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.

Compositional Techniques: Attack Sustain Release (ASR) Theory

Over the course of the past few years I've been trying to improve my ability to write "good" music, or at least music that I personally find impressive, interesting and / or enjoyable. But I've been worried that I might hit my peak and at any moment I could start going down hill. Pretty much all artists seem to plateau or hit a point in their songwriting where it's not getting any better and most of the time they usually continue to get worse. When I've talked to people about why a certain artist is getting worse I just hear the same few phrases "Well, they're just getting older. . . " or "they're just losing their edge", or "they are just selling out, man / all they care about now is money". I've always thought there must be much more to it than that and there must be some sort of way to maintain your creative edge or at least prolong it. So I've come up with a compositional technique /theory that may help this out.

I find that my focus keeps coming back to three areas, and how they integrate with each other to push you further down the path of creativity. Developing a balance in each area seems to help you continue to progress in your creativity and avoid plateauing.


I've named this theory the Attack Sustain Release (ASR) Theory after the ADSR envelope used to describe how a given sound will change over time. For instance if you hit a note on the piano in an otherwise silent room suddenly the volume will increase from no sound(attack) the note's volume will then begin to decrease,(decay) then stay at a steady rate for another amount of time,(sustain) and finally decrease back to zero.(release)

I find this is most analagous to the way creativity works as well. Suddenly you have an idea that pops into your head from nowhere. (the attack) Then you begin to develop the idea, and begin to try to bring it into the real world by recording and / or just writing it down. (sustain) And then at some point the creativity will stop, and you will stop thinking about creating this idea and move on to something else. (release)

A weakness or imbalance in any of the three areas will affect the other two, and in turn your quality of music as a whole. It is therefore important to develop each area individually, and then try to integrate them together to achieve a balance.


ATTACK

The attack portion of your creativity is your ability to open up to and tune into that creative energy and let it flow through you without getting in it's way... basically your ability to improvise. "Improvisation is the Genesis of Composition". Becoming better at improvising will help you generate ideas that are better,faster and clearer and make them sound more "alive", "fluid" and emotional. You can develop this area by doing ear training, jamming and meditative style techniques involving stopping yourself from thinking. (I'd highly reccommend the book The Inner Game of Music for more information on that) It's all too easy to let your doubts and fears creep in and affect your playing. It is very important to "not think" as much as possible when developing this area, in order for you to be able to tune into your idea as strongly as possible. Currently this is my most overdeveloped area. I can improvise some really great stuff but when it comes to writing it down and fleshing out the idea I pretty much always get stuck.


SUSTAIN

The sustain is your technical ability to capture your initial idea, develop it and bring it into the real world. It uses a completely different part of the brain than improvising does. Developing this area would include doing things such as learning music theory, anaylyzing song structures,learning to be able to write down music that you hear accurately (on paper or computer) as well as being able to play music that already written, actually learning how to play your instrument well, and most importantly taking your own ideas and trying to develop them.

For many musicians it is this area that is the most out of balance. Trying to take a purely technical analytical approach to music is somewhat justified (because it is really the most objective area of music) but it is ultimately foolhardy. That part of the brain / mind cannot fully understand the improvisational / emotionaly aspects of the music, it can only observe them.


However, even though overdeveloping this area can be dangerous it is still vitally important to develop it for several reasons. One is that there will be less in your way of getting your original idea into the real world, you won't have to spend time and energy trying to figure out how to write it down or trying to figure out how to play it, you'll automatically know what to do and you'll have a decent roadmap of what your options are for the next step. The next reason is that you can manually force yourself to break out of the box. By analyzing what you normally do, you can pick up on patterns that you repeat often and avoid them. For example, I was listening to a lot of the ideas I had been coming up with recently and was trying to figure out what it was I didn't like about them. I began to realize I was tired of writing melodies that fit neatly on the downbeats and that I wanted to write melodies that came in on the 3rd beat and continued onwards past the ends of the measures. Sure enough when I looked at songs that I found had a "fresher" quality towards their vocal melodies, this is what they were doing. I find it is best to develop your Improvisational and technical abilities in conjunction with each other, at the same
time so that you get used to having to use both at the same time and having them work together, making sure that neither gets disproportionally further along than the other.


RELEASE

You may be asking yourself, "Why is this a category?". Release is a much more subtle factor in all of this but equally as important. While devloping your Attack and Sustain skills it is very easy to get stuck in a pattern where you are no longer enjoying yourself and you aren't progressing. Sometimes you can become too close to a situation and no longer see things from the proper perspective, other times you can become frustrated or uninspired which will also cloud your creativity. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just completely walk away from it and forget about it. Otherwise you can get burnt out, leaving you uninspired and increasingly miserable. And once that happens you may not want to return to that situation again.

For instance, I was once working on a song and I didn't quite know what I wanted but I was frustrated and determined to come up with something. I worked on a chorus part for it for nearly 2 and half hours before I became completely frustrated and quit. I have not been
able to return to the song since (which has been almost 2 years now) because of all the pressure and trauma I created. I no longer have any desire to work on it, and I no longer remember what my original intent for the song even is anymore.


Another example would be John Lennon. As the Beatles became more popular John started to
become more and more frustrated and burnt out and began to lose sight of why he was a musician to begin with. After they broke up he found himself at home out of the spotlight
raising his family without writing for nearly 5 years. When he began writing again he found that without all the pressure and obligations he was free to write when he wanted and because he wanted to. He was able to write an entire album in a few days. He said it was like writing during the period before the Beatles were popular, he was free to write whatever he wanted and it didn't matter if he failed or not, he was out of the spotlight.


Developing your ability to release or let go is very important in order to stay fresh. You can develop this area by going for walks, meditation techniques or simply "getting out" and
enjoying life and taking a break. On the other end of the spectrum you can overdevelop this
area and become too complacent in your songwriting. This seems to happen as musicians get
older and or famous. Some musicians as they become older and / or famous they just want to take it easy and have a good time. This is important but if you don't continue to challenge yourself you will begin to become predictable and just use the same old bag of tricks.


THE BIG PICTURE - HOW THINGS BECOME UNBALANCED

If you think about what an artist is doing during the time when they are considered to be writing at their peak I think you'll find that they are automatically doing ASR. When an artist is up and coming, usually they are still learning new material, they are writing and perfecting their technical abilities, and writing without pressure. They don't feel like they have to write or top themselves, and they are living in the real world and putting that back into the music. After artists become successful and / or just older the ASR can begin to go out of balance. Artists begin to overdevelop one area or overcompensate for a lack in another.


The attack can become stale because you aren't inspired because all your problems are taken care of, or perhaps the pressure of having to write things when you aren't really inspired starts getting to you, and causing you to put out mediocre material to fufill a contract. Or perhaps you've written so much material you are now finding it difficult to find something new to say. A lot of people who are are more naturally talented seem to find it dificult to recover when they hit a dry spell in regards to their attack, because they've never had to think about what they were doing and they've just taken it for granted. It's just "always been there". They may find it more difficult to anaylyze what they are doing and become succeptable to accidently overdeveloping another area. For example, an artist could write several great songs or albums and not think anything of it. To them they just "wrote themselves", they just came about naturally by the way the artist was living their life. But then one day the songs aren't writing themselves they might think back and say "well how did I do that?". And what tends to happen is one of two things they start using their sustain / technical skills to try to figure them out and construct new ones, and start overdeveloping it and not realizing it. Or the artist may continue to try to keep doing what they were doing thinking well "whatever popped in my head before was good, so now I'll just keep doing the same thing because that must be right as well"... not realizing other factors in their life that were probably inspiring them along.


The sustain can become affected because as you get older you tend to stop learning new things. You are more inclined to keep things the way they are, after all your bag of tricks has gotten you this far, why stop now? Has Eric Clapton or Kirk Hammet been sitting around learning new solo tricks and techniques and been practicing new ways of composing them over riffs the past few decades? Probably not.

They've gotten to a point where they are good enough they probably only need to play a bit
just to keep their skills where they are at. Life can get in the way as well. As you get older you may choose to get married or raise a family and that takes a lot of time and effort. Usually both of those things have a huge impact on your outlook on life, ephasizing stability and consistency over spontanaity and creativity. No more highs and lows all the time. All the while your release is becoming overdeveloped. Sometimes with everyone giving you an opinion on your writing you begin to lose perspective, perhaps they are all telling you it's great and it's not.

Perhaps you know no matter what you write "it'll all be okay" and you just want to relax and enjoy yourself. It gets much easier to become complacent. You can feel like you don't want to "climb that mountain" anymore. Sometimes the way people write things when they were younger was stressful and arduous and you don't want to go back to that when you get older.