Read your October blog entries. The entries are concise, poignant, and thought-provoking. Fancy words to say that you say a lot of good stuff that I need to apply more to my lfe. I'll be reading backwards through the rest of it and looking forward to what you have to say in the future. Thanks for pointing me to it.

There is no christian problem.  Its the human problem.  Christians aren't the only ones suffering from apathy.

I think you missed the point of what is being said by the mainstream push. It has nothing to do with looking like and imitating the mainstream. It has EVERYTHING to do with pushing toward higher standards in audio production and composing. If your music can't stand up to the same scrutiny that secular music gets before it is signed by a label or selected to be played out by DJs, then you have work to do. This doesn't mean that you should sound like producer X.

If everyone sounded the same, then you are right creativity would most definitely be dead. That would be a bad thing. The problem is, if you truly want to be creative you have to train yourself to be a good producer first. Only when you truly understand how a genre works or how to mix down audio properly are you going to be freed up to produce what you really want to produce be it symphonic anime soundtracks or bangin' house music. In fact, if you are doing symphonic works, I would have to say that your production and composition skills have to be far above the average house producers in order to be truly "successful." After all, your competitors include Bach, Mozart, Chopin and a host of others.

If you just want to play around and have fun, then ignore what I just said. If you are going to try to write professional quality music though, you gotta learn how and you have to do it to the current standards. Who would you hire? The person who only uses a computer once a month and has a hard time with just email or the person who knows his computer inside and out and knows exactly how to work efficiently and can render exactly what is in his mind with the tools provided? I know which one I'd want.

1) Don't ever let yourself get upset by criticism. It doesn't do any good. You end up getting defensive and don't listen to see what valid points the criticism are.
2) Taking criticism on your terms and time means that you should never ask for it. As soon as you ask for feedback, you need to be prepared to get what you don't want to hear.
3) Accept criticism even if you don't like it. The truth is that if it is important enough for someone to mention to you, it probably has some validity. If you don't know how to solve the problem, ask. If you aren't 100% sure what the problem is... ask. Don't simply say thanks but no thanks, but don't feel like you have to implement the changes either. You do need to understand the problems.

Wow... this thread is now jacked.

Nope. Yer only kidding yourself. I went through 8 years of art school... you don't. You only get bitter about it. Once you let that go, you just feel stupid. The value of the lesson is wasted on harboring anger.


Again... fooling yourself. For one thing, all criticism is valid, but it may not be the right comment or the right thing to do. Criticism is simply an opinion. It's an expression of freedom of speech that is supposed to help someone else improve their efforts. You have to respect it from the start or you never will.


Welll... I am saying that you are

Well... if your theory is correct, a few years down the road from now you'll look back and appreciate my valid points here

...and you were under NO pressure to prove to them you were a good Christian and thus deserved to play.

I just needed to chime in about my pet issue--spiritual/moral litmus tests.  I think that alone is reason enough for Christian artists to persue work in The World.

Being who you are is your most important job as an artist and a human.  Kudos for persisting!  thankfully SOMEBODY supported you in it.

...long, slow, painful process.


No wonder you know more about WiKi's than I do!

My wife and I used to attend a church that served a very poor part of Waterloo.  A huge portion of the congregation was unemployed, and in many cases, unemployable--or nearly so.  The only people who knew what our jobs were were the handful of people who knew us before we came there.  Nobody ever asked what your job was in conversation.  That comes right after names when middle class men are introduced.  It was refreshing to have people size me up based on the way I acted.  I usually dress down for church so I don't think my clothes gave much away.  When we left I think there were still only about four people who knew Kerri had a PhD.

The other thing was that when people did learn what I did they didn't care.  There was a class distinction between people with and without jobs, but nobody was ever impressed by anybody else's job, or, for that matter, looked down on them.  It was a very interesting experience and helped me understand the role of my job in my life and distance my SELF from it a little bit.