Working in isolation

Recently I decided to put a 'draft' track up on soundcloud, it's the first time for a while I've done this. In the past I put most things up on music forums and learned a lot from doing that, but since being signed (to a small independent label, but a good one), I decided to try to take a more 'professional' approach to my music. I'm not quite sure what that really means, but part of what I think it means to avoid releasing anything on the internet apart from the final version, when it finally comes out through the label. The idea is obviously that people then only ever hear your music at its best, and never hear all the mistakes on the way. However this is a tough thing to do, and not just because you get quite impatient waiting for something to finally be released! In my day-to-day life I don't have access to the quality of feedback available in various places on the internet, and I've been finding myself building up a number of unfinished of tracks which I've been unsure are really 'good enough' for release, either in terms of the basic ideas or in terms of how I've executed them... In the past I would have just finished these tracks, put them up on a forum, and judged from the feedback whether they were potentially releasable as part of an album or EP, but without this I've been struggling. Perfectionism is part of it, and confidence is another part. So I can work towards the next full release (whatever or whenever that is, I don't yet know) I've decided I basically need to get more tracks finished, and if there's something I really can't judge, I just need to put it out there somewhere and try to get a second opinion... I won't be releasing everything in draft form, but sometimes it definitely helps.

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