On Sounding Bad, Before Sounding Better: Making Progress as a Musician
It is my belief that we have to allow ourselves to sound bad, in order to sound good.
We must think of sounding bad as part of the process, a step we go through as we move towards the target sound we have in our ears.
This applies to any piece of music, of course, and you have doubtlessly experienced it. No matter how easily music came to you, you did not sound great the first time you played your first tune. And then you worked through it and look at you now. In a larger sense, though, this applies to anything you want to do with music. And the sooner you accept this idea and allow space in your musical life for the “shooting and missing” phase, the sooner you will be sounding good in the ways you’d like to.
For many mandolin players and fiddle players, playing in the key of B is an intimidating hurdle to be crossed at some point. It often comes up as a possible area of study when a musician has already learned a fair number of tunes and has started to sound pretty good. Perhaps they are feeling confident about playing in keys like D, G, and A. Maybe this even includes improvising in those keys.
Then the key of B comes along and tends to unravel any confidence so far accrued. The open strings don't seem as friendly, the intervals feel different, and the fingering shifts needed while changing from the first octave to the second feel entirely new, perhaps because they are. All of these challenges are compounded as you try and improvise in B, too. So, at first, playing in the key of B means sounding bad again. And it’s an unpleasant feeling.
Sounding bad is part of the process.
An important shift happened for me, though, when I came to see these sorts of struggles as part of the process towards my musical goals. Sounding bad at something didn’t have to mean that I was simply a bad musician, period. I was “doing the work”, moving towards the sounds in my head.
Now we are not, of course, talking about sounding bad as something to accept as a permanent state. We are talking about sounding bad, and then examining what happened, learning from what did and did not work. Sounding bad, with self-reflection, say.
Think of cooks who continually remake and adjust the same dish, refining their approach and understanding. Samin Nosrat, famed chef formerly of Chez Panisse and author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, recently said this about her process: “Finally getting a hang of this sheet pan pizza thing after a YEAR of terrible tests.” A year! And she had already been a food professional for many many years.
Reading her sentence does not make me think “Samin is a bad cook”. To me it just shows someone doing the work, allowing for her process to include many trials that don’t end in success. The same is true for all possible areas of study in music.
Embrace improvisation.
Improvisation may be as good of an example as any. Each new key or scale, new fingering option, harmonic progression, change of time signature, and change of feel shifts the landscape on which an improvising musician dances. And each of these sorts of shifts can throw a musician out of their comfort zone, again. Any improviser who you have enjoyed listening to has gone through this process in countless ways.
For musicians who are accustomed to sounding very good, this can be a great barrier to improvisation. But I think of conversation, and the ways it is parallel to musical improvisation: in conversation, we use words (akin to musical notes?), sentences (scales, arpeggios, licks?), and we build on and are responsive to the contributions of the person we are talking with. It’s improvised! We learned to converse by conversing, and by being bad at it. Over time, and over the course of innumerable conversations, we learn to find grace in the medium. It is the same with improvisation.
Tune-writing, composing, or song-writing are also great examples of this same idea. You learn how to do these things by doing them. In the process of writing your first tune you begin to get acquainted with all of the elements: how to make phrases build on each other, how to play with and avoid clichés, how to resolve and avoid-resolving. But the process of writing the first tune, the first song, only sheds so much light on these elements. The first composition will most likely not be a work of brilliance (it wasn’t for me), but it is an important step in working towards music that is full of life. And for any composer that I know, the daily work is not “harvesting brilliant ideas”, channeling divine inspiration. It’s about trying and refining, experimenting and editing, working through all the elements that don’t work.
Sounding bad is part of our relationship with music, and when combined with self-reflection, it can be a very positive part of our musical life. The research and development part of our musical life! It’s part and parcel with risk-taking and musical exploration, which is for me a crucial part of music making. Accepting and even embracing the idea that we will sound bad in our music making as we learn and strive and create is a freeing and crucial concept.
Good luck!
- Joe
***Editor's Note:
I’m fortunate to have called Joe a friend and collaborator for close to 15 years. There’s no mistaking his beautiful tone, melodic, playful, and thoughtful approach to improvising, or his laugh. I’m so grateful to have his voice here on the JwL Blog.
If this is your first time visiting the site, thank you! You might like to read this post in a similar vein: it reminds you to enjoy the process of learning. “It’s okay to be exactly the musician you are right now. Becoming the best musician you can be is a lifelong process. Instead of never feeling satisfied with your efforts, be thankful that the gift of always searching for a better way to hear and turn a phrase can keep you motivated and inspired.”
And if you’re tuned in 5ths, go take a peek at the EBooks: Major and Minor Scales Workbooks are free downloads.
For information on where to find Joe’s music, watch performance videos, take lessons, and more, head to his website.
xoL
