People can be very stubborn. There’s just no other way to put it. I’ve seen some folk try to do the impossible. You’d think after a while they’d get the hint that it’s not going to work. At least not in the way they’re going about doing it. Well, the same thing applies to composing music. Sometimes you just have to learn when to cut bait and move onto something else or try another tactic or approach. That’s what I’m going to be discussing in this article.
Let’s start with the choice of musical genre for whatever project you’re working on. Now it’s true, sometimes you’re just locked into a genre. The client hired you to write an electronic dance track for his video which is a montage of photos of elderly people celebrating their 50th anniversaries. It makes no bloody sense at all, looks and sounds like a joke when you watch it back, and you can’t possibly imagine what the client was thinking when he requested it, but that’s what he wants and that’s what you have to give him. I’m not talking about those kind of jobs. I’m talking about the ones where you have some wiggle room as far as what kind of music you write.
That’s when you have to be able to recognize that the genre you chose, or at least the way you’re going about getting the score down isn’t working. Maybe the tempo is wrong. Maybe the key (major or minor) is wrong. Maybe the instrumentation is totally out of whack. Whatever it is, something is making your creation look and sound amateurish at best or horrible at worst. This is when you have to be able to say “Okay, this is not working” and start over.
Wait a minute Wags, you mean from scratch? Yes, I mean from scratch. Don’t try to just speed up or slow down the tempo. Don’t try to change the key. Don’t try using different instruments for the same melody. Start over.
You have to be asking yourself right now, “why?”
Here comes the explanation.
Did you ever hear something on the radio or TV or maybe at the movies that sounded so bad that you literally couldn’t get it out of your head? How many times have you heard “It’s A Small World” and the rest of the day it’s annoying the hell out of you?
Once we get locked into something, it’s very hard to get rid of it. Our brain wants to hold on, no matter how bad. I’d be composing something, come up with a riff or some melody and after a while, I’d realize that it’s really pretty bad. But by now, especially if I’d been working on it for a while, I can’t get it out of my head. And no matter what else I try to do with the song, I keep coming back to that melody. Had I recognized right from the start that the melody was bad, I would have abandoned it right away and wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in right now.
So what happens? I have to put the entire project away for as long as maybe a day or two in order to get that stupid melody out of my head that, had I just abandoned right at the start, this wouldn’t be happening.
This is where it gets sticky. For one thing, we’re not robots. We can’t always tell that something is bad right away. Sometimes it takes us a while. Then of course, for the rest of us, there is this pride thing going on.
Yeah, pride.
We come up with something and we’re so in love with ourselves that as soon as our fingers hit the keyboard, we fall in love with our creation. It doesn’t matter how good or bad it is. Our pride won’t allow us to even entertain the thought that what we just created is horrible. This goes back to the thing I said in an earlier article about how hard it is to admit that your kid has cancer. Well, it’s very hard to admit when you’ve written something that just plain sucks.
By the time you have to come to grips with this fact (if you even do) it’s too late. That melody is going to haunt you for at least a day or two, if not longer. I’ve been humming this one melody for years now. I know it’s horrible but I can’t get it out of my head. I’ll never use it in a song but I’ll never forget it either.
In short, I’m cursed.
But I’m also smart enough to realize that any attempt to use that awful melody will result in nothing but absolute failure. So I let it haunt me but continue to ignore it and move onto things that are at least marginally better. Yes, I know exactly when to cut bait and after all this time, I have no trouble doing it.
In fact, I can be playing a melody for about 5 seconds and immediately tell if it’s any good or not. I have become very hard to please. This is another problem that I’ll discuss in another article but some people aren’t happy with anything that they do even if it’s really pretty good. But not today.
And knowing when to cut bait doesn’t just apply to composing. It applies to the choice of a piece of software for a project. Sometimes you have to recognize when that piece of software isn’t going to do the job you need it to do and move on to something else. While this can be expensive, most software has a trial period. So try it out before you commit to buying it. You should be able to get a pretty good idea of whether or not it’ll serve its purpose fairly soon. Right now I’m in a trial period with a VST that is a string modeling instrument. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be purchasing it but I still have about 11 days left on my trial so I’m going to use them. I need to be absolutely sure before I make the commitment. And if I’m not sure, I’m going to cut bait. I’m not going to waste my money on something that I might use. Too many people just throw money away on things that they really don’t need like it’s toilet paper. I can’t afford to do that. Trial periods should be taken advantage of and used properly.
So think about all the things you do with your music and think about when you might have hung onto an idea too long. If you can learn when to cut bait sooner than later, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and make yourself more productive in the long run.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim