The "One Right Answer" Hack

A more convenient belief about creative conundrums

“What’s happening here?”, I think listening back to the bassline I just recorded. It wasn’t what I had intentionally set out to record just 30 minutes earlier.

Let’s back up.

I’m a particularly mediocre bass player and a particularly fast audio editor so my recording process consists of looping a song section – a verse, let’s say – and then recording over that loop 8, 9, 14 times in a row without stopping.

Then comes the act of ruthless triage. I “comp” – meaning I take the best snippets from the best takes and end up with something that, to the untrained ear, might pass for competence.

The day before, I’d sent a handful of bass ideas to the artist whose song I’m producing. He wrote back with the polite equivalent of “less of you, please.”

His instruction was to simplify the chorus — good advice, in fact. The kind of thing that made me wonder if he should be producing me and not the other way around.

So I comes up with a simpler bassline, see? And I starts looping and recording it.

There’s a part of this process that I love. Around take 4 or 5, I really start feeling the groove. I think competent musicians call this “the pocket”. I wouldn’t know anything about that but once I’ve played the part enough times, my fingers start to know the way. I close my eyes and try to respond to the push-pull dynamics of the groove.

Except slowly, like in a bad dream, the new “simplified” bassline starts sounding suspiciously like the one I recorded yesterday!

This is not the first time this has happened. I’ve had situations where a song will sit for months – waiting on one thing or another – and I’ll come up with a nearly identical part from a clean sheet approach.

So, back to the question posed in the opening line: “what’s happening here?”

Let’s consider some possibilities:

1. What I’m experiencing is the residue of the previous recording session. My fingers played that part a bunch and now they’re gravitating back to it.

2. Like baby ducklings imprinting the term “mother” onto the first living they see, it’s just hard to shake that first idea you come up with. In other words, there are any number of “right” answers but I tend to prefer whatever I came up with first.

3. There is a subjectively correct answer to what this bassline should be. Subjectively because your answer may be different than mine but mine, such as it is, is the only one I will ever feel to be “right”.

Like with most things filed under the category “art” inside my brain, I don’t know what the actual answer is. However, from a MINDSET standpoint, I have always behaved as if it were #3. And in fact, this belief is a prerequisite for sanity – if you’re me.

You see, facing the infinite as a set of possible outcomes is like floating alone in space: dismally hopeless. A scary enough prospect to prevent one from donning the space suit in the first place.

How could you ever rest with a bassline knowing that there may be another one out there, somewhere, that could be not just better but perhaps even iconic?

Ok. Maybe not iconic. But still. I’m indecisive and this type of thought can paralyze an indecisive creative. So I’ve done what people often do in the presence of uncomfortable emotions: embrace a more convenient belief.

It’s nice.

It makes working on music less like carving David out of a block of marble and more like solving a really fun escape room.

It helps me avoid procrastination because I know I can solve most of these musical puzzles if I just turn them around enough times.

It also reduces my anxiety of “forgetting” something I came up with because, once discovered, the subjectively right answer is easy to stumble upon again.

I mean, that’s why you never do the same escape room twice, right?