Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly

I don’t know where I first heard this idea, but the more I write music the more I realize how true this is. If something is worth doing, then it’s worth being done poorly because the only way that you’ll get better at doing something is by doing it.

If you want to be able to produce music or improvise solos you need to start doing those things. That might mean that you write some bad music or you improvise some poor solos. That’s fine. Eventually you’ll get better at it. Then you’ll realize how necessary it was to do it poorly.

There’s a lot more to both producing music and improvising solos than just doing it, but doing it will definitely help you do it better. Practicing improvising will help you get better at improvising solos. Writing music will help you get better at writing music.

There are things you can study and learn about to improve your composition and production skills, as well as your improvising skills, but if you never do it, you’ll never get better at it. You need to do it poorly in order to do it well.

It’s embarrassing sometimes because you have to write a bad piece of music or write a piece of music that you don’t want anyone to hear, but that’s part of the whole journey. I majored in classical composition at Berklee and believe me I’ve got quite the number of pieces of music I never want anyone to hear. They’re not good. They’re not original and they don’t sound like me. But in order to get to where I am now with composing I had to write those pieces of music. I had to write poorly in order to write well.

It’s practice. When you first start learning piano you probably won’t be amazing, but who cares. If you’ve only been playing for a week, why expect yourself to be any good? Just enjoy messing around and figuring out the basics and enjoy the process. Enjoy learning and exploring the piano.

And soon enough by doing it enough you’ll get better.

ISJ