The amateur perfectionist

I saw some random meme on Instagram today and it hit me right between the eyes:

I think my problem may be that I’m both a “perfectionist” and “not very good.”

Does this describe you? Or has it in the past? Because this is 100% me from ages 21-31, give or take. I spent easily 10+ years of my life reworking and reworking the same material, over and over and over, trying to get it closer to the sound I heard in my head.

And then life took over, and I started going on tour with people, and when I was home and had the chance to work on music, I didn’t have the time to obsess over it as much as I had before. Don’t get me wrong, I still obsessed! (And I still do.) But, also, I had limited windows of time, and a couple of the projects I was working on had other people involved, so I actually had the sense for the first time that I needed to get things finished.

So I got the stuff I was working on as good as I could get it, and we put it out into the world. And then I worked on new projects.

And I learned something that I would have learned way quicker if I’d been better to begin with about finishing things in a timely fashion: you learn more, and you learn better, and you learn faster, when you’re constantly working on new material. You can hear it with fresh ears, and you can apply what you’ve learned from previous projects, and you can grow much more quickly as an engineer. Reworking and reworking the same material over and over did not afford me the same levels of learning and progression. It was more of a “deck chairs on the Titanic” type of situation.

I thought I would share my experience with this here, in case that someone might read it and think “Shit! This is me!”

If this is you: first, I want you to know that I empathize deeply. I get it. I have been you. And, also, I want you to know that you will get better at recording and engineering. Your hard work will pay off. But you have to keep doing something to get better at it, and reworking the same material doesn’t count.

Your best work will always be in front of you. So get it sounding as good as you reasonably can in a not-too-long amount of time, put it out, use it to attract some more people to what you’re doing, and get going on the next thing. It will serve you well in the long term.

Forward — jamie