The Adventures of One-Upping Yourself

Yesterday I spent all day in the studio trying to re-do a previous session that I thought sucked. I ended up spinning my wheels all day trying to one-up the last session and finally threw my hands up in despair, abandoning the new session completely. I took the rest of the day off and tried to forget that I just wasted another 6 hours with still nothing to show for my efforts. In my despair, the next day (today) I opened up the first session and re-listened to the files I captured initially. I was hoping to gain insight on what I needed to do to get what I wanted to get. Turns out, I loved everything I captured in that very first session. This means I can start tracking vocals and adding overdubs. Yea for me!

I learned two things from this experience:

1) My "perfectionism" hates anything I do initially, be it songwriting or recording. I usually have to get some time-distance between what I've done and listen with a fresh perspective at a later date, which could be the next day, several months, or even a year. Any create-music activity is myopic, and I've found that I need to frequently back away from the tree so I can glance at the forest. Many times the forest-view makes the individual tree look less odd.

2) Sometimes I have to try to one-up my last attempt in order to discover that that attempt was actually pretty good in the first place. This applies to every aspect of songwriting and recording. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to replace what I thought were crappy lyrics, only to flail in trial-and-error land for way too long. But somehow through the process I came to discover that my initial inspiration worked just fine. Same thing applies to tracking and mixing. Go ahead and experiment or try to one-up yourself. But don't be afraid to accept the original idea when nothing's turning out the way you hoped it would.

Now, sometimes I do come up with something better. In fact, that's usually why I attempt to one-up in the first place. Whether you fail or succeed, I actually recommend the one-up attempt because it's great education and practice all the way around. Sometimes it produces great results. But sometimes it's the only thing that can help you realize that you had something good before you started one-upping. And through the process you learn yourself.

I love the saying that an expert is someone who has made all the mistakes that can be made. The implication in this statement is that experts became experts by making mistakes, learning from them, and then applying that knowledge to their betterment. In the process, the expert-in-training eventually learns to trust their own judgements. However, this can take years and years of making mistakes to discover. Don't be frustrated about making mistakes; they're part of the joyride toward success.

Happy Creating!

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