What are you making it for? Who are you making it for?
Regardless of what the answers to those questions are, it likely doesn’t have to be perfect. And good enough is often quite far from perfect.
But it’s still useful. The quality standards for what you’re making change depending on how the questions above are answered. Sometimes the quality will need to be higher. Sometimes it won’t matter as much.
Trying to avoid perfectionism in everything you do can save a lot of time and energy and frustration, especially when that extra effort, time, and frustration isn’t being valued.
When making music I’m trying to get into the habit of always creating a finished audio file.
This means there will always be a new version of the song and it’ll be its own file. It won’t require a DAW to open. It’ll be its own file, just how it’ll be when it’s released. That’s why I’m doing it.
It keeps stuff moving forward.
This means that I can send that file to myself to listen to in my car, or on other speakers, or on another computer or different headphones. I can also listen to it on my phone outside.
Doing this is helpful because before I release music I like listening to it as if I were the listener. I wouldn’t be listening to it in my apartment on my studio monitors (Adam Audio T7Vs). I’d be listening to it through headphones while walking outside or through my car speakers while driving.
It’s a slightly different setting that affects how the music is experienced. There’s extra background noise and the speakers aren’t as high quality as my monitors are. There are other distractions like people either driving or walking around. You have to pay attention to some other stuff while doing both of those things (driving or walking). Experiencing my music like that makes me much more confident in what I’m releasing because I’ve experienced it as other people will.
Printing your music is also a great reminder to finish your music. Deciding when a piece of music is finished is something that you don’t often do unless you’re sharing the piece of music somewhere. And unless you do it often, you won’t be good at doing it. Deciding that a piece of music is finished is a completely different thing than deciding what to write in a piece of music.
And printing your music every time you stop working on it is like saying, “If I decided it were finished right now, this is what it’d sound like.”
A small reminder that eventually the song will be finished. It might even make you realize that the piece is closer to being finished than you realized.
The last reason this is useful is practical. You can check where you left that piece of music without having to open and load your DAW. Depending on how extensive the piece of music is and how many plugins it has, it might take a few minutes to load every instrument, synth, plugin, and effect in your DAW. Having the option of listening to an audio file quickly can save a lot of time, especially if you have a deadline to finish multiple pieces of music.
That’s why I’m trying to get into the habit of always printing my music.
The idea behind having grades is to measure and assess how well students understand the material. Personally, I don’t think that often happens in schools. The way a lot of schools handle grades is just based off of whether or not your turn in the work and whether or not you follow the rules.
But regardless of that, the lowest passing grade is still passing.
The person with the lowest GPA that graduates medical school is still a doctor. And the person with the lowest passing grade in a PhD or Master’s program still earns that degree.
If the point of taking a class is simply to pass, then getting the lowest passing grade is a fantastic goal.
Even if it’s a subject you really enjoy, passing is still passing.
I played this for my students after the insurrection on January 6th, 2021. I think the message of this song is true for most political parties in the United States.
The song starts with a string patch on Stevie Wonder’s keyboard and later Stevie Wonder starts singing the words:
Would you like to go with me Down my dead end street Would you like to come with me To Village Ghetto Land.
He then describes a village where children play with rusted toys, people eat out of the trash, there’s crime and blood on the streets, and people eat dog food. It’s a village with horrible living conditions. He describes that politicians “laugh and drink” because they’re “drunk to all demands.” Starvation is rampant. It’s just absolutely horrible conditions.
It’s a beautifully sad song and I think the way he ends it sends the perfect message.
He ends the song by saying:
Now, some folks say that we should be Glad for what we have Tell me, would you be happy In Village Ghetto Land? Village Ghetto Land
I see too many people that are supposedly “concerned” and “upset” and “saddened” by problems in their communities, or nearby communities giving this end message. When someone complains about their living conditions or working conditions they’re told to “just be happy that you have something” and “be glad for what you have.”
But they’d never trade places with them.
And Stevie Wonder puts this perfectly in Village Ghetto Land. He describes a town with horrible living conditions and says at the end that some people say, “be glad for what you have”, but he follows that up with the questions, “Would you like to live here? Would you be happy living under these conditions?”
And he never answers the question because obviously the answer is, “no.” It’s a rhetorical question.
But too often this is the response, or something similar.
Why are people so comfortable telling people who have less than them to, “be happy for what you have?” I’ll never understand that. If you wouldn’t trade places with someone then you have no business telling them to be “glad for what they have.”
If that’s something that you’re saying, I think you really need to examine why you’re saying that. It doesn’t make much sense to punch down and tell people with less than you, lives you wouldn’t want to be living, and problems you wouldn’t want to have, to “just be glad for what you have.”
I’ve gotten a number of compliments on the production value of the videos on my YouTube channel. Every time I get a compliment about it I always laugh a little bit because my equipment (as far as video recording goes) is fairly minimal. It’s definitely not minimal overall and I’ve invested a solid amount of money into equipment, but it’s minimal compared to a lot of video recording setups.
Canon Powershot ELPH 180
The main pieces of equipment that I have are a Canon Powershot ELPH 180, which I got used for about $100. It’s a simple point and shoot camera, without a monitor or flip screen. This means every time I record a video there’s a few short clips beforehand of me testing out the framing and lighting and camera angle.
Zoom H4n Pro Handy Recorder
Zoom H4n Windscreen
I also use a Zoom H4n Pro to record audio. I keep a windscreen on it to reduce some of the excess noise. This is the main thing that improves the production value of a video in my opinion. If the video is out of focus or blurry or a little noisy, people will deal with that. If the audio quality is low or it sounds like it was recorded by a camera microphone in a reverberant room, that’s harder to deal with. I adjust the audio a little bit with a compressor in Premiere Pro, but it’s nothing fancy.
So if you only upgrade one thing about your videos, I’d make sure that it’s the audio quality. It can change so much about how good your videos feel.
Premiere Pro
One final thing that helps improve the production quality for my videos is having soft boxes. I use Neewer soft boxes that look like this, but I don’t think those are the exact ones. I couldn’t find the exact ones, but I have two that look just like those.
Neewer Soft Boxes
Total these tools cost me about $400, which is a solid amount of money to have to spend, but it’s very low for video equipment. For just that I was able to create videos that are quite high in production quality.
There are a few other things that I’ve learned to improve the quality of my videos. I’ve learned how to light and frame myself for the talking head shot that I want. I’ve also learned how to edit audio for videos so that it sounds professional. I’ve learned how to edit videos, which includes adding some quick text graphics or transition graphics and sound effects. I already knew a bit about sound design so adding in music and creating sound effects for graphics was fairly easy for me.
Lastly I’ve looked at videos that I enjoyed watching, mostly by Andrew Huang, Adam Neely, and Rick Beato, to find out how they put together their scripts. Many of them have different sections and personally I’ve found notating distinct sections of class (while teaching different classes) helps many of the students better follow the lesson and stay engaged.
That means when I make notes for a video, which I do by hand in a notebook and they’re mostly shorthand and not a proper script, I plan out different sections. I try to think of how to divide one specific topic for a video into a few different parts. That way when I edit the videos together those parts are built into the recordings. Sometimes I do add extra sections if it makes sense, but most of the time I plan out the different sections to make the videos flow better.
Many of these things are fairly simple or straight forward and easy to learn. Even if you’ve never edited video before, learning Premiere Pro well enough to create videos for YouTube is easy. Even if you’ve never filmed yourself and lighted a shot before, learning how to do that is fairly easy.
If you have extra time to learn the skills and a little extra money, these things can really help improve the production quality of your videos.
I’ve played nine different musicals and one lesson I’ve learned from doing that is that music often switches who the “leader” is. Even if you’re the music “director” of the show you won’t be leading the entire time. And you shouldn’t be leading the entire time. Sometimes other people should be leading.
Some songs you’ll need to lead, especially if you’re playing a rhythmic song with a constant tempo. You’ll be keeping everyone in time and keeping a steady and constant pulse.
But if the song is a lyrical solo, you’ll want to follow the singer some of the time, if not almost all of the time. They’ll hold out notes slightly longer than the written duration. They might speed up or slow down at certain times. You should follow them.
Many of these things change depending on the song or even depending on what’s happening in a specific song.
I’ve played some songs where I’m following most of the time, but during one section I’m leading. It’s one of the things that makes playing musicals so exciting to me, but this skill of knowing when to follow and when to lead takes some practice.
Getting into improvising music takes a lot of practice. Not only do you need to work on scales and arpeggios, you also need to practice the skill of making things up. Imagining and creating lines to use is a skill in itself. It’ll take practice to get used to it and get better at it.
The first few lines you make up, even if they use the “correct” scales and notes, will likely be boring.
I have a YouTube video titled Improve your ear training skills by learning the language that’s useful here, but the main idea is to learn the specific phrases used in a genre of music. Jazz has different “words” than rock. Learn those words.
But we’re talking about making up lines.
Creating solos and writing solos and making up things to play is a skill in and of itself. The act of creating a solo is a skill. Not only does it require some previous knowledge of the genre of music you’re making, but it requires practice to imagine lines and know how to play them.
One way to start doing this is by using licks you already know from solos you’ve learned. It can be a great way to get started. Here’s how you can do it:
Start with a lick
Make a variation of that lick
Make another variation
Repeat step #3 until you have a ton of variations
Just make a bunch of variations. You can use different rhythms, time signatures, beat subdivisions, scales, groups of notes, chords, keys, or modes. Try to make as many different variations as you can. Add notes at the beginning. Add notes at the end.
Once you’ve exhausted all the variations you can think of then use a different lick.
Keep doing that and you’ll feel much more comfortable improvising. It also helps you write or improvise a solo that sounds concise and cohesive. The different parts of a solo will sound related if you go into playing a solo thinking, “I’m going to start with this lick and vary it as much as possible.” It’ll sound like the solo is one cohesive melody that was written as a whole, rather than a collection of licks.
Another benefit of doing this is that it demystifies improvisation.
Improvising can be scary and intimidating. Creating lines to fit over a specific chord progression can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. The more you practice making lines and creating lines, the better you’ll get at making lines and creating lines. The lines will get better and more natural. It’ll be easier to think of ideas to use over different chord changes after you’ve tested out a number of different ideas.
It can also be a great way to test out ideas before using them in a recording or performance.
Start with an idea you already know “works”, or an idea you already like the sound of. Try something funky with it that you’re not sure how it’ll sound. Try out lots of different ideas like that. Try the strange sounding scales or the dissonant tensions or the “out” notes. Try out the ideas that might not sound good. It’s better to test them out with a familiar lick and while practicing because you’re starting with something that you already like and can play and no one needs to hear it if it sounds bad.
And remember that it’ll get easier the more you do it. If you improvise 100 solos you’ll be much better at improvising solos afterwards. Not all 100 of those solos might be amazing, but that doesn’t matter. When you’re starting out what matters is the act of doing it. The practice is what matters before you worry about the end result of that practice.
They’re not thinking with the same patterns and background and constraints as people that have been doing something for a long time.
Conventions can become ingrained in people that have been playing music for a long time. Conventions like tonality, functional harmony, western music theory, musical notation, and form. After playing lots of music that includes similar ideas, even if they are something as broad as functional harmony, that pattern can become ingrained.
Sometimes it can be hard to get out of those patterns of thinking, especially when you’ve been exposed to them for so long.
Because of this, beginners often have interesting ideas that are uncommon.
