Self Sufficient Musician

In just about every other areas of music instruction, they encourage students to analyze, learn and steal from the greats.  Guitar students start out by playing along to their heros.  Singers sing along.  Classical music students analyze Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and likes and learn what stylistic elements identify their compositions as their works.

Rightfully, this is a tricky topic with songwriters, because we’re so afraid of plagiarism.  Even if you don’t end up in court, being accused of plagiarism, being a copycat, is a major insult.  And I’m not advocating that plagiarism is acceptable — it’s not.  But learning from the greats is still the most effective way to learn a craft.  What you do is instead of copying bits of music — though that’s where everyone must start — you analyze songs and learn the system that makes the great songs great.

And this also extends to the art of record producing — great arrangers, engineers and producers are constantly analyzing what they hear in recordings.  Instrumentation, mix, types of reverb used — all that information is available to those who know how to listen.

Once you start analyzing, you’ll discover that each piece of music/recording contains an amazing amount of information.  It’s packed full of techiniques that you can employ into your own songwriting and production. Below let me identify what you can glean from a recording, so that you can start developing the skill of listening critically. (continue reading…)

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?

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