Practice with the goal of transformation: another angle

In yesterday’s thought, I talked about the effects that working on music has had on me — both in the short term and also over the longer arc now of my adulthood.

Reading it back, I had another realization: my work got much better when I stopped worrying so much about what other people thought and delved more wholeheartedly into my idiosyncratic interests.

Some of these interests are sonic. Distortion, saturation, the sound generally of pushing gear past its limits. Unique spaces for sounds to live in: reverbs, delay systems, and the like. 3D textures and putting sounds outside the speakers. Heaviness and percussiveness: how big can I go? How clean can I keep it while going big? The further out I get with that stuff, the better my work seems to get sonically — and I imagine it’s because I’m pursuing sound in a way that’s aligned with who I am as a person.

And some of these interests are emotional. How much can I enhance the emotion in the material? How emotional can I help the vocal be? The guitar? The drums? What exactly is the emotion in the song? Longing and nostalgia are relatively easy notes to hit; how about claustrophobia? How about panic? How about anxiety? How about isolation? How about resignation? How about hopefulness? How about joy? Where are those frequencies? What are those reverb settings? And how do I access them without superimposing my own ideas upon the song?

When I’m doing my best work, I’m subsuming my ego — my desire for external validation — and I’m centered on empathy: a sincere desire to merge my interests with the interests of the song and the people who made it, and to work in service of them.

When I make myself one with the experience of helping a song communicate effectively, my personal curiosities and my impulses to make the song better come from the same place. This means that, when I’m being the best version of myself, I can follow my instincts into interesting detours, confident in the idea that as I pursue my personal interests I will also be working in service of the material at hand.

All in — jamie