Pt.3 Perfection vs Completion – The Ultimate Guide to Creating Your First Release
By Daniel Nesci
Ever since starting to release music, my friends, fans and peers have all asked me this one question – “When did you know it was the right time to release?”
I tell them all the same thing, “I didn’t, but I knew waiting to make something perfect wasn’t going to help me and I just needed to see any reception to my music, good or bad”. This is where a big mental roadblock for first-time creators becomes incredibly apparent because they are striving for perfection over completion. What this tends to create is a constant delay and lag in the creation process, constantly scraping new ideas, shelving old ideas and this vicious cycle of “nothing is good enough”.
The awesome thing about music in my opinion is that a musician can write music conveying a story relating to their own life and yet if you play it for a hundred different people and you would evoke a hundred different experiences. To me, striving for the perfect track (something I have tried to achieve and failed in my early days) ruins what makes music unapologetically itself which is raw emotion. There is no perfect formula that musicians have landed on to write songs.
Obviously, as you’re writing and recording you do the absolute best job you can do, if even for a moment you believe you can get a better take then and there, do it again because that’s not perfection, that’s a best effort. I listen back to my first ever release and I could easily criticise it, I was fifteen when I recorded the guitar parts and I could go through and say “that’s pitchy and that’s not a good vibrato” among other things but I accept that was honestly the best I could do at the time and as I continued to write I got better.
All your releases serve as a personal time capsule to who you were as a writer, player and even a person in that period. Embrace the imperfections of yourself because that’s what makes your music yours.
To expand on the completion side of this. I can’t state how important it is to get that initial reaction to your first release. It’s always nerve-racking because you don’t want to be absolutely slammed by reviews, friends and other musicians and sometimes that is going to be the case, you just need to decide how badly you want this and make a decision on your musical future.
If you’ve done a good job though, the quality is there, you have a half-decent marketing plan and a few blogs get a hold of it you may actually get to see some positive reactions to your music. It’s a nice feeling but should be short-lived because if you’re serious about making music a career your goal should now be to beat whatever you’ve just completed. The only way growth is ever going to come through is if you actually finish something and commit to its completion.
There is a balance between quality and completion that needs to be found but, ultimately, if you listen to your release all the way through and you have no ideas on how to improve it, it’s the tightest recordings you’re going to get and it’s the best writing you can do in that period of time then the job is done.
Over-thinking past that point is more likely to ruin a lot of good work you’ve put in. If you’re anything like me, a few months after you do your first release you’ll find that your new writing is better and progressions will start to become more apparent because you’re less worried about how to get a release out there and are more focussed on making the best music since it isn’t a new process anymore.
Previous/Following Articles:
Pt.6 The Feedback Process
Pt.7 Release Cycles
Check Art As Catharsis’ latest releases on Bandcamp.
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