A Crisis of Confidence

I woke up in a panic… I don’t know what the f%#^ I’m doing!

I can write the music – I know exactly how I want it to be. I can rehearse and conduct the music – I know exactly how it should sound. But I can’t produce a recording. I don’t know who can – though there must be plenty of producers and recording techs around who can do this. I don’t have any money to front a project like this. I’ve got this great vocal ensemble whose good will and talent I’ve been taking advantage of for a couple of months now, and they’re starting to slip away from me. It’s a stretch to ask them to show up week after week, without a plan or a schedule or any discernable progress.

So I resort to writing more music, more arrangements – just to keep them entertained and interested?

This is good stuff. I know it. And they know it.
But is it great? Will anybody want to hear it? Will it sell? ... It’s pretty square stuff. It is not slick. And then I start to really doubt …

Okay – so, I step back and take a look at this:

Am I doing what I know how to do? Yes – I wrote the music

What don’t I know how to do? Um… the next step? Production? Funding? Recording? All the stuff beyond the chorus- vocals – guitar tracks, keyboard tracks, hand bells (for God’s sake!), children’s choir? Editing? Post-production and? Marketing? Promoting?

How many people do this in their little home studios? (I think of Les Paul in the hall of a flea-bag motel with his portable reel-to-reel and a couple of mikes, looking for the perfect sound space…)

And am I doing this to make a million bucks? To market it world-wide? To get my tracks up on iTunes and Amazon.com?

I believe that in a perfect world, everybody sings.

I believe the next paradigm for music is ethereal: I believe that after live concerts and performances, after radio and records and 8-tracks and cassettes and CDs, comes the internet and downloads and streaming digital sound-files and podcasts and shared music worldwide. I believe in music to be made, to be sung, to be listened to, to be lived in.

But I still don’t know how.

My Dancing Day