Mistakes – are meant to be!

Mistakes are there for a reason – to deviate you from the expected – and to teach you something.

Many people think that they have to be perfect in everything they do, but you need to make a lot of mistakes to learn that perfection. So mistakes are not a bad thing, they are a tool to help strengthen yourself.

When I am composing, I will sometimes deliberately make mistakes to come up with new ideas. Using tried and tested rhythms, melodies and bass lines breeds repetition. If you want to stay fresh and challenge yourself, you will need to embrace mistakes as a way to deviate from the norm.

In fact if you have writers block, making mistakes may be the way you unblock because really what you have hit is a wall in what you know. Take that sledgehammer of a mistake and burst through that wall. Some of my best pieces of music came from a mistake, or something I threw in as an after thought, then on closer inspection realized that that was the piece of inspiration I needed to focus my direction on.

When people give critique, they are honing in on your mistakes – that they believe you have made – whilst in your mind, you may believe you made the right choices. Listening to those criticisms will help you advance further and take you out of your comfort zone and make something special.

When I have my sound design hat on, encouraging making mistakes such as doing something random – and making a bad choice, sometimes yields a result that makes you stop and think, wow, if I hadn’t made that mistake, I may have never figured that out.

During live performances people make mistakes too. One such mistake was during a recording session where we asked the actor to create some power up screams (similar to those heard in DragonBall Z – when the hero becomes Super Saiyan). He had belted out a few screams before hand, and his voice cracked during one of the screams. It fell short, but amidst the embarrassment, that deviation from what we were looking for actually enhanced the palette for the final performance. That mistake made it into the final cut and it became a feature. You would look at it now and think, that was deliberate.

So embrace your mistakes, try to make them more and use them to strengthen yourself.