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.

I think it all comes down to constantly trying ideas you have never done before so that your work stays fresh.

my new stuff is a million times better than my old stuff. that being said i can still look back on my old stuff and appreciate it for where i was as a musician at the time.

this thread has answered an issue i've never directly thought of but have noticed every time i listen to my old stuff

basically:
new guy doing this for fun with no mental shackles vs guy who's done this for awhile and is shackled by "not good as my/other's stuff" + music/color theory

My new stuff is definitely gonna be better when I ever get around to doing any lol. Music is a bit low on the list of priorities for a while longer...

I've been trying new stuff with mixed results. My peak has passed long ago, so, probably, my old stuff was better, but less diverse.

I'm having lots of fun trying new things, anyway. In any case, I hope that I never leave music (nevertheless, music is the one who never leaves you), even as someone who has never ever been a musician, but has loved this form of art since childhood.

while in ~2023/2024 i used to make a lot of music, nowadays i barely even do anymore; and the few times i make music, it just doesnt sound as good to me anymore compared to my older works.
I'm pretty sure this might be because of me being too busy programming to make any more music,
Still - i hope that in the future by doing OHBs and other (non major) battles i can get more creative ideas and learn new programs (all i've known for years is just musescore 3 and ultrabox).

after i joined botb, there was that time period between the ultimate hum and the elements where i grew a lot. the literal growth of my level on botb is how i feel like my music has grown: slowly getting used to the site, then a mad burst of ideas, then steady refinement.

my music during that "mad burst" phase feels a lot "better" to me because i wasn't focusing on Complexity and Texture and Groove (whatever those mean) as i do now during my "steady refinement." i was just expressing thoughts and feelings in a way that was new and fun to me at the time, and i get easily nostalgic for emotional states. for like no fucking reason at all.

sometimes i go back to that mentality and it's very freeing! but currently, said mentality chooses me at its own time and not the other way around. "i am but a twig following the river," or whatever those bald guys on the mountain say

for me, in terms of art, there's no "better" and "worse" because it's all just barking into empty space

in terms of whether i've previously done something flashier or more "technical", that's just changing taste and lack of interest in trying harder to impress other people because that is a meaningless pursuit

I'm at the stage where I won't spend longer than an hour making music unless I have a "real idea", so no 0hbs for me until I learn to stop caring. I've been spending increasingly longer on tracks when I get "real ideas". I just broke my record with 42 hours spent on a track and I'm still only 50% done with it. And it's a collab too!!!

Whenever I get locked into focusing only on 1 song, my standpoint is "my old stuff sucks lmao this song is the greatest achievement humanity has ever accomplished". Whenever I'm at a lack for ideas, I look back fondly to when I could take a "fake idea" and just keep making more patterns until I found something decent.