The sweet sound of failure
It’s always discouraging when things don’t work out. You want that insane, speaker-tearing bass that sounds like a gorilla ripping a lion’s head off… but yours is like a flatulent robot wasp letting rip. You shoot for an offkilter drum groove… but yours sounds like a box of percussion falling down a staircase. You finish the track anyway, praying for a mastering miracle, which – of course – never occurs. The result? Another musical fail, and serious doubts about your gear and talent.
A natural response is to invest more time per track, but this could result in diminishing returns. Here’s an example: Tim just made a bad track. So he decides to spend two months on his next opus. Toni also dropped a clanger, but she aims to finish a song every week anyway. Two months later, Toni’s got eight songs and Tim’s got just one. But each has put the same total amount of time into music production. Tim spent eight weeks on one track, while Toni spent a week on each of her eight. Toni learnt from each track, to help improve the later ones. And with only a week between sessions, her skills stayed sharp. A contrived example, but you get the idea.
Perhaps the bigger point, though, is that failure is not the enemy, as many high achievers know. Motor car magnate Henry Ford said, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” Thomas Edison – who produced thousands of non-working prototypes before inventing a working lightbulb – put it thus: “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up.” Failure is arguably the secret to success, then, and by working faster, you may well run into it more often. Hurrah!