The quest for perfection in both performance and recording is a natural outcome of man's desire to improve, but it can be a double-edged sword when pursued to excess. We have all heard stories of bands presenting exciting demos to record companies but, when the song is re-recorded in a large studio, the magic evaporates. The song may have become stale after too many run-throughs or have been subjected to too much analysis. Quite simply, the original, slightly rough, demo often captures the spirit of the song that tighter playing and more sophisticated recording methods could not.

In this respect, you could consider music to be a similar art form to painting. The painter can never achieve the accuracy and resolution of the photograph but it's that difference between what the camera sees and what the artist paints that makes the end result interesting. In some ways, you could even say that it's the imperfection in the artists' style that makes their work individual.

In the same way, a group of inexperienced musicians with fresh, maybe naive, ideas may create a more emotive piece of music than the most highly trained session players. Listening to some of the records that have become classics over the past few years, the imperfections often stand out like a sore thumb, simply because we're now used to absolute precision in tuning, timing and recording. Nevertheless, the songs worked. A slightly out of tune vocal can sometimes contribute to a song and maybe a change in tempo is not always a bad thing. You must never lose sight of what you're trying to do with your music. I think it's true to say that the aim is to elicit an emotional response of some kind. The current trend to assemble songs from sterile and well organised parts like some sort of sonic Airfix kit is no guarantee that the music is going to communicate with anyone. You may have more success playing what you want to play rather than endlessly pursuing your idea of what you think other people want to listen to.