"All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good [...] But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. [...] Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this..."
Ira Glass
I've been playing guitar for years. There's something satisfying about working through chord progressions, understanding why certain combinations create tension and release. But I've lived in Ira Glass's gap more often than I'd like to admit.
The ideas in my head would outpace my technical ability to express them. I'd sketch out a riff that felt promising, then open my DAW to expand on it. That's when I'd hit the wall. I could hear exactly what the track needed: a drum sound that felt "saturated" and "dark" and "encompasses a room." But I had no idea how to create that texture. Maybe I knew what I wanted, but I definitely didn't know how to make it.
So I'd start clicking through drum samples. Dozens of them. My ear would get fatigued after twenty minutes of auditioning kicks and snares, each one sounding more generic than the last. By the time I'd exhausted the sample library, I'd lost all connection to the original riff idea. The creative spark that brought me to the DAW was gone, replaced by the mechanical tedium of browsing presets.
This is where a hobby can turn dreadful. When your intuition is pulling you toward something but you have no path to follow it, the creative process stops being meditative and becomes a reminder of limitation. The gap between inspiration and execution kills the joy before you can even explore the idea.