Fix it in the next piece

A friend of mine told me this in college. He played marimba and was kind enough to ask me to write a piece of music for him to perform at his senior recital. So I wrote a piece and met up with him a number of times to learn about marimba and different techniques I could use.

There were a few techniques he showed me that I didn’t include in the piece I wrote for him. For different reasons I didn’t include them, but some of them were techniques that were interesting to me that I wished I’d included.

And that’s when he said, “fix it in the next piece.”

I’d already written that specific piece, and I’d learned something about music composition and how to write for marimba. Rather than go back and completely change the piece I had, I could write a new piece that includes the new ideas.

I like that mentality a lot. Sometimes you might need to edit a piece of music over and over, but at some point that is no longer productive and it would be better to just write a new piece.

So write a new piece and use all of the new information and skills you have, that you learned from the last piece, in your new piece.

ISJ