Don't Get Stuck At The Start (How To Navigate A New Creative Endeavour)
Nov 16, 2024
Starting (or re-starting) a creative endeavour, can feel daunting and uncertain:
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What are my goals?
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What am I trying to achieve?
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What do I want to be able to do?
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What do I actually practise?
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What new skills, knowledge, and habits do I need?
The start of a new creative project is an exciting time, but it is also usually filled with doubt and overwhelm:
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I don't have hours of 'spare' time every day – How can I use my limited time in the most effective way?
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I don't want to waste time on activities that don't lead directly to the achievement of my goals – What's the most direct path to achieving my goals?
It's important to navigate this fragile and uncertain time with a high level of awareness, self-reflection, and experimentation to ensure you get the best start possible.
In this article, I'm going to share my recent experiences as a returning piano player - exploring the challenges and opportunities I've been discovering. The principles I discuss will be relevant to any creative practice.
Rediscovering Purpose
For the last 15-20 years, I've been interested in making original music. Most of my experiments centred around making electronic dance music. Over this time I enjoyed releasing a 'decent handful' of original productions, remixes and collaborations. You can listen here.
My approach was rarely focused – hence why, in all this time, I only ever released a handful of tracks. However, writing these songs kept my love for creating alive. The knowledge and skills I'd already gained on the piano enabled me to come up with musical ideas, develop and arrange them into full songs, and then produce and release them.
I always enjoyed the process of releasing new music. But as I reflect, I realise that I never applied a consistent strategy for moving from idea to release. Everything took me a long time – particularly the production process itself. (I still have a lot to learn, in this area.)
Technically, I never stopped playing piano or 'gave up' during this time. I just had a 'here and there' approach – I wasn't consistent with my playing or composing, and my desire was not strong enough to change this.
Until recently.
After a lot of ongoing and deliberate reflection, I've concluded that if making original music is so important to me, I want to pursue it actively, and with conviction.
This time round, however, I'm interested in composing music predominantly for piano. I want to create my own piano music, record and produce it, and then release it. That's my ambition.
Starting, Before Clarifying
With my new-found desire to start composing original music for piano – I decided to prioritise building my piano playing skills, once again.
You might be thinking that it's an obvious fact that piano-playing skills are required to compose piano music.
But this is not true. You don't actually need to be able to play piano to compose for piano. it's possible to compose music for piano without actually playing a single note – you can just click and drag notes in your digital notation software.
However, actually being able to play piano helps you come up with ideas (by improvising to generate these ideas).
And I want to be able to play and record my compositions, so developing my playing skills is high priority.
From past experience, I know that a daily music-making habit is the reliable engine that drives progress – be that focused on learning to play other people's songs on piano, or on writing my own music for piano.
The act of showing up every day builds momentum, and momentum enables progress.
A mistake I have made many times in the past is to spend a lot of time at the beginning of a new creative endeavour on planning – rather than doing. (An attempt to build the 'perfect system' designed to facilitate the transformation I'm looking for – trying to foresee and predict every step of the process, before I even begin.)
But this time, I did something different: Knowing the wide range of skills, knowledge, understanding, and habits required to create, record and release original music, I decided to take a more direct approach:
Start Now, Clarify Later.
I just wanted to get back in the game. Focus on playing consistently. (Don't deliberate over the details, yet.)
My initial strategy was to build a daily habit so I could:
I knew that playing consistently would enable the emergence of a path forward. A path that would lead to the realisation of my vision.
So, I started by forming a daily habit, knowing that clarity (about next steps) would come later. And this is exactly what has happened – a path forward has emerged.
Finding Clarity – The Emergence of Goals
Experimentation
When I first started my daily playing sessions, I didn't really have a fixed plan of action – I just knew I wanted to play something each day – anything. (Remember, the habit underpins everything.) Some examples:
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Learning Songs – reading music in songbooks I have
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Free Improvisation – making up music in the moment
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Ear Training – singing and playing to build aural awareness
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Composing – generating musical ideas (by playing) and notating them digitally
I wasn't really sure how much time I should spend playing other peoples music as opposed to creating my own. Surely, learning to play other people's songs would be an easy way in to sharpen my playing skills again.
So I just experimented with these different musical activities within my daily sessions.
Interestingly, by experimenting with varied activities in my piano sessions, I found the habit easier to stick to from the beginning due to the novelty of mixing up the activities. This kept me highly motivated to show up each day So I could re-build my music-making engine (my daily music habit).
Experimentation kept things fresh, and this enabled me to enjoy the act of showing up each day.
Reflection
After each piano playing session, I kept (and still do) a digital journal to capture my thoughts and insights. I wrote more about the value of this process here.
As I began to gain momentum with my daily music habit, I naturally started to focus exclusively on composing. I stopped learning to play other people's songs. I stopped doing singing and ear training activities.
I have no doubt that practising all of these skills on a regular basis is useful for becoming a well-rounded musician, but at this stage of my journey, I have chosen to focus exclusively on developing my own music during my daily sessions.
My plan is to continue working on creating and playing my own music exclusively, until I begin to see the transformation I am looking for – going from a returning piano player creating original ideas, to a piano player releasing original piano music on a consistent basis.
For clarity, by releasing I mean recording and producing final versions of my songs, and distributing them across audio streaming platforms. (I'm even considering starting my own record label to do this – a decision for later.)
I imagine that once I've created my system that enables me to consistently finish and release original piano music, I will then start to experiment with re-introducing some of the more adjacent music practices into my daily music sessions. (Ear training, learning other people's songs, etc).
Through my journalling, I also noticed a clear message coming through after my composition sessions. A theme was starting to develop. Something like:
"It's no use just coming up with tonnes of short, musical ideas – I need to learn how to expand them into full, finished arrangements, ready to be recorded."
So by taking a few minutes after each music session to capture my immediate insights, I was able to see a clear path forward for development. A new goal had emerged:
Develop a system that enables me to compose, play, record, produce, and release original music – on a consistent basis.
Optimisation
And this brings us up to date – I am now entering a phase of optimisation.
I will be optimising my daily music sessions to experiment with different approaches that help me build this system. (Notice this iterative process of experimentation, reflection, and optimisation.)
It is clear that I need to do more than just create and play. I need to educate myself. I need to build the knowledge, skills, understanding, and habits of a person who is capable of writing and releasing original piano solo music.
In case you're curious, my first project is to finish an original song that I actually want to record. And this is an exciting first step – only then will I be able to develop the other parts of my system. (Goals within goals.)
In my composition sessions so far, I've focused exclusively on idea generation (creating 4-, or 8-bar sections). My next objective is to become more familiar with arrangement structures for piano solo music so I can start to organise my musical ideas into fully formed songs, ready to record.
Through experimentation, reflection, and optimisation I have found clarity. A hierarchy of goals and projects is beginning to emerge. And this path has only become apparent because of the fact that I re-committed to building a daily music-making habit.
I plan to document my experiences as I build out my systems and practices.
Where are you at in your music making journey? If you're not yet completing music sessions on a daily basis, I highly recommend starting – today.
If you start, and maintain the habit, a beautiful clarity will emerge that will guide your next steps.
My challenge to you is simple:
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Build a daily music-making habit
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Experiment
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Reflect
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Optimise
Thanks for reading. I hope it helps.
Ian
