Bias and writing music
Over the past few weeks I've been looking at music again. It's been a while since I dove this deep. For some reason music keeps pulling me back both in listening but also in writing. I have this image of myself being a musician, composing my own pieces and ultimately performing them. However, the difficulty with this image is that I have never actually written any pieces. Sure I have created smaller things, phrases or licks, but even then I haven't recorded, transcribed or in any way "finished" any music piece, let alone release or upload it anywhere. And yet, even though all the evidence points to the contrary, I strongly believe that I am capable of being a musician and composing pieces.
Now I'm aware that it's quite a common situation (see Dunning-Kruger effect). I feel like I know what I'm doing even though probably I have no idea what's going on. To test my hypothesis, "I am able to compose music and create pieces.", I've been thinking about what kinds of evidence I could produce or point at to at least convince myself that this statement is true.
For starters there would be the proof of a finished piece that I can play or has been recorded somehow, i.e. transcribed or audio. However, I've never transcribed anything and am very unfamiliar with recording equipment. Again I encounter a bias here where I think I do know how to record even though I haven't done so. I do own a bunch of microphones and have a small studio in the house so at least the option is there. To make it easier on myself I've decided that a full piece is probably a lot harder to start with than a shorter piece or even a transcription/recording of other music. And thus I settled on 2-4 bars from 1-2 songs I know well. For this exercise I am currently studying Talking Heads and Steely Dan and hope to produce short pieces that are as close to the original as I can make it.
I think this will show two things. Firstly, I'll be able to "prove", to myself, that at least for these two songs I understand how it's build. Secondly, it could teach me techniques on recording and arranging. Both skills I would surely use in any follow up work, f.e. writing a piece by myself.
I'll write another small post when I've made any progress. :)
