I’m trying something new with my music. With my playing, with my practice, and with my recording. I’m trying two things – to my re-frame habits, and to re-frame my approach. And I’m much happier for it 🙂
In terms of my habits, I’m just making it a regular thing, with no goal other than that. In terms of my approach, I’m making it light, and easy, and fun. Strange that I had to remind myself of that!
All of this stems from a conversation I had with a friend the other day. It was totally unrelated to music, I was at a surf lesson that’s run by Waves of Wellness. They run surf lessons that focus on mental health, and the conversation was about habits that can help us deal with stress, and can help us when we’re having a bad day. A few days later, he came back to me and said “hey, I’ve just listened to this great podcast, you should check it out”. it took a few days, but I eventually downloaded the podcast and had a listen – it’s the Rich Roll podcast, if you want to check it out, and the guest is James Clear, explaining the ideas behind his book Atomic Habits.
I’ve been working on this recording thing for about 6 years now, with progress, certainly, but not a great deal to show for it – two tracks recorded for friends, two tracks up on Soundcloud, and a dozen or so in varying forms of draft. Life keeps getting in the way, moving interstate or overseas, work gets busy, and personal things pop up from time to time. I’m also trying to do everything myself, which as I learn more about it, is actually kind of a big ask! All of that’s led to it feeling a bit more like a burden sometimes, rather than the creative outlet I originally wanted.
So anyway, the habits thing – the core messages that really stuck with me from the podcast were:
- Habits are just the physical expression of how you see yourself. The more you do something, the more it reinforces that view
- The four factors that help: Make it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying
- Just focus on the first two minutes. Not the goal, not all the work involved, just the first two minutes.
Fortunately, there is a wide array of male impotence drugs available amerikabulteni.com cialis properien online. The use of this classification can help physicians characterize group of patients, provides the rationale for specific management strategies, and buy cialis viagra allows the design of future clinical trials with more accurate selection and stratification of the population under investigation. The condition refers to the inability to achieve or maintain erections firm enough for intercourse cialis tadalafil 10mg Learn More Here activity. If you need to lead a healthy life ahead and do not want such issues amerikabulteni.com online levitra to interfere in your sexual relationship and can create differences in your life.
And it’s been working. At first, it was all about the reinforcing of the idea – “well, a musician plays music every day, so I’ll play music every day. Just two minutes”. And I usually did plenty more than that!
Apart from that, the “obvious” thing was helping – doing things like scheduling it in my calendar, with reminders (not just the “to do” list), and keeping the gear set up in plain sight. The “easy” thing, too, was helping, doing things like the setting up my amp so it’s ready to plug in and play, or getting my microphones and recording interface ready to go, rather than staring a vocal session by setting it all up.
But the joy wasn’t there. I found I was fitting more in, but ended up waking up one morning with no joy. Not down, not depressed, but just a great big “why bother”. If I wasn’t enjoying it, why go to all the trouble? So I had a go at the fourth thing – make it satisfying. Why did I get into music in the first place? Because I love to create, I like the technical aspect (I’m a massive nerd, so any excuse to tinker with gear and learn new things is fantastic), and I love that feeling of when you’re completely lost in a piece of music.
Today’s session was exactly that! From the start, all I wanted to do was keep it light, and simple. Singing: warm-ups was all I did. But without focusing too hard on technical aspects – which when I do focus too hard, it increases tension in the system, and a healthy voice is all about providing support while reducing tension. Recording – all I did was muck about in the vocal booth! But again, focusing on keeping it light an easy. Turns out it wasn’t light and easy, my throat got tighter and the things started to get a bit harder. But, keep it light and easy, and find out why: try different places in the vocal booth, move about a bit, and stick a finger in the ear to get a bit more acoustic feedback – and eureka! That was it. Without the acoustic feedback, the whole vocal apparatus tightens up, and the delivery becomes heavy. I found a similar thing yesterday when recording a track wearing headphones. The extra weight on the top of my head put extra tension in my neck, and made the delivery more difficult.
And that was where I ended the session. I had learned something new, I had sung well, and I was happy and inspired! And that’s going to carry across to all of my future sessions, which will be more valuable than just slogging it out to get a few extra takes down.