There’s a concept in Julia Cameron’s creativity book The Artist’s Way that goes: the minute you decide to create art, doors will open for you to get it going. It’s the universe siding with you. It’s God the creator blessing your efforts to create. It’s a concept called synchronicity. And it happens all the time.
For me, most recently coming out of the creative block that paralyzed my Acid42 project into stasis, it came in the form of projects that appeared out of the blue. I had just decided I could finally take the time to make more music now that I had a physical space in the garage for my gear, when suddenly:
- A former contact in the Philippines messaged me from out of nowhere on Facebook to ask if I could create a remix of a praise song for their conference.
- A fellow producer messaged me to ask if I could create and submit a remix of one of his tracks for a release he was putting together on a super tight deadline.
Those two opportunities were wasted unfortunately. The universe delivered me projects so I could do what I said I wanted to do (create music!), but I dropped the ball.
How? I was in the middle of testing some new software, and thought I could use the projects to test the software out. But things were not progressing as fast as I needed it to go. And I had grueling schedules at my day job and at home as we were cleaning out the old house in preparation for selling it. I couldn’t set up my gear in time to crank out the remixes, so both deadlines came and went and I had to apologize for not being able to deliver.
Note that these were pro bono remixes. I wasn’t going to earn a cent from them. But it was still quite unprofessional of me to not deliver something to the clients. As I said, I apologized.
Still, I did learn a couple of important lessons.
Lessons Learned
The first project forced me to realize that if I needed to get things done quickly I would have to rely on my old trusted software, Reason. Which only meant that if I wanted to keep things fresh creatively, I would have to study the software more in depth and go under the hood to tweak it some more.
And the second project? I learned it’s better to finish something even if you don’t make the deadline. Give yourself some closure. I persevered and completed the remix, though not in time for the release of the track. I built the basic idea in the new software, but was able to copy the patterns back out into Reason so I could give it a more polished feel. And I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.
Here it is below:
Artist: Sparkee feat. Hazel Mae
Track title: Inversion (Acid42 Trapdoor Mix)
IMAGE CREDITS: 8Bit Bo by Boris Lechaftois on FLickr.