One idea that has been popping around in my head is how important it is to be connected to the music you are making.
I had a jazz guitar teacher once that was trying to impress upon me the importance of singing your guitar lines. He basically said, if you can’t sing it, you aren’t going to be able to play it. That really didn’t sink in fully at the time, but I’ve taken this with me to my flute studies, and I’ve found it so true, not just for knowing what notes to play, but for the accents and the rhythm. It’s become the way I approach learning any new piece of music, and maybe the only way I know to learn a piece of music.
That same jazz guitar teacher also basically said that conversely the key to writing good lines is writing things that can be sung. He said if something can’t be easily sung, people will never remember it, so it won’t be a memorable piece of music. I’m trying to take this more onboard now.
Along those lines, another great piece of advice I got from a composer I took some private lessons with was the importance of never repeating anything “exactly” more than once. He said the second time people hear it they will still connect with it, but by the third time they know what to expect so will be boring and beyond that it’s over.
For electronic groove music that is often repeated, we may not be doing any complicated song structures, but at the very least I think you have to throw your listener some new element or remove an element or something. I think “Same Beat” by the JBs is not just the template for modern groove music, but is a master class in keeping things interesting. I think failing to do this is what makes so much instrumental hip hop and beats music incredibly boring.
The other thing that got me thinking about the “importance of feeling the music you are creating” was in Yusef Lateef’s autobiography that I just finished the other day. He was talking about visiting Nigeria as part of his work to help preserve and document local music, and he was saying that one person he met said his drum teacher wouldn’t let his students touch drums until they learned to dance. It made me think about how many of my favorite hip hop producers were DJs before they started making their own music.
When I think back to how hard I struggled when I got my first groove boxes, I think it all came down to me thinking that somehow it wasn’t important to know anything about “music theory” (not sure that’s the right term here as I’m not talking about it in the purely academic sense) to make electronic/hip hop music. I don’t think I gave a lot of the creators of my favorite music enough credit for how skilled, knowledgeable, and in tune with their music that they were.
