What You Train, You Become

This is a saying I picked up from my years learning Taiji: What you train, you become. It is a very deep and general principle. Our brains and minds learn through practice and repetition: what you repeat you remember; what you remember shapes how you think; how you think shapes how you live.

In martial arts, if you practise in a way that encourages and harnesses anger, even though it might win you fights, makes you naturally angry and short-tempered: since anger is repeated and rewarded, it is reinforced and learned. Equally, if you practise staying calm and not getting angry, then that is what is trained.

When it comes to music production, and indeed learning a musical instrument, something similar occurs. Moreover many routes to quick results become like drugs one gets addicted to. If you are new to a synth, you will almost never produce patches as good as the presets created by professional sound designers. If you simply click through presets looking for one you like, and then use it to make a tune, you learn nothing about how the synth works, and you reinforce the habit of not bothering to learn how that synth works. If you train preset-hopping, you become a preset-hopper.

Then when it comes to how you remember: again what you train you become. If you practise in a way which promotes memory and understanding, then you will get better at remembering and understanding. My general philosophy here is to have a system of notes. Your first port of call is your memory; if your memory lacks something, the next port of call is your notes. Only when both memory and notes fail should you look elsewhere. And when you do look elsewhere, write what you learn in your notes. Moreover, by using your notes regularly, you will find where your notes are good, and where they are not. So you practise better note taking, you train better note taking, and you become better at note taking. Then, in writing and then reading notes, this will leave a growing residue in your memory: each time you write your notes, you are forcing yourself to pay attention to everything; each time you read your notes, you are forcing yourself to pay attention to everything. You train paying attention, you train thinking everything through, and you become better at paying attention and thinking everything through. If studying synth presets, you become better at figuring out what settings do what, and at spotting every available setting on a synth as you strive to replicate a professionally produced preset.

In a sense, this idea is a more refined version of the well-known saying practice makes perfect. I read in one old book on learning the piano, that a better version of this saying is correct practice, repeated often enough, makes perfect. But this is simply a corollary of the more general philosophical principle that what you train, you become. Train to become a musician, and a musician you will become; train to understand synths, and composition, and arrangement, and you will become better at these; train to be a preset-hopper who just makes tracks using AI and dropping in samples, and that is all you will become.