Shades of grey

Apropos of my recent post on expertise (and wanting no part of it), our dear friend James Turner sent me this thought:

I feel/see pressure to "be an expert" if I want to reasonably expect any form of success. (I.e., one is viewed either as an expert or as an amateur/charlatan, with nothing in between.)

This is so resonant for me. It took me a lot longer than it should have to start putting myself out there to work in a technical capacity on other people’s recordings — even though I knew that’s what I wanted to do — because I kept feeling like there are people who are more skilled than me — i.e., Actual Experts — and so therefore I was being a charlatan simply by having the temerity even to imagine that I could do the same type of work that these “experts” are doing.

And … that’s bullshit! That’s extremely negative self-talk. If you want to work with other people on music, then you should just do that. At whatever skill level you’re at! Just jump right in. You’re not going to break anything. It’s just music.

To the people worried about passing themselves off as something they’re not, I would just say: definitely don’t do that? If you try to tell someone that you can make a world-class mix of their song when in point of fact your engineering is still inconsistent in quality, then yes, that would be charlatan behavior.

But you can just be honest! You don’t have to oversell yourself or try to fool people into working with you. You can simply send prospective co-conspirators examples of your recent work so that they can hear where you’re at, and they can judge for themselves whether they want to work with you.

Working with other people gets us much better much faster. So don’t let your lack of perceived expertise hold you back. The way you’re approaching music production could be just what someone is looking for. Even if you’re more on the beginner / amateur side of things. There’s room for everyone. It’s not a competition.

Rejecting binary thinking — jamie