It’s okay if you’re not good at first

This is something that I told one of my students the other day.

So this is about music, but can be applied to much more than music.

I had my students make simple songs using this online music making tool called BeepBox. It’s fairly simple to use even if the interface is a little confusing. One great thing about it is that you can change the scale of the piano roll. You can adjust the scale so that it’s only allowing you to use notes in the pentatonic scale, or the major scale, or the minor scale. So I’ve started having my students learn how to use it. And they’ve largely enjoyed it.

Today I had a student tell me that nothing they write sounds good and they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t want to keep making music they didn’t like and it obviously didn’t make them feel very good learning that they couldn’t make something they liked with it.

The title of this post is what I told them. It’s okay if you’re not good at first.

I compared it to ice skating. I live in Los Angeles and if you’re not familiar with the weather over here, it’s never snowed in the few years I’ve lived here. Never. It hardly ever gets below 60°.

So I compared it to ice skating. And I asked that student if they’d ever been ice skating. They said they hadn’t. I followed that up with, “how good do you think you’d be at it the first time?” And they said they probably wouldn’t be very good. So I told them, “Yeah. You probably wouldn’t be very good. But that’s fine. You’ve never done it before. If you’ve never done something before then you can’t expect yourself to be super good at it the first time.” And I told them the more they try to get better at it, the better they’ll get.

I also gave them some ideas to use in their own music to help them get closer to something they’d like. Just so they had some real applicable tools to try to use.

But it’s always a good thing to remember. It’s totally okay if you’re not good at first.

ISJ