Why Thinking and Doing Less Makes you a Better Musician

There’s something magical about the first time you play something

It’s an expression of a moment in time. And that moment only happens once. 

The first time you play something, you have no expectations of what it should or could be. It just happens. It’s pure. 

The second time you play it, your ego starts to assign a meaning to it. It may think what you played is great, causing you to try to recapture or improve upon that original moment.  

The third time you play something, it starts to solidify into what it will be. You start to expect something of it. 

By the tenth time you play something, it’s just a recitation of that original moment. 

And that’s the way it goes. Moments pass. But as music makers, we can honor and preserve the original moment by keeping it in tact in the final version of the song. 

Do less

The more we do, the more we change that original magical moment.  

The more you add and edit, the more you risk covering up the purity. You can make it better through revising but a more overlooked option is just leaving it as is. 

Music isn’t necessarily better with more effort. Ruminating on what deep lyric to sing usually results in something contrived.

The best music falls out of people without thought. 

It’s usually best to finish songs quickly.

Some of the best songs that have come out Incubator were written in a day. 

A minimal way to write songs

I think 5 hours is a good amount of time to spend on a song before recording it. Though that should usually be spread out over days if not weeks. 

If you’re going to edit your own work, it’s good to forget what you did so you can come back to it with fresh ears and minimal expectations.

It’s tempting to work on a song incessantly because you’re in love with it. You want to be around it.

But it’s healthier to give it space so you can have perspective. It’s easy to get confused and lose sight of what the song originally was when you do nothing but try to improve it. 

Effort doesn’t matter as much as playing what you like 

The best musicians are consistently able to play want they want to hear. It sounds so simple but it requires a certain level of grounding. Not effort, just presence.

The best musicians can sit down with an instrument and just go with the flow without judging, eventually finding themselves playing something that resonates with them. Maybe it takes 30 seconds of playing to get there, maybe 30 minutes. 

If you do this, you don’t need to do much afterward to turn the idea you made into a song. It’s already magical

The power of beginner’s mind

Something that helps with overthinking is not knowing much. It’s hard for beginners to overanalyze because they don’t know how to analyze. So instead, they focus on what sounds good. This is the preferred method.

Beginners haven’t learned the “rules” yet. They haven’t internalized what music theory says you should and shouldn’t do. They just do what feels natural and the results are often special. 

That’s why some of the most prominent Incubator musicians don’t know much music theory at all. Music theory is a helpful tool but at the end of the day, it’s intellectualizing. It’s reducing an expression to letters and numbers. 

An environment for spontaneous expression

The first time you play something is a magical moment. It’s a pure expression that only happens once. You don’t need to be good at an instrument to produce these moments. You don’t need to think much and you don’t need to do much after the moment passes. 

Incubator strives to be an environment that allows for these moments to happen and where there’s a process that helps musicians create songs that keep these moments in tact.