As musicians, we’ve all heard or read the expression used before. Whether the topic is talking about reading music notation, music theory, the Nashville Number System, spelling chord names intervallically – whatever the musical topic being discussed – someone will chime in and say “Not enough to hurt my playing!”. Clever retorts aside, the reality is many players don’t identify and practice the nuances of music that could help them sound much better.
SPEAK THE LANGUAGE
Music is a language, and to communicate with other musicians (and connect with a listening audience), your vocabulary should be as broad and as deep as possible. In order to best relate the feelings and emotions of Music, you need lots of adjectives and shades and colors and levels of meaning. To say something simply requires a larger vocabulary, not smaller. Mark Twain’s famous quote: “If I’d had more time, I’d have written you a shorter letter” comes to mind. He meant that given more time to edit his thoughts, his letter would have been shorter in length, more to the point, and more easily understood.
CHANGE THE CONVERSATION
Learning how something works allows you to dig deeper into letting Music flow when asked to create. Internalizing the info when in “study mode” and letting it manifest itself in “creative mode” is the secret of what it means to be a pro. That does not mean playing practice exercises on the bandstand (a too-common occurrence), it means working on the concepts so that your knowledge informs your playing in the moment.
INTERVALLIC OVERDRIVE
Intervals are the letters of the musical alphabet. You need to know them by sight and by sound in order to speak and write the language you are using to communicate with others. For example, knowing what every interval sounds like against the chord you are playing over (and the one coming up in another two beats) gives you complete freedom to make new choices, not repeat old habits. It’s tempting to stop learning when we get our playing to a level that is “good enough”, but that presupposes that our skill at setting levels of what “good enough” actually is are constant… and that our standards can never be raised by hard work and diligent study.
WHAT’S THAT SOUND?
Another example is playing dynamics. You have physical control over the note’s pitch, vibrato, loudness, portamento, softness, darkness, brightness, sharp attack, muted attack, no attack, swells, crescendos, trails, slide-offs, staccato, legato, harp-like spillover notes with no blocking, etc. These are things that can be practiced, once noticed and isolated for study. All of those qualities can determine the amount of emotion your playing can evoke.
SYNTHESIZE ME
Breaking down music to one single pitch and trying everything you can think of to alter it is crucial. Early analog synthesizers took a novel approach to creating basic sounds. They started out with four Waves: Sine, Triangle, Sawtooth, and Pulse (or Square). Sine waves represent the pure tone of a single frequency, which is called the fundamental. The other waveforms have added various levels of harmonics or overtones that take place above the fundamental. They then identified four ways to manipulate the Waves: Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release. They called these control attributes “Envelopes”.
- Attack: Sets the time it takes for the signal to rise from an amplitude of 0 to 100% (full amplitude). (Pick Attack, Volume Swell)
- Decay: Sets the time it takes for the signal to fall from 100% amplitude to the designated sustain level. (Blocked or Unblocked, Legato or Staccato))
- Sustain: Sets the steady amplitude level produced when a key is held down. (The duration of a note, initial picking attack sustain sometimes aided by vibrato or volume pedal increase)
- Release: Sets the time it takes for the sound to decay from the sustain level to an amplitude of 0 when the key is released. (Volume pedal drops, delay pedal settings)
Other controls include “Glissando” (sliding from one note to a higher or lower note with enough time between notes to hear definite pitches in between, and “Portamento”, which is sliding smoothly with no individual notes in between first pitch and destination pitch being heard as distinct notes.
Try to apply and practice mastery of these “note controls” on your guitar.
LISTEN AND LEARN
Spend some time as a harsh critic (but fair) of your own playing every day if possible. Record yourself and listen closely. Try to discern what degree your music is comprised of habits, memorized cliches, boring stock phrases, etc. Some of that is necessary and fine…but see if you can get your “cliche and rote memorization licks” down to 50%, then 25% then 10%. Get an ear training app and use your work commute to tune your ears up to hearing intervals and chord qualities. Here’s a link to a FREE eBook on intervals: Intervals: The Language Of Music.
Keep it up until you’ll never be tempted to say “Not Enough To Hurt My Playing”.
