WARNING TL;DR CONTENT FOLLOWSZaulkin wrote:You don't like music to be tight? I agree that sometimes mistakes can sound really cool and give you ideas of how you may want to change the arrangement of your song though.benderissimo wrote:I have a fundamental problem with music that sounds too perfect. Overproduced, overpracticed, overstudied, overcorrected (whether it be autotuned or edited so that it's in time) music makes me angry. Flaws, rawness and unpredictability are what makes music interesting to me. In the same regard, the first time I play a lick is the time I like it most and the more I try to recapture that by practicing it the more it loses it's soul. My solution is to figure out the essence of the lick (usually two notes that fall on particular beats) and practice working those into whatever else I happen to be playing. That way they come out different every time. What I'm getting at is that the only practice I really do is noodling.
I think your version of 'noodling' is a relaxed way of practicing improvising.. You are learning the guide tones of a chord and how to get to them. Noodling to me has always been mindless, just letting your muscle memory feel around and see what you can do.
Most things lose their brilliance if you practice them, but if you don't practice it, you don't know it.. So I think an extra discipline I have had to learn is how to re-appreciate the beautiful licks I have learnt plenty of times... And it works for me.
I love music to be tight, but there's a threshold where tightness becomes sterility (to my ears anyway). Tightness (to me) isn't about perfection. That threshold has been ignored/forgotten/raped in a lot of what I hear these days. Particularly guilty parties: Pop music, contemporary Metal, contemporary Rap, modern Jazz... I could go on. about 12 years ago I was playing in a jazz/funk band and got really frustrated trying to find inspiring music to listen to along the lines of what I wanted to play. All of the contemporary music I tried to get into (Jamiroquai, The Headhunters reunion album, DIG etc) lacked something that I couldn't quite put my finger on. The old stuff I was listening to from the 60s and 70s had it in abundance (James Brown, Parliament, Sly and the Family Stone, The Headhunters, The Meters etc). Then about 6 years ago I read a book called "The Death of Rhythm and Blues" by Nelson George that obliquely summed it up (albeit in a racially slanted way that I didn't entirely agree with). Basically he talked about how Rhythm and Blues (and by extension Jazz, Funk, Soul, Blues etc) at its core (and inception) is raw, emotional music that is learned and passed on by feeling it and living it. As it became popular (and was accepted by white people
) the Western Music tradition of studying and slavishly practicing and perfecting (borne out of classical music) took over and effectively removed what made this music what it was. I kinda think that's over-dramatising but it rings true in a lot of ways for me. Now I'm not advocating that studying and practicing are bad but for the way I want to be able to play, I don't think they work (at least not by the definitions of them that I know). You're bang on about my version of noodling- I've been a musician for 26 years now (although only 20 years of guitar) and it's taken me a long time to work out a practice regime that works for me. I'd say it's probably only been in the last 4 years. When I'm able to find the time to regularly practice (which isn't as often as I'd like) I like to simply find a groove and improvise around it. When I'm doing it a lot I find it incredibly easy to write and to improvise, when I'm not I tend to fall back on the same licks and patterns that I've wrote learned over the years (not a bad thing really but not as satisfying or exciting). I'm pretty lucky in that I can grab a guitar at work when I'm not busy (although that's been almost not at all over the last month or two).
Playing music by the seat of my pants is what I'm all about.
(Apologies for the rantiness- I feel quite passionately about the lack of rawness and excitement in so much of the music I hear but YMMV IMO etc etc etc ad infinitum)
