That's progress: I've reached a point where I can't play any of the parts in the piece I'm trying to record.
That is to say, I can't play them the way I now want to. Welcome to the uncomfortable intersection between expressiveness, artistic intent, technical proficiency, and standard practice.
I wish I had a better term for "Standard Practice." Almost all instrumental practice has a school-trained version. It may be recent, it may take place out of the classroom, but it is there. There are accepted, known ways to do things for every instrument out there and lots of people who will advise you learn to do it that way.
And I don't disagree. For starters, there's idiom. I was just reading a blog post from a cornet player who is learning the shofar (Hebrew ritual rams-horn trumpet). The mouthpiece is small and painful to use. So...change it? The sacred tradition says don't do it. So that's standard practice. Or, in this case, a liturgical tradition. But, hey, if you change that mouthpiece...it doesn't sound like a shofar anymore. So that's idiom.
And that's the point for me. Sounds can come from anything and if it meets your musical needs to pound on the side of a saxophone with a ball-peen hammer then so be it. But if you are coming to that instrument with the desire of a sax riff, well then, you need to play it like a sax is usually played. You need to learn standard practice.
The instruments of the symphony have their long traditions. Instruments like electric guitar are often learned by ear, self-taught. But even then there were players that were respected, a repertoire that was known and quoted, approaches to plucking and fretting that could be gleaned from interviews and videos and discussions long before School of Rock and video lessons and friendly YouTubers showed on the scene. The vibe is different, but the idea is the same; there's a Standard Practice and the beginner is strongly advised to learn it.
And that's the other side of it. Standard Practice got there because it works. There are unique ways of approaching every instrument, and players who have applied them to great success (the story is Harpo Marx fired his classically-trained harp teacher because the teacher kept wanting to learn from the (self-taught) Harpo). In any case, these are approaches that have been hammered out over decades and work for most people.
And yeah -- there is such a thing as outsider art, but the idea that learning the standard way will somehow stifle your creativity and cut off your chance of developing a unique voice is nonsense. Especially since very few of us are really in a place where we want to be totally unique and individual. We want to be in a place where we can speak to an existing audience with existing tastes, and where we can find work among people who speak the language of and expect a proficiency in the standards. Branching off from a position of knowledge is vastly superior to fumbling around trying to discover what has in most cases already been discovered.
All that said, some of us aren't on the Julliard path. Some are making music in our spare time, not in all of our waking hours. And for that the Hacker mentality is worth considering. I'm Theatre, myself, but Theatre, Maker, and Hacker share an emphasis on efficiency. Theatre people will use anything that's cheap and fast as long as it looks good from forty feet away. Hackers will never waste time inventing a wheel when there's a perfectly good wheel.lib for C++. And Makers will leverage new technologies in search of a better, faster....or, to be perfectly honest, more amusing...way to get it done.
And yes that's my general aim as a musician. I'm never going to be great at any instrument, or music in general. I'm unlikely to even be good. I'm too fascinated by the total picture to want to spend all my time polishing my chops on a single instrument, no matter how versatile it is. So my goal is to find every shortcut possible, find ways to get the energy and verite of a real instrument in as little time and money as possible and put it into a recording.
And the piece I'm working on now is where those two ideas collide. I'm trying to write idiomatically; I'm writing not just for the sounds of bass, trumpet, and piano, but something that sounds like it would be played by bass, trumpet, and piano. So it isn't a bass sound. It isn't even a physical instrument making a bass sound. It is an instrumental line using the style and techniques of an (upright) bass.
The trumpet line comes closer to being something I can cheat. The aim -- the idiom -- is a vocal, raspy, dirty sound with a lot of english, a lot of slurs, plunger work and growling and so on. To some extent, the overall artistic intent is achieved regardless of what control I have or don't have over the nuances. (Basically, I can miss a lot of notes and it will probably come across that I intended it that way.)
But only mostly. It can be as dirty as I'd like but to sound like an actual horn part played by a real (experienced) player I also have to -- sometimes -- hit the pitches. Get a clean tone. Be in time. Which is to say, I can fake it 90% of the time but I have to have the technical proficiency to get it right at least some of the time.
And now the piano part is in a similar place. I originally was going to comp some chords, or noodle around doing the kind of improv I used to do back at the common room in the dorms. But the higher artistic goal asks a recognizable style to the piano part -- I'm currently thinking Gospel -- and that takes chops I don't currently have. I can, just barely, write the parts, but I can't get my hands to perform them.
So in the sense that Standard Practice is a good tool to have, this is a good piece for me to be working on. I've reached a point in harmonic development where I'm using chord shorthand instead of dots on a line. I'm back to basics and doing exercises on bass and trumpet.
But I still wish I was recording. Other obligations are crowding up fast and it's getting hard to find that hour of instrument practice every day.
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