(NO – THIS IS NOT ABOUT AI)

The concept of “one degree change” has been around the wellness and personal development spaces for a while now. This idea – that small changes can lead to big results – is appealing on a whole bunch of levels. Small changes are manageable, quantifiable, and far less intimidating than drastic ones. Maintain a one degree change every day, and the compounded effect can eventually change your life. 

There’s no shortage of analogies: a golfer rotating her feet slightly can alter the trajectory of the ball by hundreds of feet. Course-correcting a flight path by one degree may be undetectable in the moment, but over a long distance, it can entirely alter your destination. Water at 99 degrees is just extremely hot water; one degree more, and it changes states.

Innovation and creativity, too, can be born from one degree shifts in perspective. I sometimes lose sight of this, feeling pressure to be wholly different to be original, under the misconception that creativity only lies in radical new approaches. Sometimes it does. But sometimes, it’s simpler than that. Sometimes, thinking a little differently can be as powerful as thinking radically differently. 

It’s true for music as well. How many times have we completely discarded an idea just because we thought it wasn’t ‘original’ enough? How many times have we tried to force a ‘creative’ musical approach onto an ad or a scene solely to be different?

We might have just been thinking too big. 

An original idea can be a little tweak away.  Like what happened with this promo piece we did for Netflix’s movie, Next Gen. The brief called for traditional kids’ cartoon instrumentation, using the familiar orchestral palette of strings, woodwinds, piano and tuned percussion. Our piece was jaunty, whimsical, mischievous – and it totally worked. This approach is ubiquitous for a reason. Here’s a snippet of our first pass:

But I wanted to explore a different direction. The thing is, we had put so much time into constructing those melodies and getting the timing as precise as possible. Plus, convincing our clients to go in a completely different direction was going to be a tough sell. The answer was a one degree type shift. At the time, I’d been listening to a lot of The Ventures and all this great 60s psychedelic surf rock. It’s a style of music that can get weird and dark, but it can also get into that same jaunty, whimsical, mischievous territory we needed. So, we replayed our exact same orchestral piece – but with Ventures-inspired guitar, organ, and drums. This is what we got:

We loved it. The clients loved it as well. We maintained their original ideas in our creative process but put a completely different spin on it. On a broader level, it’s a type of thinking I try to draw on when I’m stuck for ideas. Instead of throwing out a chorus that’s not feeling right, try playing it in a different time signature. When a groove just isn’t feeling inspiring, reach for an effect plugin you’d never think to use on a drum track—see if it alters the track in a beautifully unexpected way. Instead of starting over, try looking at something you’ve already created with a slightly different perspective. Try thinking a little differently.

Oh – and here’s the short in its entirety: