Daily journal: #5
Avoiding lectures when coaching, eating before you're hungry and using autotune when working out vocals in a song.
Monday August 1, 2022
Things learned
When reprimanding someone, let them do the talking
No one likes to have hard conversations. Especially when it's someone that you're coaching and they're particularly sensitive. It's also easy to fall into the lecture trap where people can easily tune out.
With that said, I've heard many times that your quality of life is determined by the amount of challenging conversations you have, and it has to be done for everyone to grow: both as a mentor and mentee.
People generally know when they're not doing what they should be, and in that case let them self-reflect and tell you what they'll do next time and how you can support them. This way they're really coaching themselves and asking for help if they need it.
Things to improve
Eat before I'm hungry
Lately I've really struggled to force myself to take a break from working to get some food. It's a bigger challenge when working from home, since the computer is right there and you "might as well just finish this last thing real quick..."
Then the time comes when my stomach has had enough and starts to sound like a grizzly bear that just found a cooler full of fresh salmon. Definitely need to be more proactive and eat on a schedule so that doesn't continue happening.
Random thoughts
It's nice to use autotune when riffing on vocals
When just trying to get an idea recorded - just enough to write lyrics - it's a real pain to hear your scratchy voice and get too caught up in the details. Using a plugin with some sort of pitch correction during this stage turned all the way has sped up my productivity a lot.
Then you'll easily be able to record the final track down and turn the pitch correction down to your liking.
I'm working on public song #2, probably called "Soul", and am excited to finish it this week and continue releasing new music consistently. Cheers SL
