The more time you spend as a musician you'll begin to realize the importance of listening to your moods. Sometimes practice will be super-productive, other times you might as well be sniffing paint it's that pointless.
Do you know the difference between the moods of creativity?
-=Creating is when you're drawing new ideas out of the great cosmic jar of idea-plasm and giving them a basic shape. You do not criticize ideas during this phase, it's pure idea generation. Neuroscientists have shown that during phases of pure and spontaneous creation, your brain turns off self-censoring and inhibition. A new idea is highly disruptive and challenging to your current schema of the world, so it only makes sense that your defense mechanisms would kick in to shut down this idea that would cause too much of a ruckus. If you've got an over-active internal censor, you risk shutting down millions of brilliant ideas before they have had time to breathe. This is *part* of writer's block. (To be discussed in a later post)
-=Honing is where you're chiseling and chipping away the rough edges and giving definition to the idea-plasm. This is where you get fussy about how long you swing the third eighth in the second repeat. Unless you're full of more hubris than Kanye, you realize that not every idea is generation-defining, so you weed out the bad ones here. As such, make sure that when you're in this mood you're using it properly. When you're feeling analytical, now is not the time to try being creative and making music, you'll just end up pissed off that you can't come up with any ideas. Go retool an old song or woodshed some scales while your brain is in this mode.
Don't get confused of which phase you're in. It'll stunt your art.
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