Music is the least well understood of all media.
It is. For sure. And I am not entirely sure why, except to say that it is the most difficult to understand, which is not very illuminating. I don't claim to understand the medium very well as a creator. On the contrary, I often find it frustrating. In particular, this is the case because I do understand music very well in the abstract, and as a listener. I can tell you what works and what doesn't with a high degree of certainty. And I can even tell you why.
But for some reason that doesn't always transfer over to the creative end of things. I mean, I won't ever make big mistakes when making musical art. I am objective enough that I nix those misteps that I do blunder into well before presentation. But that doesn't mean that I can come up with the right alternative to the mistake, you know?
Here are some facts about music:
1. It is all about the song.
This is critically important. Artists in this medium are best served to think of the song only and always. What I mean by this is that the artist's job is to manifest the work as truely as possible. Each work is a distinct individual. Each should have its own identity.
Which means the following:
a.) having a style is bad.
Don't try to develop "your sound." That is foolish. It places the emphasis on the artist and what he does. The emphasis instead should be on the individual entity (the song) that the artist manifests.
b) chops don't matter at all/chops matter a lot.
Technical skill is very important. It is important in that the artist's job is to manifest the truth of the entity that is his song as precisely as possible. However, chops in and of themselves don't matter at all. They should be developed as the need for them arises. When you make music, you should be playing exactly what the truth tells you. Sometimes that will prove technically challenging. When it does, you should develop technically to meet that challenge. Don't bother developing skills in anticipation that truths might come along that require them. Do jam out for kicks and happen to develop skills in the process.
2. With melody, perfection is possible.
A melody is a very specific thing. This is something that it took me years to understand. It is something that I never would have understood at all without Komputadora's insight and his interest in sharing that insight with me. I was always, and will likely always be, attracted to noodling.
My gut instinct is to change things up a lot; to play things differently than I did last time.
No no no!
That urge must be resisted. A melodic phrase, which is a procession of notes played in a specific rythmic pattern, with a specific approach to attack and release, is exactly that. If you have a melodic idea, you must not think of it as something fluid. It is not at all fluid. It is rigidly and precisely exactly what it is and nothing else. Don't noodle. Don't play around with it. Don't doubt it one day and decide to produce "variations" on it. Respect its identity.
Think of the songs you like to listen to and imagine how different they would sound - how much worse - if just one note in the melodic phrase was changed, or if the cadence of the phrase shifted the accent from the downbeat to the offbeat. It would irritate the fuck out of you, if an artist pulled that shit on you. Have you ever listened to a live performance by an artist you like and been mad because they "aren't singing it right"? I bet you have. I know I have. Well, we were right to be mad. The artist wasn't singing it right an shame on him for disrespecting the melody that way.
3. Melody is not the same thing as music.
Melody is like writing. It is either perfect or it is flawed. As artists we aspire towards perfect. Usually we fall at least a little short in a couple of places. And those spots can be pointed at, described, and usually fixed.
For example, take the following sentence:
"I don't know about y'all, but I would like some of those pie shaped pastries over there by the range."
The problem with this sentence is that it mixes voices. It also tries to do too much, and has at least one diction issue.
"I don't know about y'all, but I'm gonna get me some of them apple pies there by the stove," is better.
"I don't know about y'all by I'm gonna git me a coupla dem der suger-treats on dat cooking thing over der in the kitchen, yuk yuk," is way too much.
I can't tell you what perfection is in this example because the answer is contigent on the context of when, where and how the sentence appears. But the bottom line is that in a given context, there is a perfect way to write that sentence. One and only one perfect way to write it.
Melody is the same way as writing. But music is not. Music is melody presented in conjunction with a number of other elements. Production choices are very important and bad ones can kill a track stone dead. Live music is different than recorded music, and is successful or unsuccessful according to different criteria. These criteria include performance and other intangibles like room energy.
Recorded live music is almost always a bad idea as art. However, there are exceptions, and one should always record live performances if one is in the habit of freestyling ideas - musical and/or narrative. It is important to capture inspired ideas. Memory cannot, and should never be, trusted.
4. One can be fully artistically successful with incomplete musical truths.
Very few of my own artistically successful tracks are built on complete musical truths. Complete musical truths are gifts, not creations. They are gifts that are probably fairly common, but it is extrodinarily difficult to develop into someone who is capable of:
1. receiving them in their entirety without interrupting the transfer,
2. recognizing them for what they are,
3. respecting their sanctity,
4. capturing them on media for future reference/develpment, and
5. manifesting them into a useful mortal form.
What is much more common, although still extremely rare, is for artists to successfully capture parts of melodic truths and to construct, by way of a deft understanding of the mortal arts of music, successful tracks.
Here are examples. Please listen to them as, having read this preceeding text, you have an opportunity now to gain enormous insight into this whole business. Listening to these two examples will make what I am saying exceedingly clear, as the differences between these two songs - though each is slow and pretty - is very obvious.
Fully successful track made of incomplete musical truths. - by yours truly. | |
| Fully successful track made of a complete and significant melody - a true song. - by Komputadora |
5. When a melody comes to you, and you think you've heard it before, DO NOT KILL IT.
At some point I will do a column on the subject of pitfalls. There are many reasons why so few people succeed artistically in music, and they deserve a column unto themselves. But this one, a truth that Komputadora stumbled upon years ago, is one that cannot be repeated too much, and that must be highlighted here.
When a melody comes to you, and you think you've heard it before, DO NOT KILL IT, it is your best idea.
People typically kill their best ideas.
Ours is a culture in which there is hardly any more egregious failure than plagarism. Any musician's worst nightmare is to write a song, present it to their friends, and then hear somewhere down the road --- hey! you didn't write that song! That's the same exact melody as America the Beautiful.
Here's some good news. It never happens. I don't know why, but it just doesn't. But what does happen a lot is that someone will tell an artist, "I think I've heard that before but I can't place where exactly." When someone tells you that, don't change your melody. For god's sake don't change it. What they are really telling you is: "Hey! That's a really inpired idea! Can I please hear it again?"
If you take nothing else from this column, please trust me on this point. We owe it to the world to let inpired melodic truths live. We owe the world that because such truths are purely good. Their whole purpose is to move people, to provide joy or consolation or some other deeply felt and worthwhile experience.
And, by decree of the pantheonic gods, you get to take credit for them, even though they are really no more yours than any other truth is yours. You can't own 2+2=4 any more than you can own a melodic phrase.
That's going to do it for today. I left unaddressed here a number of topics, including the aforementioned "pitfalls of music" and the whole subject of "live music." I'll get to them at some point, but not today.
good luck in your artistic endeavors,
keep your eyes and ears pointed towards truth.
mr strauss
**april fools.
