Slowly I turned, step by step… into the Assumption Trap
Well, I don’t have any “Niagra Falls”-type trigger words, but I do know that managing projects can be, at best, a step-by-step affair, and sometimes more a “two steps forward, one back” sort of situation. It doesn’t help when ‘assumption traps’ hang you up.
“Assumption Trap” is a personal phrase for a problem which has plagued me for years and years: having a background assumption about something or somebody that is, simply, wrong. When that happens, the results of some effort or plan or campaign fall short and you don’t understand why, and so you try again and fail and still, no light dawns.
This error is a constant danger in the geek programmer world; an early error of any kind in a piece of code will come back to bite you on the butt, usually when you least expect it. In the musician’s world, it’s the same: some assumption or set of assumptions slowly degrade a career or block a gig or, more often, simply result in a lot of things not getting done.
For instance, what’s your assumption about why a club or restaurant hires you or your band? Are you there to entertain their guests or are you there to draw in customers? Making the wrong assumption here means you don’t maximize your results for that gig and then don’t get hired again.Well, I write all that because I allowed myself to put a foot in the trap; I assumed that because the studio where I’m recording is run by an Audio Engineering school, which doesn’t have students on the weekends, that the studio was likewise not available on the weekends, unlike most studios. This made for some real difficulties with scheduling a couple of sidemen mentioned in the a previous post. I was thinking about how I could, perhaps, record the tracks in Louisville at a studio with Pro Tools and zip ‘em down to Lexington. Not the best possible solution and certainly a detour, but hey! I wanted these guys to play on the job.
Anyway, the owner of the school called up a few days ago about another matter but asked why the project wasn’t moving forward. I explained my dilemma: Saturday recording needed. Oh, hell, he said, (producer) Michael T. comes and goes when he needs to and often comes in on Saturday. I should schedule a Saturday and he would see to it that the producer was there. Problem solved.
So now, all I have to do is arrange the schedules with the players, which is a set of problems all by itself, but now I have a direction to go. Pick up one foot, set it down; pick up the other.
P. S. - For any readers not old to enough to have seen Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, the “Niagra Falls” joke was a running routine through several of their movies.