Musical Stuff

Things have been pretty grim on the music front lately.
Between work and general apathy, it’s been hard to find much in the way of time to work on musical stuff, and when I do, it doesn’t take long for me to run out of ideas.
Assuming I had any in the first place…

I purchased a subscription to the Guitar Port online service the other day – Mostly because this month they have some lessons involving Iron Maiden riffs, but also because it always seemed like a rather good idea.
One of the problems with my guitar playing, is that I simply don’t know how to play anything I didn’t write myself. I never really used to think that was a problem – as I’m only really interested in writing my own music anyway, but on thinking about it lately, it has occurred to me that it’s actually fairly important.
The trouble with doing as I have done so far, and not bothering to learn to play other people’s music, is that it means that the only real source of inspiration for my own music, is my music. I fiddle around a bit, and come up with a riff or pattern of some sort that I like, and then I stick to it, and use it in everything I write. Without infinite time in which to randomly experiment to inject new ideas, I pretty much guarantee that my creativity will wither and die from its own incestuousness.
I’ve had this principle illustrated to me in the reverse a couple of times now – Some time last year I bought a guitar magazine that had Guns ‘n Roses’s version of Knocking of Heaven’s Door in it. Learning to play the first 10 notes of one of the solos did more for my own soloing than pretty much anything else I’ve done since first picking up the guitar.
Another case is the Iron Maiden lessons I mentioned earlier. In that case, it’s not quite as direct. Rather than instantly giving me new ideas I could use in my own music, they gave me some new riffs to practice. The significance of that, is that when I come up with a riff or a chord sequence, or whatever for my own music, it’s usually something that comes pretty naturally – something that is fairly easy for me to play. That makes perfect sense, as when writing via improvisation, you can’t possibly write something you can’t play ;)
So that means that when I practice, my repertoire of stuff to work on, consists almost entirely of things that aren’t any sort of challenge. That’s hardly a recipe for improvement.
The addition of someone else’s riffs to practice gives me patters that are unfamiliar to my fingers, and should mean that the practice is far more productive. The eventual result of that of course, is that when I’m fiddling around and trying to come up with new stuff, that there’ll be a whole range of extra patterns and shapes that feel natural to me, which in turn will allow me to inject something fresh into my music.

I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to figure that out. My Sax teacher pretty much told me that more than 10 years ago – and most of the work he set for me was transcribing and learning other people’s solos.
I guess I thought it was enough to listen to a lot of music. That helps too, but actually trying to play it yourself takes you from being aware of what’s possible, to actually how to achieve it.