May Newsletter: Practicing

On our archive stream the other day, in response to a question about tips for beginner musicians, I said something about practicing what you’re good at to bolster your self-esteem, and then moving on to practicing what you’re less competent in. I think my own natural gift has always been in ‘intuitive discernment’ - in other words, being able to tell on a gut level what’s good and what’s bad. I have posts on forums from high school, back in the era where I’d bash out a song in a day and move on, where I’ll share a song and add the commentary, “everything here sucks except for the chorus”. My assessment then almost always matches my assessment now. I’ve always had a keen sensitivity for noticing something that sucks (to me, at least) and rejecting it. It’s like a hangnail or a sore tooth: that lousy line in a song, that transition from verse to chorus that just doesn’t work. Of course, it’s harder to find what does work - that’s more a matter of the grind, trying out many different options until one sticks.

But much of the music-making process exists outside of my sense of what works and what doesn’t. I’ve never had much (or any) patience for the technical aspect of creation - running scales on guitar, doing vocal warm-ups, reading through gear manuals to fully learn the technology I’m using. That sort of patience runs counter to that ‘intuitive discernment’. Playing a major scale is, naturally, boring. Warming up forces you to listen to your playing and singing in its roughest state, hearing all the cracks and missed notes; it’s hard to persevere through it.

And then, of course, there’s the task of sitting down every day to get some work done, which at some point along the road becomes necessary every time I make an album. The list of chores which require both technical patience and creativity grows longer: putting scores together to send to session players, finding synth patches to fill in MIDI parts, deciding on the exact arrangements of songs so that they can be mixed. On past albums, in the face of my lack of patience, my gut discernment would show its ugly side - drowning the songs in overdubs, rejecting mix after mix, and becoming very frustrated with myself and everyone else involved in the creative process. This album is unfolding quite differently: as I consciously practice patience, it slowly and steadily advances towards a finished, listenable state, with everyone in tow. There are far more days spent enjoying the work done so far and appreciating the quality of what’s already on the table, and far less hours spent in the misery of complete ambiguity, looking at songs with no road forward to completion. 

I’m quite grateful for this change. All my previous albums have ended with me feeling like I couldn’t possibly do it ‘this way’ again, and proceeding to change my environment and my tools, instead of looking at my own internal processes and trying to rework them. There’s more bridges to cross in the coming months, but this method of building an album feels durable, a model I can return to without feeling immediate despair.

Ultimately, patience is a process of discernment, as well: having many impulses, and following only those which seem truly good. Learning to wait for the truly good is very difficult, feeling the rush of the accelerating heart, the swarm of nerves as instincts kick in to do something, now. Every negative emotion you’d set aside for later surges to the surface. The paradox is that it feels very bad, very unintuitive, to sit through it, until you wait it out long enough that the rush subsides and something new enters in. What enters in then is hard to describe - it’s like hitting the refresh button. Everything I thought had to be rejected no longer does; now, it’s all tools to be used, life to be lived. All I have to do is learn how to use those tools, and suddenly things will burst forth from them, wonderful and complete, all of their own accord.