EMBRACE GROWTH BY “FALLING FORWARD”

A few months ago a producer I know put together a Spotify playlist of a bunch of songs he had produced and I thought, “What a great idea. I’m going to do that too!” So I went through and started collecting as many songs I’ve produced that are on Spotify into a playlist called “Vox Fox Productions”. Soon after, I pulled up the playlist in my car and put it on “shuffle”. One song came on that wasn’t perfect. It was from a few years ago. It was before I had upgraded my audio interface. I thought, “Oh dang, I’ll have to remove that one from the playlist”. Then another song came on. “Oh crap! That was before I had learned how to sidechain the bass properly!” Then another one; “Dang! This song was….

Before I got a better virtual piano

Before I got this certain EQ technique down

Before I got my favorite Warm Audio vocal chain (WA-47 -> WA-273EQ -> WA-2A)

Before my mixing lesson with Matthew Weiss

Before I got Shaperbox

Before I really learned how to program drums

Before I gained enough confidence to be creative

Before I got a good De-esser

Before I actually learned how to use that De-esser.

Before I started to use Melodyne

Before I figured out how to actually use Melodyne

Before I got Replika delay

Before I got Native Instruments 

Before moving into my new space that is properly treated acoustically where I can actually HEAR the frequencies

Before….

It may seem unrelated but it reminded me of the experience Justin and I had with our garden this past summer. It was our first real attempt and we were growing everything in containers. When our zucchini weren’t growing and our watermelons were bursting, Justin wanted to declare our garden a failure. I said, “How could we call it a failure when nearly every dinner I’ve made for two months has had some kind of something in it from our garden?” We had tons of carrots (yes, they were small and funny looking but we planted them too close together) we had a bunch of onions (again, too small because they were too close together), tons of tomatoes, cucumbers, yellow squash, lettuce and tons of peppers that are still ripening to this day! We had grown plenty of edible food and had learned a ton about what to do differently next year.

How could that possibly be a failure?

As creatives, we always expect perfection of our art without considering the process of growth that is essential as an artist! We hesitate to release that first song because it isn’t the absolute best song we’ve ever heard. We doubt whether or not we should even be pursuing music at all because there are “so many other more talented (younger, prettier, more mainstream) artists than us.

Have you ever been to a music recital and an adorable 3 year old got up and played...more like screeched through Beethoven's “Ode to Joy”?  What if you told that 3 year old to stop playing in public until they were a virtuoso. “No one wants to hear you when you are learning!” That child would probably never play again.

What if I had decided to not produce a single song for anyone until I had everything exactly right? Well, first of all I still don’t have everything right! I’m still learning and growing and developing skills. Second of all, how would I possibly have gotten any better without artists pushing me to create their music the way they wanted to hear it?

My question for you is, how do you expect to grow as an artist if you are hiding?

The answer is, you won’t.

Back to the garden, Justin (my hubby and head-Gardener at the Willard home) calls it “Falling Forward”. With these obvious failures (I mean, most people in Utah have zucchini coming out of their ears and we grew like…3) we refuse to fall backward but we are falling forward because we are taking the experience and growth with us into the next season.

Artists, producers, songwriters, creatives of all types; go out there and start Falling Forward. Make some moves in order to grow. Be bold and brave. Be humble and observant. Be teachable and forthcoming with what YOU have learned. Be willing to allow the growth to happen... and it will!

And if you’d like to listen to the Vox Fox Productions playlist with all of it’s growth, you can listen to it here.

PS - There’s a prize for anyone who can tell me what two artist’s in the playlist are actually ME under alter-ego names ;-)