Play It Right The First Time

[Tarekith]

What relearning the guitar has taught me about audio production and DJing:

http://tarekith.com/play-it-right-the-first-time/

[TCMuc]

Great post!


There's only one point where I think there might be an important difference between guitar playing and making music.

I'm talking about this part of your article:

The whole point of any activity in which you repeat something over and over to learn it, is to train your muscles to perform the action as easily as possible, with as little thought as possible. Thus it makes sense to make sure you only ever do that action correctly, so your fingers (in the case of the guitar) aren’t wasting time learning poor fingering techniques or getting used to playing the wrong notes all the time.

While I think there is actually something like a "right way" and "wrong way" when it comes to playing the guitar (i.e. if you want to play a certain sequence of notes/chords, there's not that many ways to do that). In music production, however, especially if you're producing your own music, there's often more than one way to achieve your goal, even if your way should be extremely complicated.

And not just that, an unusual way of doing things may actually be exactly what makes helps in setting your sound apart from the others'.


TL;DR:

What you wrote is definitely right for everything 'mechanical', i.e. everything that includes 'muscle memory', but in fields where there's more than one way of doing things, just playing around and trying different ways of doing things - potentially and eventually coming up with your own 'style' - may be just as effective as focusing on learning to do something in one certain way.

[Tarekith]

Oh for sure, I mean I'd bet that the way most people, myself included, actually learn things most of the time. My intent was more about those times where you have a very focused thing you're trying to study and learn. It's not so much that there's only one way of doing it, as it is planning out how you personally are going to go about it.

Even if that means spending the time comparing different ways of doing the same thing, to see which you prefer. There's definitely times for just messing around and seeing what happens, but if you have a specific goal, try it with a specific plan sometimes as well.

Thanks for reading!