Start Discovering Instead of Practicing

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When you hear the word practice, do you kind of get a cringe feeling in your gut? Does it have a negative connotation to you because it reminds you of practicing your equations and your penmanship and your piano scales and your karate or something from when you were young?

If it does, you're not alone. Most people, when they hear the word practice, hey, you need a practice that, they kind of feel like, ugh, that sounds like work. It sounds like dread.

Well today, I want to flip that upside down and suggest a different word we use. I want to use the word discovery. And this is a word I'm starting to teach my students to use a lot instead of the word practice. And this video is all about that.

But before we begin, I just want to let you know who I am. My name is Zion and I am the founder of the Triple Threat Artist. It's an online production course and community where we teach singer songwriters how to produce their own music from home so that they can command respect when they make a song. So they get people's attention, whether they become the full producer of the song, or whether they pass it off to another producer and collaborate, they can command the respect of the song they're writing and creating because they know some production skills.

If that's you, if that resonates with you, check out our links below. We're open for enrollment right now, we would love to have you. Myself and Josh Doyle - another producer - we teach our little community of students and we're constantly learning new things that we love to share with our community. All of us are part of the same journey. Josh and I might be a couple of pages further ahead, but we've had some successes and we want to share how we got there with you. If that interests you again, click the link below.

So let's talk about practice.

Now, this is a word I was taught all my life - practice your scales, practice, karate, run, and do sports and all these things that you have to practice. And unfortunately, it's carried with it a sense of dread because it often sounds like you're sort of trapped. You're trapped in a classroom and you can't get out. But here's the thing, you cannot get good at anything without doing a crap ton of practice.

There's a famous quote that you've probably heard that it takes about 10,000 hours of doing something to master it. Well, 10,000 hours of doing something means you have to practice it, right? So it's so important. You can't really get away from that. If you want to master something, if you want to get good at anything, even if you don't want to master, but you want to get good at it, you have to practice.

But what if we use the word discovery?

Now I have to admit the most amazing things I've learned in life and the most success I've ever had in life were because I pursued something out of the pure intention of discovery. In this last year and a half during the COVID pandemic, I got really into watercolor and acrylic painting. And it became something that I did once a month, to something that I did once a week, to something I do every day now. I absolutely love it. I cannot wait to pick up a paint brush and start painting.

Now, how did I get there? Honestly, I don't really know. I didn't have a lot of intention about it, but if I look back, I have to say it's because I just wanted to know how! How do people create something that looks very three-dimensional in a two dimensional plane.

That's crazy to me. How do they do that? And I was never like the artist boy growing up, but I really decided I wanted to learn how they do it. And in learning how they do it, I started applying those skills and knowledge into my tool belt and now I can do some of that. Now I'm still very much a beginner, but I love that. And honestly, that's exactly how I learned to produce music.

I never actually wanted to become a producer originally. I wanted to be a songwriter, but I found that it was extremely expensive to pay somebody else to produce my music. And it was kind of an arduous process. I got really frustrated trying to convey my ideas of a song to a producer and have them interpret what I'm trying to do, and then deliver upon that. Either I didn't have the money or the time or attention, it took to really convey my idea to get the result I wanted.

So what happened? I said, well, I just, I just need to change that. Just give me the files, give me the files, let me get Garage Band, let me get Cakewalk and load it up. And I, you know, I I'm sure I can figure out how to tweak the reverb. I'm sure I can figure out how to notch out that weird frequency or boost the bass drum or something like this. It started off with just very simple things, but all of those were discovery moments.

I thought in my head, I'd like to discover how to do that. And what I didn't realize is I was actually practicing a skill. I was not only learning the new skill, but I was started to practice it because I had to implement it. I never saw learning how to produce music as a class. I learned it sort of as a self-discovery process.

Now I wish I had a mentor at the time, like myself or Josh that could have said, hey, let me save you a lot of time and show you some of those things that you're trying to go after so that you can take it from there and discovered on your own. That would have saved me a ton of time, but I didn't at the time. So I, but I was led by discovery.

I truly believe that if you want to apply discovery to making music, it just means this. When you set aside time to make some music, you approach it with the idea of discovering. I want to discover, for instance, I want to discover how to make this song, make somebody feel happy. What would it take to make somebody feel happy or excited, or curious, or in love, or scared, or emotional, or you know, all the different emotions.

If you approach a song with the feeling of how do I make that person feel this way? Then you can do some Google searches. You can do some YouTube searches. You can try different instruments. You probably already know a lot of ideas in which you can make your song, do that and have that, that command. Or maybe you say, how do people make the drum sounds so realistic? How did they do that? And I know they're using a virtual instrument, so how do they do that?

And if I approached that as a discovery, I'm going to go ahead and discover how to do that. Instead of, I've got to practice this little process until I get good at it. You'll probably enjoy it way more and you'll probably fulfill your expectation of discovering how to do it because you went into it with a curiosity. I hope this resonates with you a little bit.

I love discovering new things. And now when I sit down to practice, I don't practice anymore. I'm not even going to use that word anymore. I'm sitting down to discover. I'm going to make something great because I'm going to discover how to create that. I'm going to discover how to get what I have in my head out into the airwaves so that people can hear it, and it'll convey what I hear in my head. That process takes a lot of discovery. And in that I'm actually just practicing. I'm practicing production.

That's all I'm going to say about this today. I would love to know how you approach 'practice' and how you approach 'discovery'.

And if this resonates with you. Send me an email back. I'd love to hear from you. I always love hearing from you guys with comments about the video or questions and suggestions of new videos I make. Please send that to me. I'd love to hear from you.

All right. This is Zion. I am signing off.

See you next week.

Zion

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