Music has taught me a great life lesson and it’s something I would love to share with all of you. I want to start from the beginning.
I’ve been playing guitar for almost 8 years now. I started my senior year in high school. I’ve always been a fan of flashy and busy music, but on the other end of the spectrum I have a love for great ambient music too. Music that has room for thoughts to actually happen. Room for emotion. Room for subtle things to become noticed.
I started writing my own music about a year after I started playing. I was learning chords and licks from music that I listened to, but it wasn’t making me tick. I wanted to make things my own. After taking a few theory classes, my progressions got better. Once I started playing music with other people in a few different bands, I began to understand how our parts are not a whole, but a piece of a whole. That did idea or perception did not come right away.
It has taken me years to learn how to write better. I still am trying to figure that crap out. You can ask almost any composer about what they think about their music and if they are humble about it, they will tell you it’s a constant case of discovery and understanding.
In my early attempts to write music I wanted to be complex. I wanted to be flashy with guitar work and show “how talented I was” – I really suck at guitar. After 2009 I was stuck to write music on my own. I went from a $3000 guitar rig with a full band to playing by myself. That’s when I pulled out the acoustic and just started to write songs with basic chords. I focused on my song structure and less on my own parts.
I had to learn to let the song tell me what it needs and not tell the song what it needs with my guitar parts. Songs need to tell a story. They need an introduction, a body, a climax, a resolution and some sort of ending, even if the ending leaves you wanting more. – I hope that can be the case! No longer was I writing to just show off my talent. I was writing to share my talent through a collective story of sounds. – I know, I probably sound crazy and abstract right now. “Bear” with me.
I began to realize that when I wrote parts to a song, I needed to leave room for the other parts. I needed to “let the song breathe” as my room mate likes to say. Andrew is one awesome musician I am blessed to live with! You need to let the song breathe life into it. If every instrument was doing a solo, it would be some crazy jazz explosion.
Haha.
That’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The common listener wants to hear something that is pleasing. They want to hear something cohesive and dynamic. Each instrument there to supplement the next. It’s not supposed to be the “Jacob Miller Band.” It should be something all on it’s own. Something that showcases the music and not the skills of the musician.
When you hear a great song you hear it as a whole. You can focus on certain instruments at separate parts of a song because they finally have room to breathe.
I couldn’t help, but relate letting a song breathe, like letting your own life breathe.
We take on too many things in life sometimes. Busy is good, but diverted focus is not… That’s jazz explosion busy. So busy that it’s hard to focus on one thing and actually enjoy what we are actually doing. We are doing so many tasks that we even lose track of time. Time we can never get back.
If we can learn to focus on less, we can get a lot more from the few things we commit to.
We get more out of life we invest in less because we are able to get more out of those few things. Investing in few is much easier than spreading yourself thin. The things you focus on should compliment each other. Like a great harmony.
Just like a well written song, we tend to feel more emotion from cohesive movements and subtle changes. We notice what is actually happening. When we have less on our plate, we can notice our mistakes. We have time to analyze them and learn from them. We have room to breathe and enjoy what we are actually doing.
Less is more because the value or the few things we do increases. It’s no longer broken or dispersed. It’s focused and whole hearted. We genuinely care and put time into tasks we have physically have more time for.
Life isn’t about being impressive all the time, it’s about celebrating the time we have to breathe.
That’s because breathing can truly give us a better life.
A better song. A better story.
