The Humbling Of Creative Growth...

over 1 year ago

so there's this interesting phenomena i've been going through as an artist that's something entirely new...

it's been about a decade that i've been producing music steadily. over that time, i've made some pretty dope stuff. and t'was last year, i really started feeling as though much of my output was getting to a pretty damn good level of professionalism...

https://youtube.com/shorts/t9-UWQrPnRQ?feature=share

then, along comes this Mercury Retrograde in Taurus, which i utilized to go back through something like 150 projects to swap out plugins from a subscription, making a few small tweaks through the process with a couple new tools... and the quality difference is absolutely unreal. which on one hand, is awesome. though on the other, is a massive humbling - as clearly, i'd been totally blind to severe weaknesses in my mixing & mastering done only a few months ago. like, i gotta admit, "holy fuck, what i thought was good not too long ago actually really sucks monkey balls." ha.

it's an interesting duality... finding satisfaction in such drastic unexpected improvement, paired with the knock to ego taken as realizing how shitty many of my mixes were that thought were dope.

yet, this is the kind of humbling required to creative growth, obviously.

no one improves through ignoring blind spots and thinking they've "made it;" or if they do, it's certainly throttled in comparison to the type of advancement than can come when acknowledging there's always more to learn and always room for improvement.

and as much as the ego might want to argue that "improvement" could be a construct wrapped up in the frame of perfectionism and/or that art is 'perfect' at whatever stage it is, not to be compared with anyone else, we gotta humble ourselves sometimes to admit 'no, actually we still aren't anywhere near our 'full potential,' and there's still a ton of growth to do in our skillsets and the application of them.

especially with a craft like music composition/production/engineering that encompasses so many different sub-skillsets, tools, and processes, there is so much more than meets the eye/ear that goes into the final product. and holy jeezus is it ever easy to underestimate how essential those '10,000 hours' actually are to achieving mastery.

maybe i was just young, naive, dumb, and overconfident to have thought results would come quicker than they have and there wouldn't be moments like there where a catapult to a new level revealed just how far away i was at the last. but man, it's so damn fascinating to observe the lifespan of creative processes & their development over decades, there really is no way to express in words.

this last wave... wow. i've frequently struggled with the focus to work consistently at music, so it's been a new experience to have such focus & efficiency to make it through so many projects so fast. and there are things learned & skills developed through narrowing focus to this specific set of tasks repeatedly across so many projects that couldn't have been learned/developed in any other way. yes, i've mixed my own music all along, but to sit in the role of strictly a mixer focusing only on the engineering, going back-to-back through projects with the same work flow... it gives a whole new level of appreciation for the pro engineers who do only mixing and what process they must've gone through over decades of mixing thousands of records to refine their ears & skills.

(somehow, this is all coming out kinda clunky, not at all as i had in mind... but it is what it is.)

anyways...

after having over a hundred fresh mixes in queue, it's probably appropriate to share some of them to be heard. afterall, what is passion worth if kept entirely to oneself. yep, it's awesome to confess i've finally been able to find/create some flow with the processes of creating music lately... but probably even more awesome that one step closer to that final vision i always had of sharing some seriously dope vibes with the world.

and yeah, it's been humbling AF getting here. countless points of frustration, screaming at the computer when hitting obstacles and glitches, soul tortured when trying to force work when the energy wasn't there, and going through level of pride & satisfaction only for the ego's bottom to fall out as realizing there was so much more room for improvement. but holy fuck, has it ever been worth it. and super cool to simply be enjoying the process of all of it in the moment as things unfold (albeit it at a much slower pace than i would've preferred).

hopefully there's some reflections in this account of one man's creative journey that may serve at least one other person along the way of theirs.