The Thoughtful Musician by Emma Harris is a really inspiring read and it's markedly different to a lot of content that I've read or viewed previously regarding learning to play a musical instrument. It's fresh and challenges some orthodoxies of music education. Three articles are particularly cogent:
Really interesting because I have spent a lot of time playing cover songs and then playing them again and again and not improving any. So I'm like, 'What's happening? Why don’t these songs sound better?' Now it makes sense. I am just doing the same thing over and over again which doesn't achieve anything.
You Don't Have to Start When You're 3 Seconds Old
You can learn to play and make music successfully at any age. A lovely reminder of this fact.
Skill comes from careful, studied learning and paying attention.
Since my journal is sort of aimed at beginners to music-making, possibly of an older age, I suggest you have a quick think about those three statements and if something in you is unsure about them, maybe click on the links and have a further read.
So I got chatting to Emma (The Thoughtful Musician) and she really kindly accepted my invitation to write a Guest Post here. Which feels like a bit of a coup for Trying To Make Music. It's a first Guest Post on here and Emma is a great writer; thoughtful, bright and funny with it. And she has responded with the following article. So, over to Emma…
Short Thing for Benjamin
Hello, readers of Trying To Make Music!
I’m a big fan of rules of thumb. They’re like life-hacks but more widely applicable.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a dearth of good ones in the popular zeitgeist. So we’re going to try to fill in some of this oversight with three of my favorite rules of thumb I follow for living and loving my life.
If Advice Works, Awesome. If It Doesn’t, Stop Doing It.
This might seem obvious, but when you actually take the time to spy on people observe other people closely, you’ll start to realize how infrequently this seemingly obvious thing is actually put into practice.
Any musician who has taken lessons, or interacted with people who like to give unsolicited advice has probably heard the notion that “hustling,” or “repetition,” or “hard work,” or “hours spent,” has some magical property that just makes success appear out of nowhere as if thought and intelligence were unnecessary in skill acquisition.
Indeed, This is actually an example of my favorite logical fallacy, the post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Just because successful people have spent lots of hours learning something, or working on something, doesn’t mean that the hours spent was the cause of the learning or the success in the first place.
As a side note, people who give unsolicited advice usually don’t have anything helpful or useful to say, haven’t thought about anything for themselves, and repeat platitudes as if they were timeless wisdom without actually understanding what they actually mean.
Heed their advice at your own risk.
Sometimes it’s difficult to know whether or not the advice you hear will actually work, though. The easiest way to do this is just to experiment to see if it works. The most important part of an experiment, though is to make sure that you have a falsifiable hypothesis—meaning that you have an idea of what it would look like if the advice wasn’t working. If you find that the advice isn’t working, don’t hold onto it, even if the advice was given to you by someone you really admire! The only thing that matters is whether or not something works, not whether or not you hurt that other person’s feelings (because they probably won’t ever find out anyway).
And of course, don’t be afraid to try out your own ideas that you come up with!
Pay Attention, Like, For Real.
To be clear, I’m not talking about memorizing factoids like you did when you were in school.
I’m talking about when you do things, pay attention to the feedback you get from your environment and make adjustments accordingly.
Again, this seems obvious, but it’s shockingly pervasive among musicians. If you squeak or honk or hit a wrong note, it’s because something isn’t working quite right. Finding out what it is should be your first priority because making random, unintelligent changes is unlikely to result in any improvement.
Alright, so how do you get good at finding out what the problems are?
Learn to be an astute observer of your environment! Develop your observational skills! In fact, if you think about it, this is the one skill that will always be relevant, no matter what situation you’re in. Even if you got stranded on a desert island, a fine-tuned ability to actually observe your environment is going to be way more useful than, say, whether or not you can form a company with the coconuts and micromanage them as their HR department.
Nothing that makes you miserable is worth it.
This last of my favorite rules of thumb is a little close to my heart.
I really, really refuse to believe that life is supposed to be miserable. And as a result of this, I will go to extreme lengths to disprove ugly philosophies or ideas that I think make people miserable. And have made me miserable in the past.
Because I would much rather be not miserable than miserable. And referring back to rule of thumb number one, being content and believing beautiful things always works out better than the other way around.
Trust me, I’ve experimented on this extensively. Or don’t, and conduct your own experiments. It would probably be good for you.
Despite this, and for some reason, lots of people like to believe that being miserable is “sophisticated,” or that being happy is hopelessly naive.
But, like, I don’t know. Jesus was a happy guy. And he seemed to be pretty sophisticated to me?
And lots of stuff that he said seems to work out pretty consistently if you actually bother to experiment on it.
So the next time believing something is making you miserable, maybe double check your premises. Because it probably isn’t doing you any favors.
Final Thoughts
The best part of my rules of thumb is that I have a rule of thumb for following my rules of thumb. It is as follows.
It’s gotta be useful.
I’m a very hands-on and practical person, and when I was younger I drew a lot of inspiration from utilitarianism (don’t worry, I am well aware of the limitations of utilitarianism :) ).
These rules of thumb helped me change my life around from being a Little Psycho Ball of Stress™ (as I like to endearingly make reference to in my substack) into someone who can actually accomplish the things she sets her mind to.
And I hope they’ll help you too.
Many thanks, Emma. These seem to me like wise, well thought out approaches to life and learning. I am genuinely going to consider these life-hacks and experiment. Happy music-making :) Ben