audiotthoughts on music

that is something i do all the time, since i wrote my first song – about 18 years ago that is. accidentally i should add.

for some reason, i always write stuff i cannot play or sing – and it sucks. breathing for instance is usually no big deal once you got the basics down. there’s of course – and always will be – songparts that are hard to do, but those are just a few. oddly enough, i managed to write songs, lots of them, that i myself could not breathe at all. how stupid is that?

and although i’m through with this “airless phase”, i still do this with other parts – like drum- or guitarpieces i simply can not play. now, today that shouldn’t be a problem, right? we have computers and such to do this for us. but this is just not how it works, at least for me. even though i do almost everything with the laptop, i still take pride in my music (stop mocking me!) and the things you hear are really played and recorded, not drawn in with some pencil tool. and this is important to give it authenticity, which is one of the most vital things in music – or any art, for that matter. so right now, while working on the second album, i spend a whole lot of time practicing – just to be able to actually play those things i’m making up for myself. it usually is about precision. when i come up with a drumpart, it’s something i am basically able to play – if you can think it, you can play it – so that’s not the problem. same with guitar or bass. the hard part is to play it clean and precisely, to make every hit or stroke count and equally important. to have no fingernoises or rimclicks and so forth. this is the big challenge for me, so it’s writing the stuff and then tracking a really bad version of it, so i can figure it out in detail. and once i know exactly what to play, i practice like crazy to simply not suck too bad on the real track.

and that’s my point. there’s this saying here (no idea if there’s something similar in english…): one grows with his challenges. or as i probably mentioned many times before: practice something you can NOT do, instead of playing something you already own over and over again. so maybe i should feel lucky to have such a freakingly perverted subconscious that throws all those rocks at me during songwriting, because it knows me all too well. but even if this makes me playing better, it still would be nice to come up with something i could do right away every once in a while…