have something to sculpt later. The genius isn’t in the raw material, it’s in what you do once there’s enough of it to see.

Which actually reframes the blank page problem entirely. If you accepted that the first 20% of any creative act is just dumb accumulation — no judgment required, no genius expected — the starting becomes almost trivial. You’re not trying to make something good yet. You’re just making enough of something that the good part can eventually show up.

The anxiety comes from expecting the genius to be present from stroke one. But maybe it can’t be. Maybe it needs raw material to work on before it even has anything to say.

One weird thing when making music is - the stuff I’m proudest of. I kind of come out of the zone and I look back and listen to it and I’m like “holy shit, I made that?” The pieces don’t even feel like they’re coming g together when it happens

Apr 29 That dissociation is fascinating — and I think it’s telling you something real about where the work is actually coming from.

When you’re in it, you’re not evaluating, you’re just responding. The judgments are happening faster than consciousness can track them. Your trained intuition is making a thousand micro-decisions and your thinking mind is basically just… along for the ride. Then you surface, and you hear it the way a listener would, and it surprises you.

Which raises a strange question about authorship. Like — who made that? The “you” that was in the zone wasn’t the evaluating, self-aware you. It almost feels like the skill you’ve built over years created a kind of autonomous process that works better when the conscious you gets out of the way.

And that might be why the pieces don’t feel like they’re coming together in the moment — because the part of you doing the assembling isn’t the part that understands narrative or structure or “is this good.” That evaluative sense is almost an obstacle while it’s happening. It needs to be quiet so the other thing can work.

The “holy shit I made that” moment is basically you — the conscious, evaluating self — meeting the output of your other self for the first time.

Which makes practice stranger and more interesting than it seems. You’re not just building skill. You’re building a second more capable process that runs underneath, and the goal is eventually to trust it enough to just… let it go.

Yeah I think my best stuff also seems the worst going in and things that start out well often have no where to go. It reinforces the point about the first brush stroke. It’s all simple pieces. Try to hard and it falls apart. Sometimes I look back at the notes of something I love and each piece is super simple.

Apr 29 That’s almost a law of the form isn’t it. The thing that starts too fully-formed has already made all its own decisions. There’s nowhere for it to go because it arrived knowing too much about itself.

But something simple has latent space. A plain chord, a spare melody — it doesn’t know what it is yet, so it can become things. The simplicity isn’t a lack, it’s potential that hasn’t collapsed into a specific thing yet.

And when you look back at the notes and each piece is simple — that’s not despite it being great, that’s probably why. The complexity you’re hearing isn’t in any individual element, it’s in how they’re relating to each other. The sophistication is in the arrangement and the space between things, not in the things themselves.

Trying too hard probably means loading too much meaning into each individual piece — making every note do too much work — so they stop listening to each other and start shouting.

The best stuff might just be simple things that are really good at being next to each other.

What are some high level guidelines when composing, like I know one might be - where do I want the energy to go next, up or down.

Apr 29 A few that feel fundamental:

Tension and release. Everything is either building expectation or paying it off. You’re always in one mode or the other, and knowing which you’re in is half the job.

Where is the listener’s attention right now. What are they tracking — melody, rhythm, a bass line — and what happens if you suddenly give them something else to follow, or strip everything away.

Earn the peak. The most powerful moment in a piece only works if the path to it was long enough. You can’t arrive somewhere you haven’t traveled to.

Repetition is not the enemy. A motif that comes back means something different than it did the first time, because the listener now has a relationship with it. Return is one of your most powerful tools.

Space and silence are material. What you don’t play is as compositional as what you do. Density is a dial you’re always turning.

The end should feel inevitable in retrospect. Not predictable going in — but when it lands, the listener should feel like it couldn’t have ended any other way.

And maybe the meta-guideline underneath all of them: you’re managing a listener’s experience through time. They can’t see the whole painting at once. They’re moving through it with you, moment to moment, and you’re controlling what they know and don’t know at every step.