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Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

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Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#41

Post by dehrmann »

PaulHoule wrote: post #26
munificent wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think so, yes. Back in college, an Anthropology professor told our class "a culture is a set of ready-made solutions to common problems". It's one of the best definitions of anything I've ever heard. In music, I think genre is the same thing. If you sit down try to make "music", you are faced with just an astronomical number of choices to make before you get to a finished compositions. What instrumentation? Acousti…

I was listening to Pink Floyd's Momentary Lapse of Reason just a moment ago and my son asks, "Is that some kind of cheap knockoff of The Wall ?" and I said "It's the same band!" It is very interesting but sometimes sad to see bands constrained by the limits of their own creativity as well as the expectations of their fans. People still pay to hear Stevie Nicks sell Fleetwood Mac songs out of tune, Elton John has been…

A lot of times artists only have so many original, interesting ideas, and they usually use them early in their career and become known for them. Their new songs just aren't as good.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#42

Post by nagonago »

raydiatian wrote: post #25
nagonago wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to this interview, or remember where you saw it? I did some searching but couldn't find it.

https://youtu.be/6v6zReRZgOA Oh how our minds summarize information. It was the Synth player from Pink Floyd, saying that everybody thinks they’ve got a Sgt. Pepper in them.

Thank you for finding it, this is still a great interview! To be fair that does sound like something Eno would say.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#43

Post by fortran77 »

dsclough wrote: post #40
fortran77 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just enjoy the relaxation involved. I can't understand this at all. I've been playing piano for 50+ years. Still practice every day. Play in amateur recitals. It's fun, but hardly relaxing. It's a lot of work, concentration, and study. And as I get older it gets more challenging because of physical limitations (movement, eyesight, hearing) that I have to work around. My fingers don't work like they used to, and s…

Practicing piano and fooling around in a DAW are completely different realms of music related activities. The pianists all know have given me the impression the activity is many more parts stress if the goal is practicing to be able to play a challenging piece, while working in a DAW can be more like splattering paint on a canvas when done like the parent comment describes

Ok. I just expected musicianship to be musicianship regardless of the instrument.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#44

Post by whycombinetor »

fortran77 wrote: post #43
dsclough wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practicing piano and fooling around in a DAW are completely different realms of music related activities. The pianists all know have given me the impression the activity is many more parts stress if the goal is practicing to be able to play a challenging piece, while working in a DAW can be more like splattering paint on a canvas when done like the parent comment describes

Ok. I just expected musicianship to be musicianship regardless of the instrument.

The difference here isn't the instrument, it's musical composition vs performance. You can compose and edit piano works in a DAW, or you can perform those piano works on a piano.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#45

Post by kashunstva »

Pianist here. The essential idea rings true. I do collaborative work, accompanying, coaching, performing with soloists and ensembles. There’s a lot of repertoire in play at any given time. Much of the background work is very much a chore - strategically breaking down the pieces into practiceable chunks, prioritizing, gradually building tempo over days to weeks, and of course building technique that allows the music to flourish.

Many non-musicians are surprised by this, expecting that the finished product to emerge as a result of talent and inspiration. Several years ago I was involved in preparations to host a well-known international artist whose name you would recognize immediately. We were told to block four to six hours per day for her practice time.

The creative process itself must be similar. There’s a quote from Chuck Close, the painter. “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”

What’s equally mysterious is that in this work, a dialect is in play. It is at the same time a chore and all-consuming & gratifying in a “flow” sense. Rarely is it fun.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#46

Post by normcoreashore »

breckinloggins wrote: post #21

This feels like the kind of workflow that would fit me. My problem, though, is the "reviewing material I've already put away" part. I feel like I'm hoarding stuff rather than saving material for reuse. Any advice on how to get out of that rut? I'm thinking I just need to introduce a "review" phase where I habitually go through previous stuff. Oh... in the middle of typing this I realized a big stumbler for me! I don'…

I really feel this. I run a small studio working on my own music and music for friends. The review cycles, listening and modifying is really important for me, incremental progress and all that. I’ve been working on bespoke software to smooth out the process. Audiopile.cloud if you’re interested.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#47

Post by daxfohl »

Frank Herbert said roughly the same thing about writing Dune (from Wikipedia)

> I don't worry about inspiration or anything like that.... later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write."

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#48

Post by kfrzcode »

One of my favorite quotes from Justin Vernon is (paraphrased as) "I wasn't ready to really study music until my 30s" -- not entirely certain of his meaning but it's stuck with me as a reminder that music is and was an omnipresence, so many of my friends and peers would have just considered it another tasking or chore and left their potential inner artistry undiscovered.

Music is a universal language we all can speak, we have to understand how to listen to the muse and translate, like any language, but it's there.

Working on the grammar, lexicon, syntax, and then building interesting vocabulatory repertoire is the "work," but it's hardly work if your only goal is to make something that moves the audience.

I recommend anyone with any passing interest in music or musicianship read Victor Wooten's "The Music Lesson." It's short, but an absolutely beautiful expression of what music is - and why it's more about community and communication and connection than anything else we (humans) have - music and fire are the foundations of humanity.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#49

Post by kfrzcode »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #33

I've been making music for 20 years, just noodling mostly. I've made some tracks that friends of mine love, but I don't want to do it professionally. I just enjoy the relaxation involved. In about 2003 I tried something very similar, except I time boxed a song. I had to spend an hour and a half and each song could only take 15 minutes. That ended up being incredibly fruitful. You don't have time to think, you just go…

I like to meditate behind the fretboard, get into a groove and let my muscle memory take over, while trying to remove my self and be present for the inspiration. Listening intently while not thinking or anticipating is difficult, but it's nice to have my fundamentals to the point where I can do this. It's made my practice routines more rewarding and unlocked me when I hit sort-of ruts in my playing.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician

#50

Post by Nition »

fortran77 wrote: post #37
DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #33

I've been making music for 20 years, just noodling mostly. I've made some tracks that friends of mine love, but I don't want to do it professionally. I just enjoy the relaxation involved. In about 2003 I tried something very similar, except I time boxed a song. I had to spend an hour and a half and each song could only take 15 minutes. That ended up being incredibly fruitful. You don't have time to think, you just go…

> I just enjoy the relaxation involved. I can't understand this at all. I've been playing piano for 50+ years. Still practice every day. Play in amateur recitals. It's fun, but hardly relaxing. It's a lot of work, concentration, and study. And as I get older it gets more challenging because of physical limitations (movement, eyesight, hearing) that I have to work around. My fingers don't work like they used to, and s…

I've been playing piano for ~25 years. I pretty quickly gravitated away from learning existing pieces towards composition and improv. I'm slow at reading sheet music and can't sight read, but for playing new songs I can generally just look at the chords and get something at least close enough to sing over right away. Just messing around making stuff up is a lot more relaxing than learning by rote I think. Of course I'm never going to play Piano Concerto No. 21 so it depends what you want out of life. :)

The best example of "relaxed piano playing" I can think of is actually the old Build Mode music from The Sims[0]. I'm 90% sure that all those piano tracks are just someone messing around improvising over a few simple chords, because it sounds so much like what comes out when I'm doing the same kind of thing.

Now, it's always a little stressful to record that kind of playing because if you play something bad sounding then you'll have to start over (or at least, splice multiple takes together), but if you're just playing the piano for fun, I think it mostly is relaxing.

Have you ever tried just playing some chords in the left hand and kind of letting the right hand do what it feels like?

[0] Here's Build 3 for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gGHQicQUw4

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Edit: Looks like that YouTube video actually links to an article which confirms my old suspicion that it's improv piano:

> "When Russo and Martin couldn't quite capture that wistfulness themselves, they called Burr. A successful jazz pianist in his own right as well as a highly sought-after session musician, he was comfortable working off of Martin's ideas (and, unlike Russo, he was a pianist by trade rather than a saxophonist). Burr says he loved the cut-and-paste style of recording that Martin employed. It was a case, he says, of "just looking at Jerry and asking, 'Does this sound like what you want?'" So, while Russo went away and worked on his pieces only to see them chopped up by Martin, Burr was happy improvising."

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