Rebuttle to Staying Naive

Often when I try to learn something new, like a piece of music, a mixing technique, or a vocal technique... and I specifically want to sound similar to something that already exists, I find that there are a few certain opinions I consistently run across. Often when reading forum posts there is at least one person out there who starts a long post about how you "needn't worry about sounding like someone else, just sound like yourself."

They usually go on to name a few points like:

• "finding your own style is the most important thing you can do, once you do that you usually end up finding success"

• "whenever anyone tries to copy others it's unoriginal and loses heart"

• "try to stay naive about your instrument / technique/ songwriting so you'll happen upon mistakes and do things that the "experts" would overlook"

While I will agree with all these things in certain contexts, for me I find most of them to be untrue.

Take the first point. I personally agree that you should strive to be original and go off into uncharted territory and find yourself, but at the same time, that is clearly not everyone's goal. It depends on how you define "success". If your goal was commercial success, right now in the pop music industry originality is NOT selling. Everybody is trying to copy everybody else who's popular and deviating from things that are known to have been successful in the past is risky. The originators of a trend usually get the most glory, but with every trend that has ever come out, there are always followers and complete ripoffs that end up taking a slice. There are examples of rip offs who have become more successful than their more original counterparts. Just look at Elvis. So being original may make you the most successful commercially, like Beatles and Michael Jackson, but how often do one of those come around? Very rarely... yet we seem to still have millionaire rock and pop stars every year...


What bothers me most about the next two points is that I feel like they want to keep you ignorant and want to discourage you from learning new things.

"whenever anyone tries to copy others it's unoriginal and loses heart"

This is not entirely true either. I agree that when people copy other people it's really kind of lame. But a lot of people who do are putting out finished songs. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try to sound like someone for learning purposes, or to see what might happen if you tried. Take the Nirvana song "About A Girl". This song was written after Kurt Cobain listened to the Beatles all day and then tried to write a song in a similar style. At first glance it might not jump out at you as being heavily beatles influenced, he definitely found his own style and applied it. But had he listened to the above statement, he might not have ever attempted it, and we'd have missed out on a great song. In his attempts to sound like somebody else, he found his own way of conveying himself.

"Don't do things by the book, or you'll just retread old ground. Try to stay naive about your instrument / technique/ songwriting so you'll happen upon mistakes and do things that the "experts" would overlook"

For me this technique has almost never worked. But for some artists it's essential to their style. I seem to just run around in circles of mediocre ideas until I try to learn something that's really outside of my comfort zone, then I seem to get a jolt of creativity that results from it. For example, on more than one occasion I've tried to learn something comepletely different than the style of song I was trying to write, and it ended up helping me write a better song. (see my post on my compositional technique the Mozart Effect) For instance, I was trying to write a pop punk song, and stopped and went to go learn some speed metal stuff. It made something click and ended up writing a better and more inspired and robust pop punk song. I seem to need to consistently learn new things and find new catalysts for inspiration. If I just ignore the outside world and try to listen to only myself, I eventually just seem to return to my comfort zone and things start to become very average. Everytime I learn something that is unlike what I want to be I somehow seem to find myself more. And the more I learn and the more skills I acquire, the more I feel like I can see between the cracks of music and see what people haven't done before.

I do admit, making mistakes is huge part of creative process. And putting yourself in situations where you might just stumble across things you would have never thought of is important. But disregarding learning new things just so that I might by chance make a happy accident every once in a while from not knowing what I'm doing just isn't a good enough trade off for me. For instance I recently just realized a new way to think about constructing melodies, whereby I pick out a few points of a riff or chord progression I want to emphasize and then just try to connect the dots. I never thought about it that way before, and now I'm able to visualize melodies over riffs I was never able to think of anything over before.

It's unsure how long it would have taken me to derive that for myself if I hadn't actively tried to pursue it, instead of sitting around by myself isolated from the world just winging it. It was something that may seem obvious to other people but it wasn't to me for some reason, even though it was a very simple idea. I really feel like those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, although there will always be exceptions.


I think a lot of this fear of trying to do things by the book comes from a very old school way of teaching music that said "this is the only way things are done" and "this is what good music is, and this is what bad music is", when music had to be more intellectual instead of for pure enjoyment. But much of the 20th century was about breaking down all those barriers in the art world. This thought black and white process for music instruction and art has been largely abandoned. It's widely accepted now that pretty much anything goes, and it does. In the internet age you can pretty much find an audience for anything, anything is valid. Yet these fears of an elitest music teacher telling people "this is the only way to do things!" is still out there. And it's getting old. Where are these elitist teachers keeping everyone down? Forcing theory down everyone's throats. They just aren't there.

People seem to think what's good for one person is good for everyone. But people need to realize that it all depends on what they want to do. If someone wants to be an opera singer, they are going to need to do things a little bit more by the book, because that whole style is built upon years of rigorous training, and following specific guidelines and tradition. And if someone wanted to be a DIY 80's punk rocker then they should probably just learn 3 chords and just wing it, because that's what that style calls for. But the Punk Rocker can't tell the opera singer "sight reading and learning music theory is bullshit, I don't use any of that stuff" because the opera does need that stuff to be successful. And the Opera singer can't force theory and sight singing and all of that down the Punk's throat because in that style it's unnecessary for success.