Rambling time.

As I'm redoing a song I did near the beginning of my musical journey, I remember a feeling at the time that my older work was better at one point around 3 or 4 years ago. I feel like this is a critical point for any musician, personally, because it's usually a sign that you've thrown your best at the wall without realizing it sounds bad because you still don't understand what you're doing wrong, and your older, safer music starts to sound more appealing to you. But you don't know why at that moment. You just know that there's like this hole, this gaping hole in your music that you can't quite figure out why it's there.

Looking back on this song that came just before that, between the period of rapid experimentation, and the "I'm just going to throw some notes on a scale" phase, it reminds me that I used to work differently. Far more melodically, sometimes throwing so many ideas at the listener that it's too much to follow. (It's been interesting to adapt these ideas to become something listenable while retaining all of them in some capacity.)

Anyone else have some stories about a time where they thought their old music was better, but didn't understand why? I recall it was a point where I almost quit, and I'm glad I didn't.

I'm currently living through that exact train of thought and it's been hard to get out of it...

I will say kot, your music is much better than when I started out

like it actually makes sense lmao

keep learning why what you've been doing works

I don't know if it falls into the same category, but that's similar to the feeling when I see how prollific I used to be on BotB compared to now. I don't think my old stuff is better but it was a time I wasn't afraid to put out anything I made, even if it felt incomplete.

I've reached a point where it's almost impossible to simply sit and compose a song for an OHB because my brain ends up holding it to the same standards as the songs i spend days working on on.

for me there's just an awareness that my focuses were different at many different past points, and it's often weird and surprising to see that i made some of the decisions that i did, if i look back on older music. i dunno if i've had thoughts of "the older stuff was better", but i'm sure i'm not alone in feeling like the older stuff has some sort of sense of "greater purity" because of the "knowing less about what i was doing" naivety thing; like a more distilled personal essence. there are a few occasional songs that do make me go "wow, i don't think i could do that again" (in a good/complimentary way) but for the most part i just see myself as having moved forward, and my music having taken much more of a distinctive shape.

i would say absolutely that my music was better especially around the 2017-18 era, plainly on that i had more time to dedicate to the activity

that is pretty much the only limiting factor to being better for me at the moment

That's basically where I'm at too. I have an actual job now, and personal projects (under my real name so I don't wanna promote them here). BotB is not my top priority, so that explains the inactivity.

I only made my most recent NSF+ because I thought it would earn me the badge... then I gave up when it didn't.

I recognize that was a shitty source of motivation, and I did then, but I thought I would get what I wanted.

For some reason, I feel like my best entries only come when I have "actual ideas". I don't know what that means, exactly, but I know it when I feel it.

Now I'm using all my energy and ideas on non-BotB stuff that feels more "useful" to me, and that's making hard to enter battles.

I've had the same feeling, because I spend less time making a track than I did before. Time is a crucial factor.

I have had this thought. But it just encourages to get wild again and spare myself the little mountains of personal judgment and prejudice I’ve built up against myself over the years through perceived pathways of definition. I can redefine myself at any time. I am still myself, I am still here. Ultimately I only really make what I want to listen to myself. I am my best audience, and that’s plenty enough.

I'm glad this question was as personal and introspective as I thought it would be.

I think I'm at damifortune's point where I find it fascinating how different my music was when I started, while knowing that it's just a product of the passage of time. But I think there's a lot you can learn from those points in time by not considering them better, but just different from your current work, and revisiting those ideas once in a while.

Fear kills creativity. Defeat fear and you will fly so high no one can touch you.