I've just posted a long article for my Patreon subscribers about the power of failing. It's based on an interview with Jacob Collier over on the Colin and Samir channel, in which (among other stuff) Collier talks about how you can benefit by deliberately setting out to do something badly in order to get your creative flow going. There's an excerpt below, and if you want to read the full thing (~2000 words) just sign up to support me on Patreon (low cost, lots of great content, supportive community) over at www.patreon.com/billhilton - OK, here's the excerpt!
*Failing: the skill at which we're all experts*
...To me, this idea of deliberately creating something bad is fascinating. Jacob was specifically talking about songwriting, but I think his advice can apply to a wide range of musical activities — whether you’re composing, improvising, or learning a written piece. That’s because one of the biggest obstacles to creative growth, and by extension to our progress as musicians, is the voice of our inner critic.
You play something, it doesn’t sound great, and your inner critic immediately says, "that’s no good. Better do something else instead."
You write something, and that same voice says, "this is rubbish. You're nowhere near as good as Paul McCartney or Beethoven." Often that voice is enough to make you give up.
I suspect this is a particular challenge for older musicians and learners. When I was a kid, it felt easy to write a song or sit at the piano and improvise. I wasn’t much good, but equally I didn’t have any kind of reputation to live up to — not to the world at large, nor in my own head. I could play around freely, improvise how I liked and write what I wanted. And yes, a lot of it was utter rubbish. But some of it wasn’t. I learned to keep the good bits and bin the rest.
Fast forward to now, the early days of my sixth decade, and I find it all so much harder. I still compose and improvise, but it feels like more of a struggle. Why? Because that inner critic is better-informed. It’s more aware of what success looks like. It’s more conscious of what other people might think. A much remarked-upon phenomenon is that creative people — from mathematicians to poets — often produce their best work when they’re young. I guess part of that is a result of older brains slowing down (especially for the maths people, perhaps?). But how much of it is because, as they’ve aged, they’ve become hyper-sensitised to the risk of underperformance? Have their inner critics just become too discerning?
That’s why an exercise that sounds silly — deliberately setting out to do something badly — has the potential to be liberating.
I’ve been experimenting with this approach for the past few days on a couple of projects. The first is an improvisation: a 16-bar chord progression in D minor that I’m practising for a YouTube tutorial. It’s in a soul-meets-contemporary-jazz kind of style, and I plan to use it to demonstrate the huge range of sounds that can be created with chord extensions. When I first played it through, I thought, crikey, I really sound nothing like Stevie Wonder. But by giving myself permission to sound bad, I've made progress. I’ve ground through the progression 230 times so far, making an effort not to worry about the quality. In fact — as Jacob Collier's principle suggests — I've embraced the disjointedness, the clichés, the poor musical logic. And failing seems to be working. Ploughing through all that bad playing has mostly just been… bad, but it’s built my fluency with the progression and a few interesting ideas have popped out.
So I’ve taken a project that I might have become demoralised about (and consequently shelved) and used conscious failure to help me make progress.
The second project is a composition. I’m working on a short piano piece that I plan to orchestrate as part of a longer-term effort to improve my skills in that area. Last night, I was messing around with it and thought, this is awful. So today I sat down and gave myself a challenge: to compose up to the end of bar 32 and not worry if it’s complete junk. In fact, to go down the Collier route and try to compose something downright bad. What I ended up writing was indeed pretty excruciating, but in the process of just getting stuff down, entirely careless of its quality, I came up with a couple of ideas I can probably recycle later. By setting out to fail — by saying to my inner critic, "clear off for half an hour, you’re not needed here" — I inadvertently set myself on the path to, well, perhaps not to success, exactly, but to creating something that has some value.
I don't want to paint the inner critic as a pure villain, by the way. At the editing and refining stages of the creative process its presence is critical ("choose this phrase or this phrase? This chord or that chord? Do I really need this bit?"). But when you're thrashing out the first draft, you need it to be quiet, or at least to be measured and tactful in its criticisms.
Now, many of you in this community are relatively new to piano. So let's think about how this technique of setting out to fail can work for you...
Like I said, to read more and also access a ton of other great benefits, head over to www.patreon.com/billhilton — I'll be really glad to see you over there!
Bill Hilton
I've just posted a long article for my Patreon subscribers about the power of failing. It's based on an interview with Jacob Collier over on the Colin and Samir channel, in which (among other stuff) Collier talks about how you can benefit by deliberately setting out to do something badly in order to get your creative flow going. There's an excerpt below, and if you want to read the full thing (~2000 words) just sign up to support me on Patreon (low cost, lots of great content, supportive community) over at www.patreon.com/billhilton - OK, here's the excerpt!
*Failing: the skill at which we're all experts*
...To me, this idea of deliberately creating something bad is fascinating. Jacob was specifically talking about songwriting, but I think his advice can apply to a wide range of musical activities — whether you’re composing, improvising, or learning a written piece. That’s because one of the biggest obstacles to creative growth, and by extension to our progress as musicians, is the voice of our inner critic.
You play something, it doesn’t sound great, and your inner critic immediately says, "that’s no good. Better do something else instead."
You write something, and that same voice says, "this is rubbish. You're nowhere near as good as Paul McCartney or Beethoven." Often that voice is enough to make you give up.
I suspect this is a particular challenge for older musicians and learners. When I was a kid, it felt easy to write a song or sit at the piano and improvise. I wasn’t much good, but equally I didn’t have any kind of reputation to live up to — not to the world at large, nor in my own head. I could play around freely, improvise how I liked and write what I wanted. And yes, a lot of it was utter rubbish. But some of it wasn’t. I learned to keep the good bits and bin the rest.
Fast forward to now, the early days of my sixth decade, and I find it all so much harder. I still compose and improvise, but it feels like more of a struggle. Why? Because that inner critic is better-informed. It’s more aware of what success looks like. It’s more conscious of what other people might think. A much remarked-upon phenomenon is that creative people — from mathematicians to poets — often produce their best work when they’re young. I guess part of that is a result of older brains slowing down (especially for the maths people, perhaps?). But how much of it is because, as they’ve aged, they’ve become hyper-sensitised to the risk of underperformance? Have their inner critics just become too discerning?
That’s why an exercise that sounds silly — deliberately setting out to do something badly — has the potential to be liberating.
I’ve been experimenting with this approach for the past few days on a couple of projects. The first is an improvisation: a 16-bar chord progression in D minor that I’m practising for a YouTube tutorial. It’s in a soul-meets-contemporary-jazz kind of style, and I plan to use it to demonstrate the huge range of sounds that can be created with chord extensions. When I first played it through, I thought, crikey, I really sound nothing like Stevie Wonder. But by giving myself permission to sound bad, I've made progress. I’ve ground through the progression 230 times so far, making an effort not to worry about the quality. In fact — as Jacob Collier's principle suggests — I've embraced the disjointedness, the clichés, the poor musical logic. And failing seems to be working. Ploughing through all that bad playing has mostly just been… bad, but it’s built my fluency with the progression and a few interesting ideas have popped out.
So I’ve taken a project that I might have become demoralised about (and consequently shelved) and used conscious failure to help me make progress.
The second project is a composition. I’m working on a short piano piece that I plan to orchestrate as part of a longer-term effort to improve my skills in that area. Last night, I was messing around with it and thought, this is awful. So today I sat down and gave myself a challenge: to compose up to the end of bar 32 and not worry if it’s complete junk. In fact, to go down the Collier route and try to compose something downright bad. What I ended up writing was indeed pretty excruciating, but in the process of just getting stuff down, entirely careless of its quality, I came up with a couple of ideas I can probably recycle later. By setting out to fail — by saying to my inner critic, "clear off for half an hour, you’re not needed here" — I inadvertently set myself on the path to, well, perhaps not to success, exactly, but to creating something that has some value.
I don't want to paint the inner critic as a pure villain, by the way. At the editing and refining stages of the creative process its presence is critical ("choose this phrase or this phrase? This chord or that chord? Do I really need this bit?"). But when you're thrashing out the first draft, you need it to be quiet, or at least to be measured and tactful in its criticisms.
Now, many of you in this community are relatively new to piano. So let's think about how this technique of setting out to fail can work for you...
Like I said, to read more and also access a ton of other great benefits, head over to www.patreon.com/billhilton — I'll be really glad to see you over there!
9 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 18