Helpful Hints

Professionalism: Advice To Young Musicians

Posted on by abassford

Now that I am a musician of, shall we say, a certain age, I find that younger musicians and artists ask me for advice fairly regularly. I find this a bit puzzling. Though I’ve been playing music for a very long time, and have been successful at it by my own standards, that hasn’t translated into either money or fame to any significant degree. However, I have learned a few things along the way. These are some principles that have worked for me, and I’m sure they will work for you. A lot of them translate well into other areas of life besides music.

  • If you are working for someone else, be a solution, not a problem. Life is full of problems, try not to add to them. Solutions are what people want.
  • As a working musician, you have three basic assets: your reliability, your ability to get along with people, and your playing ability. In that order. Think about it. If you’re the bandleader, do you want the adequate player who’s there at start time, is polite to everybody, and is happy to be there? Or do you want the genius who shows up half an hour late, gets into an argument with someone at the venue, and acts like he’s doing everybody a favor by playing with them? I live and work in New York City. There are a lot of people who can really play here, and more arrive every day. That doesn’t explain why musician A works and musicians B, C, D, and E don’t, even if they play better than A.
  • If you say you are going to do the gig, do the gig. Don’t cancel at the last minute because someone offers you ten dollars more to be somewhere else. (See #1.) I’ve actually seen people do this. A lot of what people hire you for is reliability. So be reliable. Being a reliable person and a great player is a potent combination. You’ll make up the ten bucks down the road.
  • If you know you are going to absolutely hate the gig, don’t take it! Find some other way to make money. You’ll be happier, and so will everyone else. I recently worked with a world class player who repeatedly made it quite obvious to everyone involved, including the leader, that he was only there for the money. His attitude was so bad that he didn’t even want to stick around to fix his parts at a recording session because he had something of his own happening the next day and was worried about getting enough sleep. I’ll play with this guy again if necessary, though I’d be happy never to see him again. But I will never under any circumstances recommend him. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone else who experienced his behavior feels exactly the same way. Most of your work will come from other musicians. So be someone that people are happy to see on the gig.
  • The vast majority of gigs you will do are not glamorous. (I’ve run into some very well-known musicians in some unlikely situations.) Don’t be dark about it. Deal with it. Find something about your playing that you can work on until it’s over. You can always work on your tone and your time, for example, no matter what the gig is.
  • Excellence is a habit. Every time you play with other people, or in front of people, is a chance to advance your career. Give 100% no matter how lame the situation is. Sooner or later someone will notice your work and the lame situations will start to fall away. Be prepared. Know the material and write yourself charts or notes if necessary. Even when I’m working with artists who don’t read music or send charts (which is most of them), they really like it when they realize I have charts. It sends a message that I care about the gig, which I do. It facilitates rehearsals as well.
  • The great percussionist Larry McDonald is the source of this one: “Communication is the currency of the road.” If you are late, communicate! Unless you are dead or in surgery, there is no reason why you can’t tell the bandleader or client that you are running late. They are going to be upset anyway. Providing either inaccurate or no information about your arrival time isn’t going to make that go away. Be honest about when you will get there. If you give them accurate information in a timely manner, they have options. They can start on time without you. They can call a sub. They can talk to the client and renegotiate the start time. If they have no idea where you are, all they can do is stare at their phone. If you communicate, there is a solution. If you don’t communicate, you make the problem worse.  I see people screw this one up all the time, including a lot of pros who should know better.
  • Don’t play too loud for the room, or the gig. I’ve replaced more than one guitarist who made this mistake. Wouldn’t you rather be working and feeling a bit uncomfortable about your sound than sounding great at home with your amp cranked? I would.
  • Show up with your gear working and your instrument properly intonated and set up. Carry spare strings, batteries, a tuner, cables, a mic, pedals, a music stand, a light, and a backup amp. (In a perfect world I’d carry a backup speaker cab too, but that’s not viable for most things in NYC.) The state of my car trunk is a running joke among people who know me, but when something goes wrong, even for somebody else, I often have a solution in there. If you have a MIDI cable for the keyboardist/bandleader, he’going to remember. I have one, even though I don’t use MIDI for anything. (See #1.) Stuff happens, but try to have an answer ready when it does.
  • We all have opinions about other musicians. Be really careful about where and to whom you express them if they are negative. Word travels fast, and it doesn’t help your career. Don’t blow smoke either. If a compliment is insincere, most people can tell. And don’t spread gossip. The world doesn’t need to know everything you know. When in doubt, lay out!
  • Everyone has an ego, even if you don’t see it. (I have to thank the late B. B. King for this valuable insight.) Behave accordingly.
  • If you have to correct someone’s playing or attitude on the gig, do it as discreetly as possible, ideally one on one during a break. (I’ve worked for people who did the exact opposite, over the microphone, making sure everybody within earshot knew there was a problem. It can be very effective, but it leaves scars and it isn’t necessary.)
  • At some point during your career, someone won’t pay you, or will short you on the money. You have every right to be angry about this. But put a time limit on how long you are going to be angry. Then let it go. Anyone who won’t pay a working person for their labor has much worse problems than you do, whether they know it or not. Why let them live inside your head? Don’t work for them again and focus on the positive things you can do to replace the money you should have made. There are always things you can do to get more work. I know people who are consumed with bitterness over what happened to them in 1966. It doesn’t help.
  • Learn how the music business works. Most musicians aren’t interested in business, including me. I find minor sixth chords, for example, much more interesting than publishing deals. But if you don’t learn where the money is, how it flows, and where your place in the chain is, you’ll get screwed a lot more than necessary. Even if you just play in a band or just play for other people, you are in business and are technically a small business yourself. Be able to find your way around the playing field.
  • Good manners are important. I’m constantly amazed by how far “please” and “thank you” go when applied consistently. There are people out there who think that bad manners convey “attitude,” “street cred,” or “artistic integrity” and are somehow romantic and desirable. Whatever. Admittedly there’s a certain appeal about someone who constantly gets away with being an awful human being and even gets rewarded for it. (See Trump, Donald, or Brown, Chris.) We all have moments when we think that would be fun. But to me there’s nothing sadder than an aging bad boy or bad girl who used to be all that and no longer is. They tend not to work very much either. Folks remember.
  • Develop some sort of financial plan. I dedicate different income streams to different ongoing expenses, including retirement. (I learned this trick from the late Coxsone Dodd, reggae producer extraordinaire.) The vast majority of musicians have little or no money for retirement. So you have to set that up yourself. This is what I do, based on my income sources and expenses. Your plan will probably be different depending on your sources of musical income. Cash payments for gigs go into savings for estimated tax. Cash payments for private lessons and songwriting and publishing royalties go into savings too. These income streams are for retirement, so eventually I take them out of savings and put them into better investments when I get a minute. But in the meantime they are earning interest. Payments to PayPal go to equipment purchase and maintenance. CD and digital music sales go into album promotion. Payments by check (usually the largest sums) go into checking for personal expenses.  If you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea to take a little bit of money out of every musical service you get paid for, no matter how small, and put it in an envelope for retirement. Don’t raid the envelope for anything! Saving for retirement is a habit, just like musical excellence. This seems impossible at times, but when you’re my age you’ll be happy you did something.
  • Declare income, take deductions, and pay taxes. Keep records and save receipts (this is much easier now in the digital world, you can photograph things.) Get an accountant that understands the music business to help you. This will actually save you money; they’ll find things to deduct that wouldn’t occur to you. You’ll get some of it back in Social Security when you retire, too. In the immortal words of Copeland Forbes, legendary reggae manager, “You don’t have to tell the government everything. But you must tell them something.” I tell them everything; I sleep better.
  • Keep up with whatever is going on now in music, especially if you hate it. Don’t get stuck in your era. Admittedly this gets harder as you get older. But it really is good for you, particularly if you do session work. And keep practicing!
  • Have your own project happening, no matter how small, at all times. It could be a band, a recording project, a solo artist project, an experimental jam, whatever. Doing your own thing is good for your mental and emotional health. So consistenly dedicate some time to it. Doing your own thing also helps you learn about the business when you try to get it out there.
  • Be honest in your interpersonal relationships outside of music. I prefer monogamy myself. It’s one less thing for you and your partner to sort out when you get home, particularly if you are touring constantly. But that isn’t for everybody. Some people are fueled by the stimulus, conflict, and excitement of sexual adventure. And there are plenty of opportunities for that in the world of music. If fidelity is not for you, don’t lie to yourself or anybody else and pretend that it is.

Howls From The Woodshed #3: Not Only Does It Take Time, It Takes Good Time!

Posted on by abassford

People often say that music consists of three elements: melody, harmony, and rhythm. To these I’d add a fourth element: timbre. The same melodies, harmonies, and rhythms create very different results when played on log drums, for example, versus a string section. Understanding all of these elements is important for the serious musician, but for me, particularly given that I mostly play dance-related music, concerns about rhythm predominate. Rhythm reaches everybody. The lyrics may be in a foreign language but if the rhythm is strong, the music will move you, and make you move yourself. So it’s critical to master rhythm to become a good musician.

Rhythm consists of the distances in time between one sound and the next. (When you record into a computer, you can actually see and measure these distances on the screen. It’s interesting, and sometimes frustrating.) So playing good rhythm means that you control the distance between each note you play to extremely fine tolerances over the entire duration of a piece of music. This is not easy! We’re all imperfect and even great players occasionally falter or miss slightly, particularly when everyone is improvising.

In order to play groove-oriented music well, it’s important to have a strong internal rhythmic clock, and to be able to play your part in an ensemble over long periods of time without slowing down or speeding up. A groove derives its effectiveness from the hypnotic effect of repetition. And the steadier and more accurate the repetitions, the more hypnotic and powerful the groove. In popular music, both in the recording studio and, increasingly, in live settings, musicians often play to a click track, which is an electronically generated beat that is perfectly steady. The listener doesn’t hear the click, but the musicians do, and align their playing with it. But even if you’re not playing to a click, everyone in the band internalizes the tempo of the song from the initial count off, and tries to hold on to it for the duration of the performance.

It’s also important to have control over where you place your part in relation to the other elements of the ensemble. Not only do you need to tightly control the distances between the notes you play, you also have to align your notes in a pleasing manner with all the other musicians who are also doing the same thing. You also have to place your notes in relation to the beat (either the click or your internal clock) in a way that fits the emotional content of the music and makes your part as effective as possible.

To understand this, imagine each beat as a mark on a ruler. Now imagine that you are drawing marks on a paper at each inch. These marks are the notes you play. You can draw the mark a tiny bit to the left of the inch line, directly on top of the inch line, or slightly to the right of the inch line. In each case, if your mark is close enough to the line on the ruler we can see that you meant each beat to be an inch apart and we accept it as such. But if it’s too far away from the ruler line, it looks wrong. The same thing is true with rhythms.

In the case of music, the relationship of each note (mark) to the click has an emotional component, that good musicians use deliberately. If you place your note a tiny bit ahead of the beat (to the left of the inch line), it creates a sense of urgency, tension, and drive. If you place your note exactly in the center of the beat (right on the inch line), it conveys stability and accuracy. If you place your note a bit late (to the right of the inch line), it conveys a feeling of relaxation. Of course, somebody in the group has to hit the beat dead on occasionally in order for these differences to be apparent. And for the music as a whole to feel good, everybody in the group has to be making decisions about how to approach the beat that sound good together.

Different styles of music have different approaches to the beat. Aggressive rock is often ahead of or “on top of” the beat. A lot of Brazilian music tends to be straight down the middle. Older jazz tends to be on the back side of the beat. The younger jazz players play more on top. Set drummers are playing as many as four rhythms at once; a very common approach that often works well is to play the high hat dead on the beat and have the back beat (2 and 4 on the snare drum) a hair behind. You can also take all three approaches in the same musical phrase! As you can imagine, this creates a universe of possibilities when a number of musicians are involved. Some musicians have instantly compatible approaches. Some musicians don’t, and a lot of times when the music doesn’t feel the way it should the problem can be traced to the differences in the way the musicians are approaching the beat.

Some musicians understand how to use this aspect of music instinctively. Others, like me, had to learn how to do it. I’m still learning! My recent work for David Garfield was a case in point. He sent me a song with a reggae flavor to it, with instructions to play what I thought would fit it. The track was recorded to a click (80 beats per minute, a good reggae tempo), and was played by world class studio musicians, none of whom were reggae players.

Musicians like these are masters of their instruments and they play with click tracks and drum machines all the time. Their playing has a lot of feeling and flavor but it’s also compatible with the demands of commercial recording, where everything is highly scrutinized and lots of money is at stake. So they often play right down the center of the beat, as it’s what producers often want. Their parts are super accurate and their deviations ahead of and back of the beat are usually pretty small.

Roots reggae, on the other hand, has a different lean to it. (Contemporary dance hall, on the other hand, is very much on the beat, as it’s mostly done with machines.) The bass line is often back, as is the 2 and 4 on the drums. Sometimes the ska (the piano and rhythm guitar part) is back too, particularly if the bass is more on the beat. It’s more idiosyncratic than pop playing, so it can be a challenge to make the two worlds meet. I came up playing reggae sessions, so I never really noticed that this could be a problem until the late great producer Denny Cordell played me some tracks where he had combined Brazilian musicians with reggae players. The idea sounded great in theory but the tracks were unsatisfying, despite the high quality of the musicians involved. The Brazilians and the Jamaicans had incompatible approaches to the beat. I was amazed when I heard how clearly it didn’t work. Denny was not a musician; he could hear that there was a problem but he didn’t know what it was. When I explained what was going on and why, he decided to shelve the tracks.

David’s track didn’t have this problem. Everybody on it sounded great together. The track just didn’t have a reggae lean to it. Of all the parts, David’s piano playing was the closest to a reggae feel, so I focused on locking with that. After quite a while, I came up with something that felt pretty good, and I decided to examine it on the computer screen to see where the notes were falling. To my surprise, I was just a hair ahead of the click! I was expecting that I’d be a bit behind. I was in an obsessive frame of mind so I thought the part might sound even better if I quantized it. In non-geek terms, this means using the computer program to line your notes up directly on top of the click. I did so, and checked my work. The notes were lined right up on the click. Then I played it back and it didn’t feel good at all. Making the track perfect had taken all the flavor out of it. I hit “undo” and the notes went back to where they had been.

I went through all the tracks very carefully, fixed a few notes, and listened to them with just the click track, muting the other instruments and vocal. They wobbled a tiny bit in relation to the click at times but they felt good together, and the wobbles added interest. I added the rest of the band back in and realized that I was finished. Playing a hair ahead made the rest of the band sound a bit back and drew emphasis to the reggae element that David wanted. I sent the tracks to him and he liked them. Hopefully they make the final mix and you can hear them for yourself.

On the other end of the placement spectrum, later that week later I played bass with the Cannabis Cup Band, a group that does a Bob Marley tribute every year with strict attention to detail. Normally I play guitar with CCB, and it doesn’t require a lot of thought because I know the music well and where the guitar fits. But bass is a different issue on that gig. Family Man Barrett, the bassist with Bob Marley, plays notoriously behind the beat, and the group’s regular bassist, Blacka, is a master of the style. My tendency is to play on top of the beat or slightly ahead, so I was quite nervous about being able to capture his feel.

To my surprise, after a song or two it was fairly easy to place the bass lines where they were supposed to be, way back on the beat, because the rest of the band was playing and singing the songs as they were played on the records. This was further proof, if I needed any, that it’s really critical to make the right choices in rhythmic placement to fit the context in which you appear.

Once your ear gets attuned to the subtleties of what musicians do with rhythmic placement, it makes your listening as well as your playing much more rewarding. This is true regardless of the idiom. It’s as important in classical music as it is in R&B or salsa.

One of the great joys, and frustrations, of music is the fact that it’s infinite. There is always room for improvement, and always new things to learn, even about things you’ve spent your entire career doing. Rhythm in particular is so important.  I make a real point of emphasizing it with my students for this reason. Out of all the things I’ve practiced, I’ve benefitted most professionally from the time and effort I’ve spent studying it. Good time, and good placement, makes everything about the music better.

 

Howls From The Woodshed #1: The Left Hand and The Right Hand Should Be Friends!

Posted on by abassford

There are a blessed few musicians who don’t have to practice much. I work for one: the great Jamaican jazz pianist Monty Alexander. He never warms up. On the few occasions when a piano is available for him backstage, he looks at it and laughs but doesn’t touch it. His wife, a fine musician herself, claims he doesn’t practice much at home either. I don’t know how he manages this, but he does. (Monty’s explanation is that he played long gigs practically every night for decades, so he doesn’t need to practice much. He just has to get his fingers moving once he’s on stage.) For the rest of us, practice is the iceberg of which performance is the tip.

Recently I’ve increased the amount of private teaching I do. I’ve also started playing bass in a group that performs a lot of soca tunes, requiring me to go back into the shed myself. For both these reasons, I’ve started thinking about the practicing process more, and I thought that some of you might enjoy reading about some of the things I’ve discovered recently.

The Left Hand And The Right Hand Should Be Friends

One of the wisest insights I’ve ever read about the guitar is the following (I’m sorry that I can’t give credit where it’s due, I just don’t remember who said it): “Your left hand is what you know. Your right hand is who you are.” It follows that developing as a guitarist requires both increasing your knowledge of music and your understanding of what kind of person you are. Unlike the piano, where both hands are doing different things most of the time, playing the guitar well requires the fretting hand (the left hand if you’re a righty) and the picking hand (the right hand if you’re a righty) to be perfectly synchronized. Most guitarists have more facility with one hand than the other. In my case, my left hand has always been ahead of my right hand even though I’m right-handed. This makes sense on some level because as a person my level of knowledge about music is far ahead of my personal development in some areas. So musically, I spend a lot of time on developing my right hand to try to help it catch up. As to personal development—it’s a secret!

Recently I’ve been working on two separate projects, one for each hand. For the right hand, I’m practicing the chromatic scale, A to A over two octaves, four fingers per string, one finger per fret. I’m using alternate picking and working not on speed, but on making as little extraneous noise with my left hand as possible when shifting. I’ve discovered that for some reason the work I do on minimizing noise, while useful in itself, also seems to increase my speed and facility. My two hands get along better after some time playing chromatic scales. I don’t know why yet. I just know that it works for me.

For my left hand, I’m doing exercises to expand my reach. I start high up on the neck at the twelfth fret, playing a root position major seventh chord on the top four strings. (From bottom to top, I’m playing F A C E, with the E on the twelfth fret). Then I move each finger in turn down a fret, leaving the other fingers where they are. So I play F A C Eb (F7) next. Then I play F A B Eb (F7b5). Then I play F Ab B Eb (F-7b5). Finally I move the F down to E, which gives me E major 7th (E G# B D#), the same chord I started with a fret lower. I continue this down the neck as far as possible. Then I go back to the top and try the same thing, this time moving each finger down two frets, one at a time, while keeping the other fingers in place.

A word of warning: If you haven’t tried anything like this before, go slowly! Unless you have huge hands (mine are of average size), this will hurt a bit. A bit of discomfort is normal, but if it really hurts, stop! Wait until the pain goes away and then try again.

If It Hurts, Why Bother?

I’m glad you asked! The first reason is simple: these chords sound good. I first realized this when I saw a picture of the great guitarist Johnny Smith fingering a major 6th chord in root position. The six fret stretch looked impossible. Why would anyone even try it? There are plenty of ways to play 6th chords on the guitar. But I figured if Johnny could do it, I could do it. So I tried. It took a few minutes and I had to go way up the neck to do it, but I was able to play it. As soon as I heard it, the answer was obvious. It’s beautiful! I was an instant convert.

So the next step was to try the other seventh chords in root position. I got similar results. Hard to play, but worth the effort. But I really got serious about this when I encountered the Barry Harris method of improvisation, which is based on sixth chords of various types and diminished chords. I found that being able to play a sixth chord in root position put diminished chords close at hand, and that I was able to harmonize an entire diatonic scale with sixth and diminished chords. Now I was off. What other chords lay close at hand?

As you may know, lowering any note of a diminished seventh chord one step gives you an inversion of a dominant seventh chord. So when I started lovering notes of diminished seventh chords in root position. I started uncovering piano-like four note chords, along with a system with which to organize them. I love making the guitar as piano-like as possible when I can, so this was a big step toward the goal of harmonic mastery.

All this was very exciting. However, there was a bonus. When I went back to playing single string phrases, all of a sudden I was faster, clearer, and more articulate. How could learning new chords improve my facility with single notes? I don’t know! But I’m going to find out. Perhaps the increased left hand strength I was developing had something to do with it. But my right hand seemed more controlled also. Why? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I’m onto something very useful.

More to come…