I know as a songwriter that you want to make sure that your music is good or not but should you listen to honest critique by other musicians of your songs? In order to improve your songs, I used to think that listening to advice from other musicians is a good idea but now that you think about it, I don’t think it’s a good idea for other musicians and songwriters to critique your songs. You know the deal… they give you honest criticism to your songs like, “The intro of the song should be shorter”, “This part should go here, this part should go there”, “Shorten that riff or make it longer”, “The song is clipping and the sound quality is crap”, “The lyrics don’t rhyme and they don’t make any sense”, etc. Yeah, I believe you get my point now. I think it’s a bad idea to get criticism and honest feedback from other musicians.

The goal is you want non-musicians to be giving you feedback on your songs, not other musicians. You know your songs are good when you get non-musicians giving you positive feedback on your songs and I’ve had gotten positive feedback by non-musicians on my songs before. Those are the people who you want to get honest feedback from ’cause why? It’s because they don’t know anything about being a musician and when they say that they like your songs, that’s when you know your songs are good. That’s who you should be trusting are the non-musicians. The regular music fans who don’t play an instrument. Their feedback is more trustworthy and more believable.

You can’t trust feedback from other musicians ’cause even if they give you advice on how to improve your song, they’ll always find something else to criticize it on. On top of that, you don’t want your songs on how they want them to be. You don’t want to please them, you want to please yourself. If you’re happy with your songs and if you think they are good enough, that’s all that should matter. So next time I put out a new batch of songs, I’m no longer going to listen to criticism from other musicians. I’m just going to leave my songs right where they are. If other musicians like ’em, fine. If they don’t like ’em, that’s fine too.

Don’t ask for feedback from other musicians ’cause it’s a bad idea, really. I used to think it was a good idea to do but all they’re gonna do is make you feel bad with their honesty after all that hard work you went through. Whatever other musicians say about your songs is just entitled to their own opinions so don’t ever listen to them. I mean so because they have more experience in recording than you do does not necessarily mean they are good at it and it doesn’t mean they know everything either. You don’t want to listen to anybody else.

You got to be your own worst critic. When you record your songs and they make you happy, if your songs make you smile then chances are your songs will make other people smile too. Once again, don’t ever listen to other musicians ’cause they’re always gonna be assholes about it. Again, if the songs make you happy that’s all there is to it.

I’m gonna start writing and recording again soon.

Kev