Closing the gap between your taste and ability

July 08 2008

Closing the gap between your taste and ability

Tagged Under : music, songwriting, video

Ira Glass, host of NPR’s This American Life, talks about the process of improving in creative work. His context is primarily video and radio work but I think everything he says here can be applied to songwriting and musicianship in general. There’s 3 major points I want to emphasize that I think are critical to successful songwriting and musicianship.

Good Taste - This is where so many Christian artists struggle. Whether it’s because they only listen to Christian music and have no creative influences beyond Tomlin and Michael W. Smith or just that they weren’t blessed with an ear for creative music it results in bad songs and bad playing. I’ve known a lot of worship leaders that knew nothing of music, were part of a great worship service and then desired to lead it. Read a chord chart, practiced a couple weeks and off they went writing and playing really bad music, but because they didn’t have good taste, they were satisfied.
Accurate Self Assessment - Assuming you have good taste now you need to be able to be critical and have accurate elf assessment so that you can accurately measure how well you’re doing or how much you need to improve. Without this good taste is meaningless because you assume that whatever you write or play is great. You’re off in la-la land and any critical thought is shoved out of your head as an attack from the devil himself. Self assessment is important in any role in our lives so that we can measure and have a road map for improvement, but this becomes more difficult in the arts because people get offended when their “artistic expression” is criticized. Rubbish! You can see a post here I wrote on proper perspective of creativity and why worship band members are so easily offended.
Perseverance and dedication - If you have good taste and you see that what you’re doing isn’t up to the level you desire you may, like many, get discouraged and quit. It’s important that we realize every successful writer and musician goes through this phase, some never get out of it, but we need to persevere and keep writing and playing. That’s the only way you get better. I know it’s hard when you feel like you’re writing a bunch of garbage, but learn from the garbage. Our mistakes are the best learning tools we have, but if you’re afraid to make them it’s going to be hard to improve.

With all that in mind, here’s the video.