Generating Expectable Feedback

There's the occasional project where you have a customer who seems to be requesting changes on every first version you show them, often feeling like they're requesting changes just for the sake of it.

This is often due to a lack of experience or a misunderstood hierarchical structure where they feel that they need to justify their position by "having to add something to the music". Most commonly you get this phenomenon with customers who don't often work with composers.

Particularly where you feel like the feedback doesn't help the cue or the requested edits don't seem to have any proper relevance this can become quite frustrating and take a lot of unnecessary time.

One strategy that has proven to sometimes work in such cases is to guide their desire to give feedback to something that you deliberately "plant" into the cue. Creating something that is easy to change but more or less obviously needs to be fixed in a cue before you present it to them might focus their attention exactly on this and avoid them "finding" something else that supposedly needs changes.

Of course this is a slightly dirty psychological trick to play with them and will at least cause irritation if they get the hang of what you're doing, so you need to be careful with how obvious and how frequently you do this.

Generally, don't get to the point where you develop an arrogance that you treat every feedback from a client without much musical background as invaluable and only a source of annoyance. Very often, there can be gathered some valuable feedback from people who don't speak in musical terms but rather communicate in "emotional terms" that can really help to improve the way the music works. So use this trick only in extreme cases where there really seems to be no valuable feedback to be gathered.