learning

Day 9: Fear and Challenge, Part 1

January 23, 2019 — Leave a comment

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

Helen Keller

I feel it’s a good time to talk about this as it’s been a surprisingly difficult first week of the challenge, and it’s largely due to fear. I say part one, not because I have multiple posts planned, but because I expect this won’t be my last word on something this huge.

If you are staring down clear and present danger, fear makes sense. Most of the time the fears we grapple with are not clear and present danger. We feel fear for all sorts of reasons, and usually it isn’t because somebody has physically cornered us.

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Sometimes we’re just watching it.

Most of the time the threat is something that is built of layers and layers, over years, until it’s a glowing, fearful pearl. Something that started out small. A little piece of grit that couldn’t be washed away, and in attending to it, merely grew the problem.

The fear I’m specifically looking at is fear of failure. Atychiphobia is fear of failure when taken to an extreme, i.e. when we allow that fear to stop us doing the things that can move us forward to achieve our goals. More about that here.

This topic is a tricky one, because no two people have the same parameters of fear tolerance, or failure. What I deem to be failure usually sounds ludicrous in retrospect. It doesn’t really matter as much as the end result.

The two most common triggers:

  • Frequent criticism, humiliation, undermining in childhood
  • Experience of trauma

How it manifests:

A reluctance to try new things or get involved in challenging projects.

  • Self-sabotage – for example, procrastination, excessive anxiety , or a failure to follow through with goals.
  • Low self-esteem or self-confidence – commonly using negative statements such as “I’ll never be good enough to get that promotion,” or “I’m not smart enough to get on that team.”
  • Perfectionism – A willingness to try only those things that you know you’ll finish perfectly and successfully.

End result: small output. While that output may have all kinds of lofty theory and narrative behind it, it’s still something small.

“But the [insert painting/piece/sculpture/etc here] was small! This artist only did x and look at them!”

Fine, yes, but whether that’s due to a fear of failure or something else, I generally don’t know. Second, while that’s fine for other creators, I don’t want that. I already have a lot of fear at going into a lot of things I do. Certain things, like classical music in groups, I am callused to. Solo classical performance gives me so much adrenaline my hands shake too much to even hold a pen. The most nerve-wracking performance was at my  grandfather’s funeral, where I had had one day to learn Massanet’s Meditation from Thais. Afterwards, I was ripping up individual sugar packets to make smaller and smaller origami cranes to have somewhere to send the energy. It got weird.

I can’t point to many things in life and call them a colossal failure, yet. What I deem to be failure is not taking the initiative. In that sense, I never took enough of a risk to gain a greater reward. Even though the reality of that failure would not have been egregious. I have a support network, if I can get over myself enough to use it. I can’t control what people think about my choices or work regardless, and either way they’ll have opinions.

Last year I made a private resolution while watching an Art Battle. I decided I wanted to get rejected as much as possible. It was a start. I’ll talk about that more in the future.

I planned a challenge for myself this year that is different from last year in a few ways. Last year the parameters were simple: play violin for 15 minutes each day. That was not something I had done for a long time, and getting back into it was revealing in multiple ways –  not least in terms of my own standards. 15 minutes a day doesn’t seem like a vast commitment, on surface.

Fast-forward one year and I play better now. I’m not at the level I used to be at, but I know more and I am less neurotic about things related to playing. I can say that I’m a competent player, at least. Picking up a violin doesn’t fill me with apprehension because I’m not ashamed of the lack of work I’ve put in.

OH HEY WOAH IS IT THAT FEAR AND SHAME CAN BE LINKED?

Well, so far, so obvious.

Doing 100 days more violin would certainly improve my standard more, and would be unquestionably beneficial. However, there’s another area of my work that is seriously below standard: production. That includes structure, arrangement, recording and mixing.

I work on Ableton 9. I had a lot of help for the first release, and I slapped together a release for last year, but only when an imminent departure lit a fire under me. I sent a mishmash off for mastering in The Cage, and embarrassingly, it was 28 individual tracks and about 5 minutes extra drum loops I didn’t have the know-how to move around. The original vocal recording was at the wrong level and had a crazy buzz before Martin worked magic on it. I couldn’t properly quantize the violin tracks.

My lack of knowledge of sound engineering, levels, envelope, instruments, recording technique, mixing and generally messing around with tracks is sloppy and to purpose. I have little visible structure in my work. These are all elements that can be improved.

The main fear is that I won’t be able to hold to this, because I haven’t been able to adequately set parameters. What counts for 100 days of music production?

It’s a mix of theory and practice. Learning the tools and putting them to work. I worry that I won’t be able to use my laptop or use Ableton if I have to travel, etc., but on the other hand, I made it work last time.

So far this week, I have started basic arrangements, loops, sessions, some filtering and effects, built a small drum rack, made a pop filter, recorded drum effects live. I’ve watched a few tutorials and felt less terrible about it. It’s a small thing that becomes less scary with exposure. Even though there are crying jags and times you take a nap or a walk or make the call of making food, even though it might set you behind, but you’ll have more resources, just opening it and doing SOMETHING means you have something more the next day. It’s all just progress.

I once read that progress is like rowing upstream. If you stop, you won’t stay still. You’ll regress.

Go listen to this, then go do the thing.

You’ll be dead longer than you’re alive.

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Day 5: Keys 37:88:78

January 19, 2019 — Leave a comment

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I used to collect keys. They look cool, they don’t take up a huge amount of space, and there’s endless variety. Given I have limited space I don’t have as much of a passion for it anymore. Eventually, I want a wall of keys.

Between my iRig and my M-AUDIO I have 125 keys. That’s a good start. Could say that with my laptop keyboard I have another 78. 203, excluding any house keys.

 

I spent more time on one instrument yesterday. This time, rather than throwing down notes I started wondering how I could change how it could sound.

So I started looking at a few options. All of the following can be found in this tutorial.

  • Attack
  • Reverb
  • Room
  • Gain

At what percentage does this sound good? Terrible? Do I even hear a difference?

I know what kind of sound I want. Describing it is often difficult because although I feel the same way about sounds as I feel about colours and tastes and touch, I don’t always have the words or bridge for them. Partially because identifying each note in a piece feels like identifying individual ingredients in a recipe, or individual chemical components. I can, but it doesn’t give us the full picture of how they interact. Saying “I’m making a curry” is different to “I’m making a garam masala-ginger-garlic-turmeric-fennel-chili-cinnamon-cardamom-coconut milk-tomato base.” Or whatever ingredients work for you.

The thing is that once I start getting into it, it’s fun twiddling around the sounds and listening to what sounds good to me, but I still need to do more research. I don’t just want to find the sounds I want. I want to be sure that I understand what makes it that way, rather than “I clicked things until this happened and it’s fine.” That’s not learning so much as accidentally a piece. Technically it’s random element, but perhaps a bit too random to me.

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It’s not so hard to open Ableton as it was, and changing around the attack, the velocity,  the room an instrument is in, is pretty sweet. It’s like trying to create the taste of an apple synthetically. You won’t get an absolute spot on match to all apples, but you can get an approximation of that organic experience. That said, occasionally when you get an apple that tastes exactly like synthetic apple flavour, it’s a trip.

In this case it would be hearing a grand piano in a room. I wanted it to sound a bit more like the piano I grew up listening to. My room is right over the study where my dad practices piano, and I would go to sleep at night hearing that. It was lovely. I may not get it exactly right, but a little reverb in a constant hall, bringing down the hardness and a few other options makes all the difference.

I haven’t finalised all settings yet, but I will share fully when I have.

In the mean time, what kind of keys do you have?

 

 

 

Day 2: Listen

January 16, 2019 — Leave a comment

100 days as a challenge often feels like walking through a snowstorm. One foot in front of the other, no matter what.

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Like Jon Snow, I also know nothing, and frequently have this expression. Ah nuts, I also wear all black and call myself a crow.

Rehearsal first with Summerhill, then Ableton. Afterwards, fit in cleaning, stretches, and some sleep. If you’re curious to hear the programme but can’t make the show for whatever reason, I got you.

It’s really weird to think about as a concept – to be in a very dynamic, breathing entity, where you are a living cog and your actions impact a totally different group in very measurable real time. Like in life, but these cues are a lot easier to see.

It’s simultaneously trying to be a machine and the best expression of the emotions that make us human. It’s both restraint and release. To express emotion without strangling the music, and then to make another person feel, remember, know something that might take you years to explain and relate to their experience.

I will likely always be in an orchestra because it’s very clear what is correct at a base level. It’s written there in front of you.

Interpretation, however, is another story. If you want to see a really good short explanation of the difference between reading and interpretation, watch this:

It starts out being about listening, but that feeds into interpretation, too. You cannot interpret if you don’t know how to listen. Proper listening is a full body activity.

If you’ve never seen this artist before, she is one of my heroes – Evelyn Glennie, an amazing percussionist who happens to be profoundly deaf. She teaches people to truly listen. Watching this and her documentary Touch the Sound was eye-opening and made me want to write music where I could hear what I hear in the world.

I plan to write a longer post about listening and a few other things that are seemingly innate and taken for granted, that I have had to re-learn over the past few years.

Ableton was more fun yesterday because things were more easily set up, but I got frustrated early because I was just throwing down notes at random with the iRig keys. That’s something I usually do and then prune out bits until it works, but I think this time I’d like to experiment with working with an actual structure.

Summon worked for that because the whole idea was that everything was supposed to be happening at once. Because that’s how it feels when you’re trying to recover. It’s all too much, too fast, and not fast enough. It’s a swirling mass in your head.

That isn’t a permanent state, though, and most of life is structured. Even if the structure is often broken or inappropriate. Being able to choose your own structure is a luxury.

Light

January 7, 2019 — Leave a comment

“It’s light. Finding the light that can glow”

There are so many things that we need to find in this world, but nothing comforts us after a bad time like light does. There’s nowhere to hide, and provided we have done nothing we need to conceal, that is a comfortable place to be.

Speaking as somebody who was terrified of the dark as a child, that is.

We all hide much, and more than we probably need to. So we stop looking for light to bring in, because of shame.

I can’t see fully in light. It blinds me. And often we can only let it in if there’s a break or vulnerability. Leonard Cohen said it best:

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

Anthem, 1992

To be ready to let light in, there’s pain, and there’s work. There’s a gnawing  fear that it’s a weakness that will be exploited. Who has not had some weakness exploited in their life?

I started looking for light by going back and back to the first thing that every musician learns:

Scales. 

I hear the groans of musicians everywhere, but hear me out.

Scales are like weights training for your intonation, your technique. We know this.

But.

Scales also hold the keys to anxiety and avoiding repetitive strain injury.

The irony was that I didn’t even get this advice from anybody I was involved with musically. A dental hygienist put me on to it while fitting me for a night guard. When I started getting anxious because this mould was going down my throat, she told me to start playing through scales in my head, start to finish, while breathing in. It worked, and nobody had ever given me that advice before. It planted a seed.

What follows is speaking from my own experience. But I know that I didn’t like scales, so I tried to get them out of the way as quickly as possible. Which meant that when I was playing scales for a teacher, I would be tense because I hadn’t laid the foundation properly, and tensing up added on increments every time I played that note.

I learned that this was more relaxing when I worked on it as though it was an experiment.  Just observing, no judgement. Just a long note. I started trying to keep my  bow as even as possible, which meant noticing when I got afraid.

It seems silly, doesn’t it. Getting afraid because you’re two-thirds down a bow towards the frog, when moving between the two lower strings? Because I didn’t drill  technique hard enough? Or knowing that I don’t watch my intonation when I hit a C note above middle C in 3rd position?

This isn’t an hours-long commitment, by the way. This is something I take 15 minutes on, but those are dedicated minutes. That is when I am fully engaged in what I am doing. Just me and a vibrating string which envelops everything else in my head. Distraction breaks that connection, so getting better at getting back to that is important.

(Quick note as well to anybody  who has only played scales as up and down with zero variation: what are you doing? That’s step one in how you can drill the hell out of it and also start to improvise better.)

End of technical talk.

This seems like a lofty topic to relate down to something as simple as body awareness and the fact that I was a lazy music student, right?

It isn’t, though. It’s small decisions that reflect up to the big ones. It’s putting in the work on the foundations. If I have no foundations, I cannot build. Putting the work in there reduces my anxiety, which means I play with less pain, which means I play more, and get better, and get closer to making music I can play as well as write.

You can find something that makes a light glow brighter in you. It doesn’t have to be grandiose, or lofty, or anything related to anything I talked about. This is just what I found that helped me. You can find a glow in working on something, day in day out (not even long-term, necessarily), building a foundation that has deeper ramifications for you.

I spent a while perfecting a breakfast sandwich and that was as important to me at the time as this is now, because I was not feeding myself properly up until that point. Now it’s mainly a weekend treat. These individual glows don’t have to be a lifelong pursuit, either. It’s taking the time and care to build a foundation, because it is worth it.

Weaknesses remain weaknesses if we keep them in the dark and do nothing to address them. A vulnerability is out in the light and can be turned into strength.