Creative (Re)discovery: The Art of Making Music the Old-Fashioned Way
by Danielle Venne, ECD, Music Production
I have a confession to make — I practiced too much guitar in my 20s. I’m not trying to suggest that I’m an amazing guitarist who got “too good”. But at some point, when you immerse yourself so deeply into the field of discipline, you start to lose some of the joy and wonder that brought you there in the first place.
This is common amongst musicians as they pursue becoming professionals. In his book, ‘Effortless Mastery,’ jazz pianist Kenny Werner talks about this exact phenomenon, about how musicians can lose sight of their creative spark. He says something changes in us along the way:
“Most people studying music are playing not to play, but to avoid sounding bad... When we were children, we were already masters. It was not a question of practicing for ten years to achieve mastery. It was there already.”
The moment you place yourself in the proverbial “creative box,” you can lose the ability to surprise yourself and discover new sounds, or stumble across new ideas. Your field of study becomes too narrow, nothing is inspiring anymore. I had a Bachelor of Music Performance in Classical Guitar and Master’s Degree in Jazz Guitar. How did it get so boring?
For me, that all changed when I for some reason decided to buy a gourd banjo from a guy living in the mountains of South Carolina. In a previous blog post I info-dumped about my special interest in the banjo, and believe me, if given enough of an audience I will go on and on. But aside from the historical fascination I had with this instrument, something else happened.
I was way out of my comfort zone as a guitar player. To start, there is no standard way of tuning a banjo. It is played with a technique that feels backwards from everything I was taught as a scholar of the musical arts. And the one I bought didn’t even have frets.
I struggled with it for a week or so. But soon the thing began to make music — I was delighted! So I started to experiment more. The synapses in my brain were firing. I would try something new, get a cool sound, and it felt so satisfying. I knew I wasn’t proficient, but it didn’t matter. I was experiencing the universal joy of making music by, essentially: fucking around and finding out.
A similar experience happened to me a few years back when our Founder and CEO, Joel Beckerman, walked into a client meeting and placed a small, toy-like keyboard on the table in front of everyone. “This is also a music studio!” he declared to our slightly confounded client (this is great side-quest story for another time). The instrument he had put in front of us was called an OP-1, made by a company called Teenage Engineering.
OP-1s look like a cool musical toy you found at a thrift shop in Japan. They make cool sounds, but also have a ton of strange limitations and are notoriously confusing. “Can I borrow that?” I later asked Joel. “Go for it. And good luck” he replied. “It’s not so much a learning curve as a learning cliff”. With Joel’s warning in mind, I decided to do follow my strong instinct to simply play. The result? I found myself up late several nights making some of the weirdest and coolest music I‘ve ever made.
With my confidence up and my tax return mostly spent, I decided nevertheless to continue my new journey of musical discovery. The next instrument was an Analogue Synth made for Ambient Drone Music called the “Solar 42” by a company called Elta Music out of Latvia. This instrument is probably one of the most idiosyncratic and odd devices I have ever laid hands on up until that point.
As I’ve learned to coax unique sounds from it, I’ve also learned to record everything I do. You’ll never be able to repeat the same sound twice on this device. If the sounds you created were cool, you better have captured it because you might not find it again. I love this so much and find it liberating and exciting.
This journey that I’ve been on has been incredibly rewarding as a creator and I intend to continue this way. Instead of having self-doubt or impostor syndrome that comes from trying something new, I’ve curiosity and satisfaction. If it sounds cool and makes me feel good, then it must be good.
And isn’t that why most of us got into music in the first place? At some point a younger version of ourselves experimented just enough on an instrument we were learning, and we discovered out that there was magic in what we could create.