Self Sufficient Musician

I know that among some musicians — particularly rock musicians — it’s glamorous to say that you don’t know much about music theory.  Knowing too much will spoil it, they say.  It ruins the mystery and stifles creativity.

In response to that, let me tell you a little story.  I once heard a man who is a famous speaker designer, well-established in the high-end audio circles.  He said that when he was little, he used to take apart everything: radios, TVs, typewriters.  And tried to put them back together.  Some of them he couldn’t put back, but this activity gave him great insights into how electronics worked.  I don’t know when and what kind of education/training he received, but it sounded like that came after this era of taking things apart.

How We Learn and Understand

Among guitar players, we encourage beginning to intermediate players to learn from their heros.  Copy them, actually — learn to play what they played, by ear, preferably.  We all have to start from imitating — like little kids do with speech — and this gives us insights about how things work, even if they don’t know the system behind it.  Little kids don’t know grammer or spelling, but during the course of acquiring language skills, sooner or later they realize that there are systems and there are rules.  Learning these guidelines help them figure out what to do, for example, when they encounter words that they hadn’t heard before. (continue reading…)