Tuesday Jun 24, 2025

13 | It Takes Years To Be Bad At Something with Hayden Dun

Alexis chats with the wildly creative Hayden Dun, a Melbourne based classically trained pianist, composer, teacher, and long-time improviser with Impromptunes.

They talk about staying curious, finding creative flow, and how to keep the joy in making art, even when it’s hard.

If you’d like to see more, you can follow Hayden on instagram; @ haydendunmusic

This episode was recorded on 24th May 2025 on the lands of the Woiworung Peoples. We hope that this episode inspires you as a creative person and as a human being.

Thanks for listening, catch you on the next episode.

Psst! We are always on the lookout for creative people to share their story and inspire others. Have you got someone in mind who would love to have a chat? Get in contact with us via Instagram @throughthecreativedoor

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Creative resources from Hayden:

Asuria: https://www.asuria.com.au/courses

Let’s get social:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/throughthecreativedoor/

TikToc: https://www.tiktok.com/@ttcdpodcast

CREDITS

Created and Hosted by Alexis Naylor

Music by Alexis Naylor & Ruby Miguel

Edited and Produced by Ruby Miguel

Oh my goodness, Hayden Dun What a glorious day this is to get to interview you. I'm so very excited.

I'm really excited to be here, Alexis.

Ah, I am coming through your creative door, your gracious, beautiful home. . You are a very talented bear. You are a classical trained pianist.

You are a composer of some phenomenal tunes. Might I add? And also you're a teacher.

Yeah.

Which I think is really beautiful. You are sharing your knowledge, sharing your gift.

Thank you.

Before we get started into the questions, 'cause I know that you're prepared, I love a man who's prepared. But I just wanted to mention, you got a young composer of the ward at, Victorian College of the Arts.

Is that right?

I did, yeah.

Oh, that is so impressive.

How does that come about?

Thanks. Is, I think it is much harder to get it for performing than for composing 'cause I'm pretty sure I also applied for performing and yeah, I didn't get anywhere close to being selected.

Yeah, it, competitive space. Yeah. Competitive space a hundred percent. I also

wanna mention,

obviously the rabbit hole of

going through your world, which is so much fun, I got to come across one of your beautiful music videos. Which is, for water dance. Yeah. Water dance. Water dance. Yes. Oh my goodness.

And I saw that the video is amazing, by the way, and I have a sneaking suspicion that was down the peninsula or somewhere in Victoria.

Yeah.

But the thing that I found really cool is you dedicated it to your sister. Yeah. Who's the videographer, right? Yeah.

She was. Oh

my goodness. Tell me a bit about this.

I'm intrigued.

My sister is a marine biologist and she's also an a photographer, underwater photographer as well. And yeah, she, yeah, she's really inspiring to me. I. She's my younger sister, but she still inspires me

and it makes sense being water dancer, that you would dedicate it to someone who's immersed her life around water.

Yeah.

Oh, I love that. How beautiful.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was her idea to go to the cliff. Pretty sure it was Half Moon Bay.

Yes. Okay. I thought it was down that way of Victoria. I was like,

yeah, it's a long way away.

Oh, beautiful.

Question one. Question, what does a creative space mean to you and why?

Great question. For me, it's definitely changed. When I was in school and when I was studying at uni, I was, it was by my piano. I could spend hours a week

there.

nowadays, now that I'm 30

music and teaching, my,

my full-time profession, so I don't get hours a week at my piano anymore.

So I've been forced to make it everywhere, especially when I am, especially when I'm driving. I spend, have a lot of dead time driving from gig to gig. So now, I make it my creative time, my creative echo chamber.

Interesting. And how do you, when is that you just getting inspiration, listening to different things?

Or are you having to pull up on the side of the road and do voice messages?

How do you harness that creativity in that space?

Yeah, exactly. That. If I get, a really great idea, I'll either, I'll try to quickly tell it to Siri to put it in. If that doesn't work, which it often doesn't, I will pull up on the side of the road.

And

you find that you are able to.

Imagine some of these melodies and that instrumentation, even though you are not at a piano.

I do it better at a piano, but yes, I can still get a rough idea of it. I'm driving

amazing. Oh, I can empathize with the car scenario. I love long.

Hall drives.

Yeah.

And I find that something

about doing the mundane task that your brain goes to this creative space. Yeah. I find the same when I go running. Yeah.

Yeah. A hundred percent. Running walks, traveling to other countries, that's all where it comes. So yeah, it comes when I'm not, when I'm not at my most convenient at the piano.

How

dare it not be convenient? Oh,

so inconsiderate.

Oh, the creative way, right?

Yep.

Now, you've been doing this for a long time.

And you'll be continuously be doing it for a very long time. But I'm curious, what is something. That you've created or released, that you are most proud of? And how has that come about?

I've actually got something really exciting and, it might even be released by the time people are listening to this, I'm gonna release my, piano album Terra Sonata.

Ooh, what does that mean?

It is, it's gonna have five songs. Usually a Sonata has three or four songs, but I'm cheating a little bit.

It's gonna have five songs that I've, written throughout the years and compiled together. Cut a little bit of the fluff that I wrote along the way. Wouldn't, yeah, even musicians sometimes write fluff here and there, but I cut it all out and. Yeah. Five piano solo songs that I'm really proud of.

Amazing. And when you say that you've written them along the way, is this a, a span of 10 years that you've been working on these compositions that are on this album or this record?

Actually, the oldest one I started writing 13 years ago, in, in my opinion, I don't think I wrote it too well.

It's something that I. Yeah, put in the bank and revisit it.

Amazing. I love those. I love those. Oh my goodness. Please tell me that your song until the end is one of those five.

It will be, yes. Oh my goodness.

Yay. For those listening. I was devastated when I listened on YouTube to this phenomenal song until the end.

Then I couldn't find it on Spotify and I was like, no, I wanna be able to listen to it all the time and yay. So hopefully when this episode lands, that song will be readily available. I'm sharing it straight away. Oh my God. I'm so excited.

Thank you so much. That's really kind.

Okay. On the flip side of things that you are proud of.

What is something that's challenged your creativity, do you think?

Being cocky and naive?

Oh my God. Tell me more. I'm so intrigued by this.

When I was fresh out of uni, so this would've been eight years ago, one of my best friends and myself started writing a musical. Cool. We had it finished in one and a half years.

So both of us, we studied music composition, which had a little bit of lyric writing, but hardly any at all. Yeah. That was our specialty. The music, little bit of lyrics, we had absolutely no experience writing, dialogue or story. But that didn't stop us. We put on our show, we wore it as a badge of honor that Okay.

It only took one and a half years to write. And yeah, sure enough, when the feedback came in, the. People thought the music was nice, the lyrics were good enough, the dialogue was a little bit clunky, and the plot was an absolute disaster.

No. What was the plot? What was the premise of the show? The

premise of the show was a girl, she is asexual and her trying to fit in into this sex crazed world.

The premise was people liked the premise. They just didn't like the delivery.

Interesting. Yeah. And I feel like sometimes if we realized how big the task at hand was, we would never start. But I'm curious like out

off the back of that,

what are the key takeaways?

Like how have you then come through that project and gone to the next project?

Yeah, no, it's a, it's a fine line between,

not wanting to scare yourself away by how daunting the task is. But, I guess for me personally, I didn't respect the disciplines, the other creative disciplines of lyric writing, dialogue, writing, and story I thought.

I thought, I studied music composition. Surely I'm good at, I'm good at everything else. But yeah, I wasn't she's

lucky we didn't meet 13 years ago. You'd be like, oh, so sing a songwriter, please.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I learned the lesson for me was that each of these creative disciplines, they're an entire world.

And, yeah, they're exciting worlds.

For me personally, I was feeling that I was a little bit bored of, writing dialogue, writing a story. It's just something to get the job done.

yeah, that was a sign that I wasn't that good at it.

I think also too is as we get older, we recognize we're, our strengths. Like perhaps this project could have been an opportunity for you to realize another passion in another avenue, but it's also an opportunity for you go, maybe you didn't like that so much. Maybe next time I'm gonna

Yeah.

Collaborate with somebody else to do that part.

Yeah. Both, yeah. Both my co-writer and I, we've, ever since we've been studying, more about writing, creative writing and writing, writing music theater. So it's been. It's been really exciting to actually dig in and learn about how to do this properly.

Amazing. Oh, I love that. That's not, dampened your creativity in any way, and if anything, it's just made you pivot and learn more. I love that.

Definitely. What a

great lesson.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks

for sharing.

Yeah.

Okay, my next question. I'm curious, what does or what is a object that you can't live without when you are creating, do you have one?

Oh, I don't, I could. I could give a cliche answer and say, my piano, my laptop, my music programs, but everyone needs those.

True.

Yeah. Should I, maybe I should.

No, I think it's a particular question that for some people it will truly be exactly what you said. Piano, a laptop, a.

Yeah. Headphones. Yeah. All those kind of things. All those things. And for others it could be a bit more sentimental. So you don't have any lucky socks that you wear when you do gigs?

I don't, yeah. Knowing me, if I did, I might freak out if I one day forgot them.

I Are you superstitious? I

don't think so.

I don't think so, but I can, sometimes things do get into my head.

Okay.

In that way.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you have like rituals when you go to gigs, like a particular process that you like to follow before you are like in the studio or before you go to gigs?

I will try to limit, limit any, anything that's gonna cause anxiety or stress, a couple of hours before any show or performance.

Yeah. I'll have two coffees straight away every morning.

Nice. Get that coffee into you straight away. Yeah.

I love that. I do that too. To be honest, I'm not good until I've

If you could give one nugget of gold, one piece of advice. To another creative, what would it be?

It is orders of magnitude easier to critique something than it is to create something.

Ooh, okay. Let this sink in. Spell it out for us. Break it apart for us

for sure. It takes years, so many years to be bad at something and so many more years to become good at something.

And along the way you're going to hear, you might hear people say, it's, you are not made for this. You just don't have that natural talent. You're not a writer, you're not a singer. Et cetera. Yeah, don't listen to it. There is, there's a time and place for feedback. Of course. Yeah. People, if you do, if you have created something and you do want feedback, generally yeah, you can.

It's totally valid to get feedback from friends and family. Generally, people are very good at being able to tell when something's not right. But, in saying that if people do tell you. This isn't the right path for you, or you should just throw everything away. Never listen to that.

For example, Fur Elise, it takes about, five or six years of training before someone's ready to learn that song. Even the first page, the main theme that everyone knows, even that, at least two, usually about three years of training before someone's ready to learn that song, learn that page.

Yeah. So just 'cause you can't do it right now doesn't mean you can't do it a bit later. Exactly. You just gotta apply yourself.

Definitely.

So you mentioned just then about obviously getting feedback, which is something in the creative space we get, whether we ask for it or not.

Yes.

But if you could give our listeners, or even for other creatives, like how do you think is a good way for that feedback to come?

Or how do you think the best way as a creative person is to ask for that feedback? From our community and from our listeners.

If I have an idea that's not completely finished, not polished, then I will generally ask, other musicians or other creatives for, feedback or ideas. I'd only ask. Someone who isn't trained, who isn't a creative, for feedback.

Once, yeah, once the product is more polished and pretty close to finished. ' Sometimes people might hear that something's not quite right, but they might think it's, a problem with the content rather than a problem with the delivery.

Now, if you could give another creative, or even someone who wants to do what you do, would you give any advice and recommend any resources that they could develop their creative process with?

A resource I've gotten into in this last year is repurpose. It's for social media. I find with creatives we rely heavily on promoting ourselves.

What it does is. If you post something on one platform, for example, on TikTok, you can set it to automatically post on YouTube shorts automatically on Instagram. Yeah, it does cost a bit, but it's, in my opinion, it's worth it. It gives, frees up a lot of time that you can be using for creating.

Amazing. And how did you find that?

I heard about it through my music business course. It's called Asuria.

How did you find that?

My sister again, the same one.

Oh,

amazing.

Yeah.

And that helps with the financial side of. Yeah. Creation, like creating content, being a teacher, doing gigs, that kind of,

yeah. Finances, promotion, business admin. Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. And is it like a. Night course or like a weekend course. How long does the course go for?

It was a nine month course.

Nine months? Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah,

it's brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah.

Oh, we'll have to give details in the show notes for that course. Sounds like that has been quite helpful for you.

Definitely. It doesn't cost anything either.

Oh really? Yeah.

Really. Oh,

brilliant. We like things that are free. Yeah, we do.

And last but not least, one last question. If you could hear another creative come on this podcast and answer these questions, who would it be and why?

I had love to hear next, a person I've worked with a few times over the years. Her name's Victoria Mantynen. She's an incredible, performer, singer, actor, creator.

She creates her own shows as well. She delivers her shows with, yeah, they're really polished and professional. I'd love to hear more about, what happens behind the scenes.

Cool. And what kind of genre is her craft?

She can do, I'm pretty sure she can do any genre. If you asked her, I'm pretty sure her main genre is like 1940s, 1950s.

Yeah, the kind of. Hollywood from back then.

That's cool. Yeah. Oh, I love that. What a vibe. What a vibe. Yeah.

Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for coming through the Creative door and having this beautiful chat