Note #25: Eschewing Perfection
Eschewing Perfection
This is going to be a short post, before I get too far into 2024 without having posted at all.
Since using Garageband, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole on the possibilities of what I can do with my songs. As such, I’ve made at least half a dozen recordings for songs but I haven’t yet been able to release any of them. I’m still figuring out the mastering process, and since I discovered how much I didn’t know about what I was doing before (using Bandlab), I’ve recognized the greater depths of what a recording should sound like. Now I make multiple mixes and go to the car to listen to them. In some cases, I like the pre-mixed versions better than the so-called “mastered” mixes, and so until I can determine how to get everything where I want it, I am not going to put it out.
Now, this sounds to me just like what I heard so many people talking about before, some of whom would say, “I’m not sure it’s ready yet. Listen to these 137 tracks and tell me what I can do.” To whom I would say, “Why not just put it out? Why does it have to be perfect?” But I’d be thinking, Why do you have 137 tracks for one song? I have, at most, seventeen tracks on one song (whereas before, I might have had 5 or 6). A lot of these people can’t stop themselves, and pile on the tracks, a saxophone here, an extra loop there. I like to think I have restraint because my goal is to make the song as good as it can be, not throw everything into it. It can be too easy to keep adding on, though you sometimes lose the vision you might have had for the song.
I’m at a point of recognizing that, yes, the song doesn’t need to be perfect. But the learning curve is such that I have to go through a lot of trial and error in order to get the mix where I think it will be the quality I am now capable of. In the past, I would have recorded, mixed it over a day or two, and put it out, within days. I’ve now spent at least a month on some of these mixes.
So, I’m not trying for perfection. If anything, I am trying to learn the software, and I know, as usually happens, six or seven months down the road, I will learn new things, and these will color how I look at all the work I’m doing now. Recording is somewhat like this. You really don’t know what you don’t know. And, in a sense, what you don’t know doesn’t really hurt you. You just eventually get better at it.
I intend to put these songs out soon.
Also, with the Mac, I’ve been using a graphics program that has caught me up in one of my other pet pastimes, graphic design. I am really enjoying laying album covers out, and the intro images on my Meetup group pages (This is the 510 Musician Collaborative, which I may have mentioned in another post). Granted, it’s another chunk of time toward something that might seem ultimately frivolous. Yet, I am enjoying it. I love looking at graphic design and spend a lot of time thinking about it. It makes sense that I also used to make art, and went into architecture, and have somehow cycled to music and back to graphic design.
I have been toying with the idea of posting my songs’ sheet music, and writing up a bit about each song. The goal is much larger than I can fully get my mind around right now, but essentially, I am going to call it the 100 Songs Project. The idea would be simply to put the music out there. I don’t expect I’m going to get rich from writing all of this music, but if someone wanted to record or play their own interpretation of a song of mine, I’d be happy to let them do so. Of the thirty or so songs from the past year, I think I could write about twenty-five of them, at least. It’s a question of what I can write about them; I’m sure I will think of something. Also, it’s a matter of time and an incentive to keep writing songs. Not that I really need any.
