I’ve read that the bass rules the chords, and the chords rule the notes, but what to do about the beat? Often, I hear the time differential between what I hear and what I play and what I hear myself playing, and I haven’t entirely figured out how to know if my ears are being hyper-critical, or if I just need to play “ahead of the beat” better. My experience tells me that this “problem” is much like what a golf instructor – I was a qualified one for a number of years – sees in a scratch players’ swing, where the “normal person” only sees a beautiful swing.
My goal when I switched the focus of what I was trying to accomplished was to take the spiritual aspect vision of the game of golf that I had developed into music – which is actually where the vision started anyway, at a sound board long ago. What I “saw” was an electrical process that was a “language”. In golf, the electrical process is between mind & body working to get the ball into the hole from the teeing ground. In that venture, what I noticed was that the mind/body connection was like a psycho-analysis toolkit, partially influenced by the exterior ground – the course. In music, the notes, chords, and “sounds” are also a mind/body connection, with the goal to arrive at the correct “hole” – the precise sound wave length – which is intended as the language of the composition. I began looking for this place as a “instrumental vocal”, where often the rhythm is contained as a series of percussive points which might be a “vocal language” but is just as often a “measured number” language. At the sound board, it was easy enough to “see the cycles” of the frequencies, and to manipulate and mold them to the ear through the various processes that are used on recording and mixing boards and through the techniques of shaping sound, a process that starts at the instruments. If a player is thinking in a language, and knows how to play the right notes, then the language will come out on the other side, theoretically at least.
My problem is that often there is a delay between what I hear being played on a tape or “digital track” and what I hear played and reintroduced back into the mix of the “digital track”. Of course, the easiest way to get around this problem is to play with other people, and to work out with them exactly what it is you are trying to do, what is acceptable and working, and what is not working, and what the limits of the parameters are at each stage of arranging to play or write songs together. Because I understood exactly how far that “concept” could go, I studied music production some before I started taking playing seriously. I hadn’t been in a band since I was fourteen years old …. I had been around bands, and music production, so it wasn’t like the environment was new to me, nor the obstacles. In the end, Producers who can’t show the function wind up unemployed as producers ….
It only took me ten years after I had a clear vision of exactly what it was I needed to explain and how it needed to be explained to be simplified to an extreme before I began feeling confident that even if it was the notorious John Lennon [still here, at least in memory] harping “what are you doing, just tell me what are you trying to do because I’ve got better things to do …”, I would have an answer other than an expletive. “Dig it”, John said ….
