Over on Chris Randall's Analog Industries blog, he wrote up a frank and useful post on how to post your gear p*rn to YouTube. I won't take credit for inspiring the post but I did tweet a link to my video a week and CR hit me back with #2 (and ruminated out-loud about writing this). I mean, Chris has watched a shit-ton of these things so no doubt this post was in the making well before I sheepishly pushed my link live. But, man, was I guilty of trying to head off criticism by anticipating every possible negative thing someone might think while watching.

Since my video isn't so much a gear demo as me composing a song on a hardware array I've been experimenting with (big nod to the micronaut live-in-studio videos), I was trying for a bit of finesse, not just showing cool presets I built or selling something. So especially my reflexive self-deprecation was doing me no favors. It isn't that I honestly believe that my gear & performance are all that crap. First, the gear may not be rare or enviable but the setup/chain is of possible interest (plus whatever, how's it sound?). Second, the performance isn't simply the first thing I captured. Beyond deleting a lot of takes because some key element was just too far off for me to live with, I could've captured many variations on the same performance. And there would always be something that I could do 'better' no matter how practiced I was. (When the cat made his cameo I decided that was a good place to wrap.)

We musicians and 'producers', we're rarely 100% pleased with our performance or technical accomplishment. There's always that one part we nailed during rehearsal but didn't really work on stage, or I should have mixed the kick down a little and put less compression on the bass, and damn, we nailed it that time except for the ending which was really sloppy; or, my favorite, what was that setting/signal path again? But, indeed, it doesn't make any sense to point this out and moreover is actively self-defeating.

Perfectionism is dull to most everyone but the perfectionist. But even more dull is someone who needs to qualify everything with a defensive posture of 'I know it sucks.' Because we all know, dude, that you don't really think that, you just don't know how to handle criticism.