Making Music for Yourself

a guide to joyful music making

“When did making music stop feeling enjoyable?”

I love music, but sometimes I unwittingly use it to torture myself. As I work hard to grow as a musician, I often become too self-critical and start having some of these unpleasant thoughts:

• “I’ve lost my spark”
• “Everything I do sounds basic”  
• “It’s too late for me to get good at this”

When these dark thoughts creep in, I have a hard time doing anything with music at all. It seems like most musicians I know sometimes struggle to enjoy making music which can eventually lead to a lack of focus and extended creative blocks. Over time I’ve realized that it takes just as much work to continue enjoying making music as it does to improve at the craft. 

While musicians get a lot out of craft-focused courses on music theory and songwriting, this is a different kind of course with a different kind of goal: get back to enjoying the process of making music. Through 18 fun, actionable, and sometimes challenging exercises, this course will help you chip away at some common and treacherous creative blocks including perfectionism, decision fatigue, and feeling stuck in a narrow process.

I made Making Music for Yourself with Jessica Kion and Josh Friedman - two of my dearest friends and musical collaborators. We have been helping each other out of musical ruts for decades, navigating the often confusing and contradictory feeling of performing for sold-out and empty rooms, self-releasing albums to enthusiastic and indifferent audiences, and struggling to balance creative fulfillment with gigs that pay the bills. Life making music is full of highs and lows. When we’ve found ourselves in a ‘‘low," this is the course we wish we’d had. So we made it!

How much experience do I need to take this course?

This course is best suited for musicians who have played an instrument long enough to know some chords and have recorded in a digital audio workstation.

The lessons are designed to be equally helpful to casual and professional musicians because they focus on how we look at our process from the inside out, rather than focusing heavily on specific gear, techniques, or instruments.