the gap
competent aesthete and bumbling beginner
I’ve been working, slowly and quietly, on a longer piece of writing—something between a long essay and a short book. It’s called Making Time: A Field Guide to Finishing Music, and it’s about creative friction: how to manage it, how to structure your time around it, and how to build momentum in a creative practice in music. It’s written with the creative music producer in mind, but I think it will be useful to others who do solo digital creative work.
I’m not quite ready to share an excerpt, but I want to start putting some of the core ideas out into the world. One of the concepts I keep returning to is the idea of the Gap—or the space between your taste and your skill.
It’s the difference between what you know good music sounds like and what you are personally capable of making. It’s the reason so many people abandon their creative ambitions prematurely. It isn’t because they aren’t serious, but because the seriousness makes it worse. The wider the gap, the harder it is to learn from the beginning, and the more emotionally laden the creative work becomes.
I have always been a compulsive learner. And yet, somehow, I’m not especially good at anything—at least not in the technical sense. I tend to orbit objects of interest rather than master them, which I’m slowly learning is not the liability I once assumed.
A lot of people come to DIY music production not because they have technical training, but because they have really good taste. They’ve been shaped by music for years—often decades—and they carry around an internal archive of references, sensibilities, emotional tones, and aesthetic preferences. That archive becomes part of their identity. Eventually, it compels them to try making music themselves—not because they believe it will be easy, but because they recognize that they might have something meaningful to offer.
The problem, of course, is that making music—especially on your own—requires a sprawling and constantly shifting mix of skills. You need not only technical fluency in your tools and instruments, but also a capacity for experimentation, self-direction, emotional regulation, and a kind of quiet, dull persistence. It’s easy to underestimate how many forms of learning are involved, and how often that learning begins at zero. The result is a kind of psychological whiplash: people know enough to know what they want to make, but not enough to make it—and that gap can feel unbearable.
When I started learning to produce music, I wasn’t trying to build a career. I wasn’t passionate about FM synthesis, or automation envelopes, or dynamic EQ, and I definitely wasn’t seeking an occupation that had me sitting at a desk most of the time (yet, here we are). I just wanted creative agency. I wanted to be able to make something from start to finish without relying on anyone else.
Sometime in 2010, I heard the first Twin Shadow record, Forget, and I knew I wanted to produce my own music. That sound, and the early Blood Orange demos on Myspace, became my north star. That evolved into a fascination with commercial R&B when I discovered The-Dream’s solo work. Around the time I moved to New Orleans in 2016, I finally saw Drive and became obsessed with Desire and Chromatics. I made a small portfolio of instrumentals inspired by that sound, thinking about making music for film or sync licensing. Those became the first Doll Muscle demos.
Each time, I had a clear aesthetic direction, and each time, I ran headfirst into my own limitations. Sometimes they were technical; other times they were emotional or logistical. But in all cases, I lacked the tolerance for being bad at something, and my capacity for inspiration attached itself to the next thing. That, more than anything else, shaped the trajectory I’ve taken with music. I was always learning—but I was also always ducking the hardest parts of learning.
When you’re doing everything yourself, there’s no way to avoid being a beginner. You will, inevitably, have to be bad at something all the time. And if your self-image can’t withstand that, it becomes very hard to stick with any creative path long enough to grow.
There’s another layer to this, which I think is subtler but just as corrosive: the belief that we shouldn’t have to start over.
I can sort of play the piano. I have enough experience to fake it in a band or write some parts. But I’ve never learned to sight-read, and I’m far from fluent on any traditional musical instrument. There’s nothing preventing me from taking a beginner course and practicing daily—except the quiet, irrational belief that I shouldn’t need to. I already know enough to get by. Why go backwards?
That kind of thinking is deeply limiting. It keeps us in a holding pattern, where we never allow ourselves to learn with intention, because we’re too invested in the illusion of already knowing. When I talk to other artists, I hear this all the time: people who are embarrassed to be beginners in areas where they’re supposed to be advanced, and who carry that embarrassment around like proof of failure.
It’s not failure. It’s just the nature of the work.
When someone asks me to help them understand wine, my first move is usually to ask them to forget everything they’ve ever heard. Most people have a jumble of memorized phrases and secondhand opinions that clutter their relationship with wine. I try to help them make space for direct sensory experience, because that’s the only thing that actually teaches them how to taste.
I think about music in the same way. Before you can learn how to produce well, you have to let go of the performance of competence. You have to stop trying to appear fluent and start getting curious about the process itself.
I started learning about wine, myself, in a professional context, with no aspirations of becoming any kind of connoisseur. No part of my creative identity was already wound up in understanding wine. I just needed a way to support myself while I was playing in a band in Brooklyn and trying desperately to sound like Blood Orange. Because of this, I learned what I needed to learn in a smooth and structured way that allowed me to exist in that profession for years to come. Learning wine was interesting and fun. It was, at times, very difficult—but not emotionally, not in terms of my own ego survival.
One of the guiding principles of Open Studio is that it’s perfectly fine—normal, even—to have great taste and still be developing your skills. That isn’t something to hide or feel bad about (talking to myself here). It’s just the creative condition.
The things I make for Open Studio are built with this gap in mind. They’re meant for people who understand music deeply, but who need structure and support to begin producing the kind of work they know they’re capable of. In that way, I think of them less as tutorials and more as invitations—ways to enter the process without shame, and with a greater sense of clarity and possibility. I want to offer permission to think and feel like an artist, even when what you’re actually doing is learning the basic differences between MIDI and audio.
Because the truth is, the gap never disappears. The more you make, the more your taste evolves. The more your taste evolves, the more your skills have to grow just to keep up. The creative process is not about finally catching up to your taste. Try as you might, the gap will never close all the way. It’s about learning to live inside that space, to build from within it, and to trust that the distance between what you imagine and what you can do is where the most interesting work will happen.
I’ll be sharing more about Making Time over the next few months. For now, I’ve turned on pledges here on Substack. If you’ve been enjoying Open Studio and want to support what I’m building, I’d love it if you’d consider pledging. The newsletter will be free, regardless.
I’m also thinking about adding a paid tier at some point, and I’d love to know what you’d actually want from that. If there’s something you’d like more of—or something you’re missing entirely—feel free to hit reply and let me know.
Thanks, as always, for reading.