Confidence is a vital criterion for every songwriter. Painful as it may sound, if you are a songwriter and you lack confidence, you may as well just be wasting time in the wrong profession. This may be a very stern and harsh approach to starting an article, but it is what it is, you can’t make music with doubt and uncertainty clouding your mind too often. There is not much you will be able to achieve, and in the long run, you will end up disrupting the flow for other people you work with.
Nija Charles is a popular Grammy-winning songwriter. She is well known to have created hits for Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Cardi B, and Wizkid, honestly just to mention a few. What’s more fascinating is that she was born in October 1997, which means she’s just 24 years old. She was asked once how she has been able to fight her way through a male-dominated industry and hold it down against industry giants at such a young age. Her reply, a very simple one at that, was, “I was taught confidence from a young age…. If you are confident in yourself, that is all that matters, do not take no for an answer. So I’ve always carried myself like that”
Confidence and motivation are two concepts that are easily intertwined in songwriting and music recording but are also equally and subtly unique. Confidence is the inbuilt belief or trust in your abilities to make good music at any given time. Confidence was coined from a Latin word fidere meaning “to trust”. Confidence helps you to gauge your worth and helps to build the inner belief that your abilities are world-class.
Motivation on the other hand is a drive that fuels you to constantly want to make good music in the good or the bad times. Finding the balance between these concepts is necessary to build a good music career. So if you lack confidence when recording music, there is surely a cause for worry. But it is not over yet. This article would serve as a lifeline for you to build your confidence and stay motivated while recording music.
There is no exact pathway to developing a high level of confidence or motivation but highlighting their significance to the recording process is the right way to begin.
Guide Against Self Doubt
The lack of trust in yourself brings self-doubt. Once you begin to second guess your abilities you begin to take lesser risks and wallow in self-pity when things are not working out. For instance, when big opportunities come around or a chance to showcase what you can do comes, you find yourself dodging the chance or being too scared to try. This doesn’t happen when you possess confidence. You are never afraid to try or take your chances when writing music and recording it.
Build Self Belief
You build a strong level of self-belief when you are confident. When you believe strongly in yourself, your abilities, your judgment, and your capacities, it builds your belief and it, in turn, creates the impression of you not being one to be pushed around by people. Self-belief will also create room for you not to stay in your comfort zone, and even make you be able to admit your mistakes while writing recording and learn from them.
Maintain High Quality
Recording music is not an on and off process, it involves consistently raising the bar and maintaining a high level of excellence. When you lack motivation or confidence it is extremely hard to maintain a high level of discipline and skill. Confidence and motivation push you to not remain stagnated in growth but to keep pushing and raising the bar.
Negotiate Your Worth Correctly
Your success depends mainly on what you think of yourself more than what people think of you. If you lack confidence you would never be able to negotiate the right price for your time and talent. You will consistently find yourself being underpaid. Confidence puts you in charge of the negotiation table and gives you an upper hand in negotiating what you are worth.
Do Things Yourself
To build an outstanding level of motivation and confidence you have to learn to do things yourself. Completing tasks of various difficulties yourself feeds your confidence and boosts your motivation to keep going. When in the studio, learn to set up the gadgets and every other thing by yourself. If you can program the presets yourself, do it. Just do anything that you can do for yourself by yourself. It will help you achieve what you need in the long run.
Be Your Strongest Critique
Be the first person to recognize what you just wrote and recorded was not good enough. Be your biggest critique, strive for perfection in everything you do. When you are your biggest critique in private, you have the confidence to boldly defend and claim accolades for your work when it reaches the public space. Being your biggest critic, however, doesn’t mean that you have to undermine yourself at every given time. It is also important that you are not letting your ego overwhelm you when making writing decisions. Keep your head grounded enough to know when what you have written isn’t good enough and write it correctly, but confident enough to not beat yourself up unnecessarily.
Defend Yourself When Necessary
It is possible that in the initial phase of your dream there are not so many people who believe in you. Only when necessary defend yourself against people who are looking down on your records and written songs. Sometimes people do not understand your style of music or whatever studio experiments you are doing and are quick to tongue-lash your efforts. Be vocal against those opinions when necessary.
Try To Maintain Composure Always
Writing and recording music can be nerve-racking sometimes and we might just easily lose composure, due to the pressure to impress or to fear. It is important that you maintain composure and keep your cool to have a clear headspace so you can execute your record perfectly.
Maintain A Recording Pattern
The idea behind this is repetition. The things you are best at are the things you do every day and you don’t need guidance on how to do them because you have done them over and over again. Your recording pattern can be based on your inspiration or based on a structure. If it is based on your inspiration then you have to record it as it comes. If it is a structure, make sure you record the songs in bits, from the hooks to the verses till the whole song is perfect. Most times, it is better to have a structure that doesn’t revolve around inspiration, as inspiration can be difficult to come by sometimes, and some other times you just need to get started to get in the groove.
Record with People
The needed motivation and confidence sometimes come through people. When you are surrounded by people who believe in you and can guide you through the fundamentals you need to understand it makes the recording process easier.
Learning to record music motivated and confident is not a day’s job. It is a gradual process, especially for people who are introverted and struggle to express themselves outside of the studio already. The outlined steps in this article would guide you into breaking the barrier of low confidence and motivation and bring you into the realm of confidence so you can consistently record mind-blowing music.
Thank you for reading this article here on Tunedly, your favorite online music recording studio, music publishing company, and masked music discovery platform.
