Blog Post #2 - Shitty First Draft

I thoroughly enjoyed this article. There were many aspects that people my age (often including me) just refuse to admit. We all want perfection, but I know that if I can do as little work as possible to get the job done, I would do it if I could. Time and maturity has slowly taught me that doing just that will land me with the quickest C any teacher could write on my paper, but I sure used to. I am a saxophone major here, meaning that I must spend a ton of time practicing. And this, like writing essays, is extremely hard to do! You must sound as bad as you can, so you can fix it and sound better. But then you cannot accept it as perfect, because if you do then you will never get better than you already are. So, you force yourself to do scales, the most painfully dull exercises ever conceived. Sitting down for hours and hours just playing the same fingerings, the same notes and the same rhythms. I used to find myself watching YouTube or Netflix to distract myself from the routine. But as I began to do that, I started to find myself slowing down in my progress. I was not getting better at the rate I wanted to improve at, and I wasn’t impressing anyone, getting less successful in my auditions and my competitions. Now I always force myself to focus on them, because I know what it will do. Music is hard, focus is harder, and progress is the hardest, because as we improve, we find unfamiliar problems and we don’t notice improvement because progress is not sudden. It is gradual and it takes time, like writing a first draft and rewriting it three times before publishing.