this is one thing i already mentioned in this entry. but it’s so important i thought to write something about it again.

no sweat, this will be a short one. once again it doesn’t really matter if you’re making music yourself or if you’re ‘just’ a listener. in the first case getting into it will make you a much better bandmate and musician as well. if you’re the latter, looking into different instruments, one at a time, makes you able to get the most out of any performance.

just go through your record collection, pick an album and listen closely to one song. then pick one instrument and make the second time you listen to the song about this instrument only. pretend, it’s only this one instrument that plays the song, the others are background noise (not much of a teamwork advice now, is it?). this should help you separate the single sound-sources. if you picked the drums, you can even go further into concentrating only on the hihat for example…

the idea is getting to know the single ‘voices’ that make the choir. did you know that a bell (those big thingies hanging around in churches) does not make the sound you hear? it creates all sorts of frequencies and the mixture of those is interpreted as the tone you think to hear by your brain. so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. and the same goes for music. but to really get into it, understand it and to be able to create it yourself, requires knowing the single parts. i’m not a bell-builder (or however these guys are called) but i’m pretty sure you need to know how that specific sound is achieved in order to design such a thing, especially if there’s more than one bell in the same tower. so get to know the parts to understand how it becomes the whole. think about the decisions the musicians made while recording that song and about how a change in those decisions would affect the song (what would happen if the bassplayer would lay down smooth long notes instead of slapping through that part?). this will teach you a whole lot about music…