Just finished reading the “Making Music” book Ableton released this year. Here’s the last chapter (apologies for formatting):
Fail Better
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
— Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
Problem:
The closer you get to finishing the track, the more you realize that it’s a
failure. It will be impossible to turn this into something you’ll be proud
of. Why bother finishing it at all? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just
abandon it and start over on a completely different project?
It’s depressing to realize that you’ve made something bad. It’s even more
depressing to realize it while you’re still working on it but after it’s
beyond any hope of salvation. But in this situation, there are still valid
reasons to keep going and finish the track anyway.
Solution:
Most producers have started far more tracks than they’ve finished. It’s
much easier to give up in the middle of a project and move on to
something new than it is to see a project through to the very end.
But what most producers don’t realize is that each stage of the musicmaking
process is itself a thing that requires practice. We get to be
better sound designers by designing sounds. We get to be better drum
programmers by programming drums. And we get to be better song
finishers by finishing songs. Because of this, the more songs we start
but don’t finish, the more opportunities we miss out on to practice
finishing. And as a result, we might continually improve at various
aspects of the early stages, but we’ll never improve at actually getting
things done.
If you realize very early that what you’re working on isn’t going to be
successful, you probably have time to change directions and make things
better. But if you’re very late in the process of making the track before
realizing that it’s not good, it might be too late to fix it without
completely gutting it (which is essentially the same as starting over). In
these cases, forcing yourself to finish—no matter how painful—is often
better than giving up. You’ll not only get practice finishing, but you’ll
also get practice failing, in itself a valuable skill to learn in a subjective
and unpredictable business like art. The better you get at finishing, and
the better you get at coping with failure, the better your chances will be
the next time you begin (and, hopefully, finish) a project.
If the track is really as bad as you think, maybe there is a natural end
point that’s earlier than where you’d stop with a track you were happy
with. For example, it might not make sense to get your new track
professionally mastered. And it might be a good idea to not share it with
the public. Maybe it just goes right back into your Scraps and Sketches
folder, to be pulled apart for use in other tracks later. But the important
thing is that you actually finish the arrangement, if for no other reason
than to practice, improve, and experience how it feels to finish.
