Storyboard for a hit: turning your mistakes into your greatest success
I don’t know for sure yet, because my cd isn’t ready for sale as we speak, but at the same time I know: I have a hit. A winner, a great song, however you want to call it. The purpose of this post is not to talk about how good I may be, or how lucky, but to share with you the process that led to that hit.
It all started with a piano melody. I loved it, recorded it, but it was a failure. Post-mortem: too many notes, an attempt at going back to the roots of jazz, mostly a mix of fast tempo piano blues, and ragtime. But I’m quite stubborn, so I took steps to release it on a cd. At the last-minute I found a way out: add a guitar with an exciting kind of strumming. I loved that guitar, and before I knew it, the piano was gone.
Lesson number one: the hit is not what is said, but what is not said. The piano was occupying the entire sound scape, leaving a tiny space for the guitar, the unspoken background. In the language of call and response, you write the call, but only to get to the response, which is the beginning of the hit.
I expanded on that guitar and produced two songs which got me so close to real music that I released one of them as single. But nobody bought it. Post-mortem: too many notes! I had repeated the same mistake with the guitar. Live and not learn!
Lesson number two: there are errors and mistakes. Mistakes are shallow, errors are deep. Correct a mistake and you’re on your way. Correct an error and you’re a different musician. You have changed. You know you’re still stuck when you keep attacking the problem (of writing a hit) with old tools and old mindset.
So the guitar, which had morphed into fiddle, was tossed, and buried. Luckily for me, I’m more stubborn than you can imagine, and one morning I sat down and decided to rewrite that fiasco, i.e. the string melody. Re-write is polite for burying, incinerating. Re-write means saying goodbye to your creation, and let it rest. A hard thing to do.
Equipped with a rational approach, I took the string melody, threw away everything but the first and last 3 notes. The result was immediate. It sounded like real music. Mature, spare, intelligent music. Not just an overflow of notes, but a statement.
But the song wasn’t working. It was missing an ingredient that I had decided was wrong. Which is why I couldn’t see it. Wanna guess? It was missing none other than piano! The instrument that brought me failure in the first place. I was dumbfounded. But I accepted it. Put piano back in. Now I had an exciting peace, so exciting that I sent it to a producer.
Now comes a personal view of the hardest lesson ever. Please take a moment to consider the following, before dismissing it. Ready? Here we go. The most important lesson is:
Talent doesn’t exist. Success comes from something entirely different: maturity. Maturity of your musical mind is what others will interpret as talent. It can be composing maturity, or performing maturity, it’s nothing else than the opening of your mind to a higher level of musical awareness. Nothing else. Takes years and years of work to get there. But that’s what it is: open your mind, and the rest will follow.
The good news is, maturity is something you can acquire through hard work, by doing an essential thing: don’t throw away your mistakes, record them to their fullest extent. Only then can you fully learn from your mistakes and progress.
So there is hope. What I’ve done you can do it too, your own way. Perhaps I can talk in more details about the tools I use to compose. Musical tools, as opposed to software. There is a language of music, called harmony, and it is so powerful that if you master it, the sky’s the limit for you. Ok. Deal. Next post will be about harmony. In the meantime, I let you meditate on today’s post. Lots of food for thought here.
Peace.
