Weekly Studio Update - "The Inner Critic" - 14/10/19

How good was the rain on Friday and Saturday! It's sprung a bit of life back in to some of my plants in the garden, including some chilli bushes that I thought were dead and gone. I have to admit that in the midst of the best rain on Friday, I was sitting in my studio, headphones on, oblivious to most of it! After spending a few hours in the studio the weekend before (as I mentioned last week) I wanted to finish off a couple of projects that I started. One part of working on creative projects of any sort is the unleashing of the almighty beast...
...THE INNER CRITIC.
The inner critic is that little voice in your head that says, "No, that's rubbish. Stop what you're doing. How unoriginal."
​So, is this voice in your head ever useful?

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Well, YES. But we have to decide when we want to allow it to have its necessary influence. For example, on the previous weekend, I made an effort to lower the voice of my inner critic so that I could do some creative brainstorming and just start. There's a good reason why I have the "Just Start" poster in my studio, as the inner critic loves nothing more than to stop you before you've even started.
I had a productive time on that first day of recording my song, getting the bones of the structure and some of the sounds down. I knew it wasn't going to be perfect, and that was the point, to try and get as much done with the intention of editing it later.
When I revisited it on Friday, the inner critic was unleashed. And it told me quite a lot of useful things, for example:

• The tempo I'd set was too fast
• Some of the sounds didn't fit
• Some parts needed to be cut altogether

So I took the advice, made some changes, before turning the voice off again to do more work for the next few hours.
​The inner critic is extremely useful, and its influence is critical when in one particular stage of creativity - the editing process. So next time you're working on something creative, see if you can tune it out while you're brainstorming, and then listen back in once you have something to edit. Recording your work is a great way of delaying that process as well - you'll often see things a little more objectively after a few days away from it.
A reminder that the next Performance and Catch-Up day is on Sunday November 10 at 3pm - if you didn't receive an invitation via email last Monday, please let me know and I'll re-send it.
Things I've been watching/listening to this week:

1. Everybody Wants to Rule the World | Tears for Fears | Pomplamoose - Beyond this being a great song, it's a great example of a "compound time signature" as this song is in 12/8. One and a two and a three and a four and a...
2. Ed Sheeran - Happier (Cover) - one of my students Jeremy moved to Caloundra early this year, so it's been great to keep seeing progress with his occasional YouTube posts.
3. Chandelier | Sia | funk cover ft. Stan Taylor - the band who puts these covers together, Scary Pockets, are a bit of an indie-music-supergroup so there's no chance of hearing anything other than supreme tightness. First time I've heard of Stan Taylor - what a voice!
4. How To Play "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap | HDpiano (Part 1) Piano Tutorial - I mentioned a while ago about the challenges of learning a six-page piece that I was learning for a video tutorial. Part one of my tutorial has just gone up on YouTube!
5. Jacob Collier: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert - this dude is on another planet.
6. I finished the third season of Hip-Hop Evolution on Netflix, I hope more is coming soon.