New beginnings uh? Change? We are beings of constant change even some people are scared to accept change is inevitable. You see, I like to consider myself like water, constantly adapting to the surface. Being like water just makes you embrace change more adaptively. Some people are more like solids, they need the surroundings and the surface to adapt to them. Well, life is not like that all the time. Sometimes our parents, our friends, or even the people we are used to working with make the life of a solid individual easier to the point that these types of people will assume they don’t change but it’s the people that are around that change for you so that you don’t have to adapt. This could be good or bad, you see, being liquid and constantly changing makes you have some extra effort in really knowing who you are because you can change to the point you forget who you are. On the other side, being too solid will make you vulnerable to life itself, because you can’t control life and your surroundings, even if the people around you mold everything for you.
What it’s inevitable is change, and if you want to be able to adapt to it, you first need to know who you are. But let’s leave the existential part to the side, let’s talk about who you are as an artist or creator. Do you know yourself to know when change is a good thing? When you have a couple of years on your back doing the same thing as a creative, answering who you are is mostly a conversation about what things you excel.
When being a creator, it is important to know your limits. You need to know your lows and highs. It would be best to understand what you can realistically do and what it’s not it. What I mean by that is you need to know your artistry to the point that you know what things you can control in your creations and what things you can’t. A lot of the time (especially when you are in a place where there’s a lot of inspiration to create) when you get busy most of the work is to say no to things you can’t do because you are already busy working on other projects or it just doesn't fit the area you are becoming an expert. When you put a lot of time into a craft you start understanding your expertise and what you excel in certain things. Sometimes you might be better at crafting ideas, planning, and formatting; or sometimes you are better at executing. This took me some time to realize because as an independent artist, I have an obsession with being in the whole process, from the beginning to the end. But by having this thinking I can’t just assume I will do every part of it because with time I started understanding what was my favorite part of the creative process and started just focusing on what I was good at. With some records I’ve worked on, I understood that as an engineer I could bring more to the table than as a producer. It takes a lot of time to come to that realization because most of my life has been putting myself in so many situations to always have something to bring to the production part of the music. Not only because I love it but because it is the core of how I started making beats and creating instrumentals for artists, but because I love building a song and creating everything on the DAW makes me see the all the picture. With time and as I was working with different artists I understood that there were certain times I could bring more to the table as an engineer. Even if I’m producing a song, I necessarily don’t have to make the beat, I could arrange it or change it for the better fir of the artist and literally, that’s what the engineer does as soon as it gets beat on with the artist.
To create for yourself or be part of a creative process for somebody else is two different things but both processes tell you more about yourself and who you are. In the end, you will choose what’s best for you, but in the end, certain decisions will truly affect your career. So know when to take a pause, when to say no, and when to go fully immersive in something, even if that means that will bring a new wind of change.
