Improving Your Musical Ability Based on your Natural Strengths and Weaknesses

We've all done it, you write and write and write until you hit a brick wall and all of the sudden, you're "out of ideas". I've found that a lot of people who struggle in various aspects of composition aren't "out of ideas", but rather "limited by their lack of technical knowledge" A. K. A. "Stuck". Many get "stuck" because they write and write and write, but always seem to hit the same technical roadblocks. However, I believe there are 2 kinds of music makers, each getting "stuck" in very different (sometimes opposite) ways and each possessing a unique set of shortcomings and strengths. What I'm going to talk about today is:

1. a way to identify your natural strengths, weaknesses and categorize your personality type in a very general way

2. constructing a strategy to improve by focusing on your musical strengths and adapting your creation process around them

I'm going to assume that both of these 'personality types' are not familiar with much, if any, music theory.

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Identifying your Natural Strengths

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I've found that musicians fall into 2 general categories: Strategic Thinkers and Detail Oriented Thinkers.

Strategic Thinkers in music are mainly focused on the overall construction of the song and are naturally good at identifying if a song "feels wrong" or "isn't what I want", even if they can't identify what specifically is wrong with it. However, strategic thinkers aren't very good at detail oriented tasks. While a 'ST' may be able to envision the entire piece in their head and/or a specific feel and flow for the piece, getting that sense for the piece down on paper is very difficult. Tasks like constructing chord progressions with a specific feel, synth sound design, drum sample selection can be very difficult. Patterns for detail oriented tasks are fallen into easily for the ST, using the same rhythms, chord progressions, synth sounds, workflow etc is very common, but rarely satisfying. Attempts to venture outside of an STs self-imposed box and focusing on aforementioned details is usually met with frustration. Finishing songs is a big problem for STs.

Detail Oriented Thinkers are very good at creating and maintaining natural connections as to what "sounds good" in a limited context. Finicky things like hi-hat patterns, individual instrument sound design, layering sounds, and constructing small, cyclical chord progressions are very natural tasks for the DOT. YouTube sound design tutorials are very helpful for the DOT as they can take small details from the sound design However, the DOT may find themselves struggling to think about the long term consequences of certain musical choices they make, resulting in very apparent patterns. The DOT may write songs that sound very familiar to one another, or have sections of a song sound nearly identical. DOTs find it very difficult to write an emotionally diverse catalogue of music, but are better at completing music in general.

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Addressing Your Weaknesses by way of Reinforcing Your Strengths

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Strategic Thinkers have a natural sense for musical form, the specific emotions for each piece, but can't fill in the blanks when they write. First, a struggling ST needs to enhance their understanding of form. This provides the skeleton that all of the detail oriented things they will learn snugly fits into. Without this skeleton, any detail oriented knowledge feels baseless and difficult to understand in the context of a fully formed piece. After a good understanding of form is established, focusing on the small details of Harmony and Melody is next.

Now we have a basic understanding for creating any kind of music. After this, the details of orchestration for whatever genre the ST wants to write is key, but approaching it in a similar way is very important. The electronic musician, for example, may want to establish an understanding of how each element In the synthesizer impacts one another, and how basic patches are constructed and manipulated into more complex sounds before attempting to create very specific synth patches. Start from a general context and then move to a more specific one. As for percussion in electronic music, gaining an understanding of the general concepts percussion and how they interact with one another generally is a good idea. establishing a general framework to operate within when making choices is the and then focusing on the details is key.

The Detail Oriented Thinker's approach is the STs approach, but in reverse. Focusing on the theoretical side associated with the intricacies of music making, and then applying a framework to operate within. The DOT may feel more comfortable learning specifics of synth sound design and then approaching it from a general standpoint. Or learning the specifics of harmonic and melodic development and then learning the impacts of their Harmonic and Melodic choices over the long term.

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Music as a Puzzle Rather than Pure Discovery

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I think it's important to stress the idea that music, along with every other craft in the world, isn't purely a discovery process, but rather mostly a puzzle. Of course, coming up with initial ideas is very much a "discovery", but being able to take those initial ideas and develop them using applied music theory is paramount. In the future, I will be discussing a variety of music theory topics and how to practically apply them.

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This is my first ever post to Steemit, and I hope to make many more posts like this one. If you're interested in seeing more content like this, make sure to drop an Upvote and follow me for updates on my posts. Cheers.