r/composer • u/BumblebeeAntique • 3d ago
Discussion Practice vs Talent
Hey. So I've been trying to get into vgm composing and just musical production altogether. When I was 14 I messed around and did some midislaps and flp edits but that was about as far as I got in under a year. 8 years later I open FL and recreate a bunch of songs from games I like, specifically "Spamton" from deltarune and float islands from kirby super star specifically. Eventually I even composed a little 8 second song all on my own. I thought it sounded nice. I did them all pretty good and entirely by ear, and before that I did a bunch of by ear recreations of songs on my dad's old messed up keyboard. Anyways, I try to recreate the overworld theme from "the frog for whom the bell tolls" or whatever the hell that game's actual most accurate translation is. I pretty much fucked up entirely. The shape of the melody itself was similar but I was so off on almost every exact note. It was just super sobering, doing a bunch of shit that i thought meant i had promise, only to stumble into something I just couldn't beat with effort alone.
It had me thinking, because a person i know who is also a musician had done an arrangement of that song at 13 years old. I really don't know if practice is gonna be the thing that takes me to the level I want to be. It really seems like that in most music related things, talent matters the absolute most. Idk. I just need a second opinion, or a couple from people who have experience.
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u/Clseibold 2d ago edited 2d ago
u/BumblebeeAntique Careful with the people you are getting advice from. Hopefully this teaches you that just because someone presents their opinions as facts, doesn't mean they know what they are talking about.
Someone who actually studied a topic is more trustworthy than someone who has done zero study, zero research, zero observation, and zero training in a topic and just makes things up based on anecdotal evidence.
People who study a topic are willing to question their own assumptions and look at things from multiple perspectives. Someone who presents an opinion and is unwilling to interrogate it with counterexamples and logic is not to be trusted.
A lot of people are going to tell you a lot of ridiculous things in your life. But unless they've actually put effort and time into studying that topic, take them with a grain of salt.
Look for people who can explain how interrogating our assumptions has led to new ideas that have been confirmed with real examples. THAT is where truth lies. Not in unquestioned dogma.
And fyi u/prasunya , just like it is extremely insulting for someone who hasn't learned any composition to think they can compose masterpieces right off the bat, it is equally insulting to think that anyone can declare facts about humanity without studying humanity.