The Difference Between Perfectionism and Feel When Producing Music

“Perfectionism is just insecurity with lipstick on”.

I saw Gary Vaynerchuk post the above quote today, and I thought to myself, “Yup, that’s me”.

Far too often I find myself searching for an unattainable (and often undefined) standard in how every single sound in one of my songs should sound, and I’ll spend hours trying to alter sounds without even knowing what I’m really going for.

This often results in me blindly applying different effects without even knowing what I want the sound to sound like. Basically, I’m changing things just to change them, without any clear goal of what the change should be.

The example I used is exactly what Gary is talking about for me — I’ll spend countless hours tinkering without knowing what I’m doing or why, just because I feel like I’m supposed to do it in order to find some “perfect” sound.

That’s often time wasted, and not productive toward my ultimate goal of creating a song that makes people feel powerful emotions, and crafting beats and melodies that people really feel when they listen to them.

However, what is productive toward my goal, is messing around with different sounds, beats, and melodies until I find the combination of them that feel the way that I want them to feel.

I’m not holding each individual sound to some undefined standard — I’m just combining different sounds, beats, and melodies until they feel the way I want them to.

In a way then, I am in a sense searching for perfection, and constantly reworking and changing things until I get there. But I think the distinction here from what Gary V. is talking about is that this is a perfection that has a definition — the definition is that when I listen back to the song it has to make me feel the emotion I want to feel.

When the perfection you’re searching for is defined, it takes away a lot of the negative aspects of the stigma around the word, and doesn’t leave you searching for some undefined and therefore unattainable goal.

Also probably worth noting is that even within a “defined perfection” that can be healthy like I’ve mentioned, you can still take that too far. You could put together a song that really makes you feel the powerful emotions you’re looking for, and then fall into endlessly tweaking it into infinity to try and pull more and more out of it.

At some point you have to know that a song conveys enough of the emotion you’re going for, and you have to call it done. This is obviously much harder to define and decide upon, and I think one of the best remedies is to simply do — you have to put songs together, work on them until you think they’re ready, and then release them.

Over time you’ll start learning and hearing the differences between what is “finished” to you and what needs more polishing or edits. I’m still far from where I’d like to be with this myself, but I learn a little more every time a work a song through to completion.

Hope this helps, have a great day!