It arrives while you are warming up.
Four bars,
half an accident,
better than anything
you sat down and tried to write.
You play it three times.
You think, I will remember that.
You will not.
By the evening
there is a shape left,
a feeling that something good happened,
and no notes.
By the next day
even the feeling is gone.
The fix costs nothing.
Your phone is already in the room.
Hit record,
play the four bars,
say out loud
what key you are in
and where you thought it was going,
and stop.
Twenty seconds.
Do not tidy it up first.
Do not wait until you can
play it cleanly,
because the version
you are trying to protect it from
is the only version you have.
A bad recording of a real idea
beats a perfect memory of nothing.
The temptation is to judge it
while you are capturing it,
and judgement kills capture.
You hear the timing slip,
you hear the room,
you hear yourself,
and you delete it
before it was ever an idea.
Capture and judgement
are two different jobs.
Do them on different days.
Name the file
with more than a date.
Two words are enough.
Minor thing, walking bass,
chorus that goes up.
A folder of two hundred files
called Recording 47
is a folder you never open again.
Then go back once a month
and listen to the pile.
Most of it is nothing.
That is fine,
that is the deal,
and you cannot tell which is which
in the moment anyway.
But three or four of them
will sound better cold
than they did warm,
and one of them
will finish a song
you gave up on in the spring.
The habit matters more
than the equipment.
An interface, a good microphone,
a template project already open,
none of it helps
if the idea has to wait
for you to set it up.
Whatever you can start
in four seconds
is the right tool.
Ideas do not arrive
when you are ready for them.
They arrive while you are tuning.
Leave the recorder within reach.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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