This Is More Important Than Your Instrument.
Do you seem to go nowhere? Do you feel you’re stuck as a musician, although you practice your instrument daily? Does it seem like everyone else is progressing more quickly, even though they have much less skill than you? I sure felt so. But my actions and I were responsible for the lack of progress. I got lost inside the wrong habit. Today, I want to show you how to avoid it!
How It Starts
As beginners, we start out with big dreams of becoming famous. Touring around the world and playing sold out shows to energetic crowds. So we pick an instrument we like and start to learn. Some are classically trained, some do it all by themselves. But we dedicate a lot of time to improving.
At a certain point, we gain confidence in our abilities and notice how much we improved. The chords and melodies are much easier to play than we started out. We start to write songs of our own. We play the chords and scales we learned, but the music we write doesn’t sound anything like our idols. As a result, we get frustrated and either lose motivation or think we haven't practiced enough. And the circle starts again:
learn instrument → try to write music → fail → get frustrated → learn instrument….
It doesn’t matter where you fall in this cycle, but I want to show you a way to break out. A simple shift that will make you write songs you actually like. Because:
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. — Albert Einstein
Write Songs You Care About!
Your rigorous drive to improve and practice is the most valuable skill you’ve got. It shows discipline and open-mindedness. But this skill won’t bring you far if you only use it for a small fraction of your musical career. It’s time to learn a key skill that combines every trait of your musicianship. It might be obvious by now.
The key skill you need to develop is...
The key skill you neglected is...
SONGWRITING.
Many musicians forget that songwriting is a skill in itself. They focus too much on how and what they play, but don't take time to create something on their own. Songwriting is the skill that transforms every skill you learned into something tangible. Your skills on the instrument, your knowledge of music theory, your taste in music, etc. all support it.
If you want to build a house you need materials to work with, wood, bricks, glass, you name it. But piles of materials don't become a house, if they only lie around. They need to be combined with craftsmanship. Like a carpenter, you need to learn how to use the wood to create the support structure of your house. Like the bricklayer that can't stack bricks in a random fashion, you need to learn how to use your materials.
Everything you’ve learned needs to be practiced in the context of creating. Until now, you only practiced by mimicking skills you found in the world. From now on, you need to start to build your own house. Replace most of your time practicing your instrument with learning to write songs. Practicing your instrument should only be a fraction of the time spent.
Steps To Improve Your Songwriting
1. Create a ritual of daily writing!
Make it part of your day! 30 to 60 Minutes a day is already enough. If you invest 30 minutes a day, you’ve got 3.5 hours of improvement a week. That's about 105 hours a month and about 1,260 hours a year. A GIANT number, for only 30 minutes a day. If you already practice your instrument daily, you have a time chunk to take some minutes away from. Shift your priorities!
2. Write Drafts, Not Release Ready Songs!
It’s important to state that not every song you write should be released. Like a blacksmith that forges 1,000 bottle openers before he creates his master sword. (Look it up, it's a thing!) You write songs first and foremost for yourself. These songs are crucial for honing your skill.
Don’t burden yourself with toxic thoughts about streams.
Don't try to please the expectations of others.
Don’t fall into the trap of endless perfectionism.
Write a song draft to capture its spirit and parts. Don’t polish it to a release ready standard. The key is to improve fast with short projects. Limit the time you spend on a song. 8 hours per song should be the most.
If you insist on releasing music, then write 10 songs and release 2 of them. Most professional Musicians have a huge library of unreleased music. These songs never made the cut. So you see, they do exactly the same!
3. Don't just learn. Apply!
The worst thing we can do is to practice a skill daily and never use it. It’s easy to consume knowledge, but hard to practice it. Online, you can find a wealth of videos that want to teach you skills and techniques. We hop from video to video and think we've learned so much. But in the end, everything we’ve watched will be forgotten in the span of days.
Mindlessly watching informative content already has a term. It’s called Infotainment. That’s why it’s crucial you let every technique flow into your songwriting process. Every skill you learn, on your instrument or as music theory, needs to be used in a song (preferably in 2–3 songs). There are 3 big benefits to this approach:
Your memory gets stronger, and it is harder to forget this skill.
You use the skill in context and better understand how it works.
With every learned skill, you create a new piece of music.
Bringing It All Together
Practicing the skills on your instrument is a good thing, but won’t build you a music career. All the skills you’ve learned need to be used in the creating process. Your songs are the way to connect with the world around you. They will be the thing you can build a career off with. Shift your focus from practicing your instrument to practicing songwriting. You can do this in 3 easy steps:
Create a ritual of daily writing.
Write Drafts, Not Release Ready Songs!
Don't just learn. Apply!
So stop practicing scales and start writing songs.
If you got something out of this, share this with someone who you think can benefit from this advice. We all need to watch out for another.
BECOME A SONGWRITING MACHINE!
— Max of Current Mindset
