Onwards into 2022.
When I was in my teens, I spent lots of time writing and recording music with friends. This was pre-digital recording, which made it more frustrating, but in many ways more fun.
The Tascam 424 was our go-to device.
We'd spend hours "down in the basement" (of course) trying to get things to sound decent.
Embarrassing photo #1. John and David in Graham’s basement.
Whenever we would reach a natural stopping point, we'd mix down the song (or songs) onto a cassette. These were so-called rough mixes. And then—this was the best part—we'd go for a drive in my Volkswagen Golf or the drummer's family minivan and listen to our music.
Embarrassing photo #2. John and Josh play a song in the VW Golf (and look very moisturized for some reason).
Cars were a good "test" of the recording AND the mix. Musicians can listen to a recording of a new song fifty times straight. It's like they've discovered fire or gravity or something. Nothing matters. Time stands still. Your vision narrows. If you are a musician, or lived with/dated/married/divorced one, you know what I mean.
Anyway, when you keep listening, you figure out what you'd like to improve. You start inviting friends. You get a rush from taking the recording out into the real world. Later we all invested in "real" gear (and moved to places where we didn't need cars, and played in different bands). We recorded "better" sounding music. But the rough mixes and listening rituals persisted.
Looking back, I can see we were doing a form of incremental product development. We weren't waiting until we had finished the record, or song. We were mixing (integrating) a version of the product that could do the "job" any sixteen year old musician with a car and friends cares about. It wasn't THE PRODUCT but it was the product. It worked. Driving...and rocking out...to your music. That was the test.
Ken Kocienda describes this perfectly in Creative Selection (about his time at Apple). This could be about music—word for word:
We always started small, with some inspiration. We made demos. We mixed in feedback. We listened to guidance from smart colleagues. We blended in variations. We honed our vision. We followed the initial demo with another and then another. We improved our demos in incremental steps. We evolved our work by slowly converging on better versions of the vision. Round after round of creative selection moved us step by step from the spark of an idea to a finished product.
This is what so many teams miss about "sprinting". What is a sprint anyway? The end of a sprint marks an integration point. You pull the thing together, and check it out. Teams get so overwhelmed with stories, acceptance criteria, sprint-lengths, points, and blah and blah, that they forget why they're doing all this.
All the pomp and circumstance is a smokescreen:
You're MAKING SOMETHING and you WANT IT TO WORK and that means you you have to mix it down and take it to your car (or your, I dunno, Sonos) and listen to it!
The integration forcing function is a catalyst for creativity and improvement, not a process hoop to jump through.
Listening to music in the car was also something Hendrix would do even though he built this amazing studio (Electric Ladyland) to do all the magic studio stuff they were into. I understood it to be a way to get the experience that the audience was going to have. In order to be a hit, it was going to have to sound good in the car, that was the private identity space for the American (male?) teen...
What a great post!! This applies to any creative process. I followed the same sequence when designing furniture/lighting (my own preproduct management days). In building software we often overlook the inherent creativity because most companies have chosen to optimize building, aka output vs the outcome. Perhaps that’s trite, but it’s like somehow following “the process” has become more important than the end result.