“It shouldn’t sound good”
It’s hard for me to make time behind the drum set between my career and my family at this point, but you must understand that I fear the cloud. And so, I find time to practice when I can, as rarely as that may be, to stave off the cloud.
When you apply to music school, nobody in the admissions office mentions the cloud. Hell, your high school band directors don’t even give a friendly heads up. It’s like everyone is hiding it on purpose! The cloud appears to many professions and trades, I’m sure, but to musicians, it is relatively straightforward. Whenever one is killing time, or generally doing something with one’s time that is not mission-critical, one might accidentally cast one’s glance upwards and behold a giant, ominous cloud. That cloud is not made up of your typical cloudstuffs, though - it is made up of thoughts. Or, just the one thought, really:
You know, you could be practicing right now.
And so it is that, when life permits me, though my proper career as a musician and music teacher is several years behind me at this point, I still prostrate myself to the cloud whenever and wherever possible.
It is in one of these recent practice sessions where I found myself remembering a mentor figure talking about his approach to practice. He said something that wasn’t revelatory (indeed, it’s a pretty common saying among musicians), but it was the first time I had heard it, far too late into my journey as a musician:
Practice shouldn’t sound good!
Practice can be, and often is, a gruelingly arduous process where an individual repeats passages again and again at excruciatingly slow tempi (speeds). The tougher a passage is, the more the individual ought to repeat it. And, frustratingly, the “money spots” of a piece of music, the parts that sound great and occur to us easily? We shouldn’t be touching those much at all, because they clearly don’t need the attention. This can be a tough pill for musicians to swallow, especially young musicians, and of course, this extends well beyond musical practice (something something leg day). But it got me thinking about how this concept extends to the rest of our lives outside of our hobbies, or our craft. It got me thinking about how we show up to our circles, the special people in our lives.
Another tired adage, but crucially important in our current social environment: “we compare our behind-the-scenes with others’ highlight reels.” If I tie this back to music for my own sake, it’s the moment when someone sees a performance and says, “that didn’t look too tough,” not knowing about the hundreds of hours spent pulling one’s hair out in a practice room for the month leading up to the performance, so that one might play the song so well that it seems effortless. This is a frustrating dichotomy in and of itself, one that’s hard to get past without openly explaining the musical process it took to get there, but it made me think back to the behind-the-scenes/highlight reel message again, and made me wonder—what if we were to laud the practice as much as we did the performance? “It shouldn’t sound good,” sure, but could we see the proverbial forest for the trees and appreciate seeing the creative process in action? Moreso, would we accept the lifting up and exhibition of this process in lieu of the final performance?
In closing, I want to tie this back into my initial thoughts about practice. When you’re practicing the stuff that really needs it, the sounds you’re making won’t be great. At least, they won’t start out great. I want to try applying that to life when possible. How easy it can be to go through the motions, to check off the same boxes each day. To blast through the easy, fun part of the song that you’ve been repping since the first day you got the music.
Instead, turn your mind’s eye to the spot that needs it, and drill down on it. Do the work, and accept the bad sounds with the good. Live in the behind-the-scenes, ignore the highlight reels of passersby. Hell, don’t even seek them out in the first place. You’ve got work to do.
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Full disclosure: I sat on this post without publishing it for seven days, with a reminder at the top that I needed to collect my thoughts and clean it up before hitting “publish.” In hindsight, it gave me a laugh. Here I am, writing to myself in the hopes that I’ll make this a habit, with my personal biggest hurdle being writing consistently, and I let myself get hung up by my closing thoughts for a week. So, I slapped together a single closing paragraph and I’m hitting “publish” as soon as I finish these last few sentences. How’s that for inside baseball?