Self Sufficient Musician

One of the major differences between popular music and jazz/classical is the technical expectations of players. With the latter, the technical proficiency is a requirement, a must.  And the bar is set pretty high — high enough to require years of dedicated and effective practicing.  You can’t become a professional by merely being good.  You must be exceptional just to get your foot in the door.

With popular music, though, it’s a different story.  We all know that virtuosity dosen’t necessarily make good music.  As a guitar player who picked up the guitar in late 80’s myself, I used to think that fast playing was a good playing.  It is so far from truth, and thousands of rock guitar god wannabes are the proof.

The fascinating and interesting thing about popular music is that effectiveness is the requirement, not virtuosity.  Most often, technical proficiency is required to be effective, but not necessarily, not always.

So what makes one an effective musician?

The True Goal of Popular Music

In order to figure out what makes one effective, you need to first define what the objectives are.  In the case of popular music, here is the goal:

To convey feelings so that listeners feel what performers are expressing.

There are two parts to this: performers expressing, and listeners feeling.  The two sides both have to do some work, for this goal to be achieved.

But, this is not an equation where both sides are equal.  Most of the time, the performers have to do the majority of lifting.  The more effectively one performs, more emotion-packed that performance becomes.  The stronger the emotion conveyed in the performance, the easier it is for audience to feel that feeling.  A sign of a great musician is when a great percentage of his/her audience can really feel what he/she is putting into the music. True greatness transcends genre and preference — everyone feels the depth of the emotion present in the performance.

The reverse can also happen — for example, a band member can be totally having an off night, simply going through the motions, while the audience may be feeling ecstatic.  This happens because the audience is attaching more feeling to the aural sensations of music than what the musicians are putting out.  This can happen more often if the audience had already attached emotional value to you (perhaps they became fans from your images or past recordings or web sites or through other medium) but you really can’t expect to keep fans just based on their buy-ins.  It’s not impossible, but immensely difficult and unlikely.

The True Goal of Practicing

So here’s the basic rule: unless you achieve enough competency as a performer to put in enough feelings into the performance for the audience to pick out, they will not respond to you.

And therein lies the goal of practicing: to acquire the ability to effectively express feelings through your performance.

Now, for the vast majority of us, this requires technical competency.  It’s hard to convey anything except discomfort if you can’t tune your guitar, strum it in rhythm and do it like you mean business.  You can’t stir up feelings when you’re stuttering through your lines — either in yourself or in the audience.  This is why you need to practice and acquire techniques, so you can not only execute the moves required to play the piece of music, but also say something in doing so.

That said, this ability to express yourself is also greatly tied to the larger you — how confident/comfortable you are in your own skin.

Let’s say you’re taking a speech class.  You learn the mechanics of how to craft a good speech — and you also learn and practice how to deliver one.  But you fundamentally hate getting up in front of people, and even after you repeatedly practice and get the techniques down, you still can’t deliver once on the podium.

This problem has roots in a deeper place.  There are some deep set fears in you that prevents real you to make an appearance in front of people.  It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend practicing.  Unless you do something to deal with this fundamental obstacle, you can’t deliver a soul-stirring speech.

The same thing applies to musicians.  All the practice in the world will do you no good if you can’t build up the confidence to get in front of people and perform. The flip side is that if you are very comfortable and confident in your own skin, you don’t require as much technical proficiency as the next guy — stumbling or awkward, you’ll still manage to say something with what’s in your arsenal.

Imagine that you’re learning new language, and all you know is “hi,” “happy,” and “sad.” And you are asked to say something in front of a huge crowd.  Will you be petrified with fear and awkwardness?  Most of us would be.  But some of us who are more secure than others, will be able to just break through that fear, get up on the podium, and start saying “hi, happy — happy — happy — HAPPYYYYYYYYY!”  If you really come out of your shell and say it with true emotions, it still has the chance to stir the same feelings in those listening to you.

This is what happens to likes of Neil Young and Kurt Cobain.  They are not technical wizards, but they can still say a lot on their guitars.  In fact, a whole genre of music is built around this concept of relying on gut-wrenching emotional display over technical wizardly: blues.  This is the reason why blues guitar players frown on the notion of fast, technical playing, as they see it as a mask, just flashy display to hide your real feelings behind it.

How to Practice So You Can Become Great

So, now that we know what the goal is and what’s required to achieve it, we can figure out how to practice and make all this possible.

Practice so that you increase your confidence as a person and a player.

While that may sound like an abstract goal, it really directs us in certain directions.

For example, some schools of thought emphasize competency with a broad range of material.  Public education is like this.  They like students to become “well-rounded” so there are all kinds of requirements about classes and subjects you have to take, regardless of whether you’re good at them or interested in them, from science to math to history. And they approach their musical instruments the same way, by basically practicing to eliminate weakenesses.  So that you know a little bit of everything.

But is that really helpful in performing?

It may be so in some people, but I tend to think it’s unlikely.  It builds more confidence to start out by focusing on one specific type of material — whether it’d be rock or metal or flamenco — and just really focus on building upon strength, instead of covering up weakness.  It does a tremendous good to one’s confidence to know that there is one type of lick, groove or style that you can handle really, really well.  You may not be able to do much else, but when it comes to your favorite style, you can really shine.

Once you build that specialty, then you can work to expand upon that by branching out.  Your confidence will increase as you become more versatile.

And we all know there is no such thing as the end of the road, being so good that you can’t get better.  Sure, it’s possible to master one type of music.  But music is vast and wide, and you’ll never run out of room to explore, to discover, to learn new things.

Practice and Build Yourself

So the same truth remains.  How do you become a great musician?

Practice, practice, practice.

But now we have a slightly different goal: practice so that you build your confidence. For example, being familiar with the music you’re playing increases your confidence.  Or if you’re improvising, you want to figure out at least the tonal center of the music you’re playing against, so you can hear what notes can work against it.

Competence with your instrument ought to increase your comfort and confidence.  But it also applies to your life as a whole.  You’re performing music.  Are you comfortable playing to people?  Are you secure with yourself to stand in front of an audience? Or pour your all into playing when the tape’s rolling?  If not, you need to put yourself into these situations so that you can become more familiar and comfortable in such environments.

They say that the way to improve fast is to practice smartly, not the number of hours you spend practicing.  By focusing your efforts on confidence-building both on and off the instruments, you’re taking a more direct path to becoming a great musician.  Not everyone is meant to be a virtuoso or prodigy.  But that’s the great thing about popular music — anyone, and I mean even those with only a limited technical ability, can become great.

So there’s no reason to lose hope or hold yourself back.  If music is what you want to make, go practice!

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