The Deep Frustration with Learning Sound Design

There's something that happens to most sound designers that I call “The Silent Spiral.”

This is the horrible downward spiral that happens when sound designers simply stop… doing sound design.

And it all stems from a massive sense of demotivation.

You know the feeling: the very idea of starting a new redesign, or creating a new synth patch, or practicing for its own sake gets impossible to feel excited about. This feeling just gets worse and worse as we realize our work will be done in a void, with no feedback, and no real sense of direction. And, by the end, we may not even feel like we improved at all.

To top it all off, when we spend time around pro sound designers, they make this whole process sound so easy. “Oh yeah, I just designed the sound for 16 undead-dinosaur-bear hybrids using my own time division multiplexing plugin that I programmed from scratch using a coding language that I invented in high school. How have you been, though?”

So, we subconsciously start to think “why bother?”, and feel even more demotivated as time goes on. The sound stops being made, we never share our work, or update our reels. We stop showing up to events, and yet we still hold out hope for gigs, praying we can still find paid gigs with our skills diminishing day-by-day.

We've all been there. I certainly have. You might be there right now, and it feels impossible to get out.

So, how do we stop the spiral?

We have to change our process entirely. We have to make it fun, and we have to make it easy to start, and, most importantly, easy to finish our work.

This is the broad process I recommend in my Step-By-Step Sound Design course, and I'll share it with you here:

1. Decide ahead of time how much practice you can do that day

   1. I recommend people choose between 10-minute, 30-minute, or 1-hour blocks.

   2. Most of the time, you're only going to have time for 10 or 30 minutes per day at most. That's fine!

2. The time block you select will determine the quality of your output

   1. If you decided on 10 minutes, be okay with the output being imperfect.

   2. The point isn't to create something post-worthy. It's to create something.

3. After X minutes, that project is done. You never need to return to it again if you don't want to.

4. Start a new thing the next day with the same rules as above.

   
   

There can be more nuance added to the process, and some thought needs to be put in into what to practice, but that's the gist of it.

Considering the act of practicing sound design is so rare, you can get very far ahead of most other sound designers by doing this ritual, even if it's for 10-minutes a day. Most people out there are suffering in the spiral, so even a small bit of practice will separate you from everyone else.

So, what's your first 10-minute block going to be?