A large part of my journey to becoming a professional musician is becoming a better musician. While I have a degree in music, it’s been 10 years since I’ve been in a setting where the principles of music were drilled into me 40 hours or more a week. For those of us outside of those hallowed halls, we have to make up our own master classes. Rather than taking actual classes though, I’m creating my own to solidify my current skills and learn new ones.
Some people are fine learning through rote memorization (especially those with eidetic memory). Some people need weekly lessons and homework. I learn by doing. Mostly. I still hop on the YouTubes for instruction. For the most part, those instructional videos serve a purpose – working through a point in a project. I like project based learning. I’m not good at isolating and compartmentalizing – I have to make connections right away.
My project is my one-woman tribute show to Minnie Riperton titled: SELFIE – A JOURNEY THROUGH SELF-EXPRESSION, SELF-LOVE AND SELF-ACTUALIZATION: A MINNIE RIPERTON EXPERIENCE. (I like long names…don’t try to change me, Janet!) It’s going be Bette Midler’s Divine Miss M meets Maya Angelou meets experimental theater. There’s a lot to learn in this fire. Let’s break it down.
EAR TRAINING
Goddamn if this wasn’t the worst part of music school ever. I do not have a good ear. For whatever reason, if you play more than four notes I couldn’t tell you what that chord is. I can’t tell you what interval it is between a fourth and a fifth, between a minor sixth and minor seventh. It all sounds the same to me! But I can’t accept that. I have to change that. Having a good ear is fundamental to being a good musician; essential for being a great musician.
For SELFIE, I’m creating my own backing tracks. That’s going to require my listening to each song, ascertaining what each instrument is playing, and recreating/reharmonizing/reimagining it. I’ve already got the chord progressions and piano accompaniment which gets me 25% there; but listening to each part and recreating it is going to get me to 50%.
ARRANGING/ORCHESTRATING
Again, by making my own backing tracks and reimagining them, I have to become well-versed in the art of orchestration and arranging. That is, how all the individual parts of a band work together to create one sound, one feeling. While most musicians need not be proficient in orchestrating – I’m a control freak. I like to be in control of my vision, and that means articulating and creating it my damn self. At some point, I’ll bring in an audio engineer to mix it and master it so it sounds professional. But I want to get it to at least 75%.
PERFORMING
There’s a lot more than just singing a song that goes into a performance, most of which are things you may not notice. For example, transitions. How do I write / perform a transition from a break to a song, from song to song? How do I open? How do I close? What about choreography? What about audience participation? What about lighting? What about graphics or other special effects? What about costumes?
Each of those elements have a pace. Each of those elements have to fall on a beat. Each of those elements requires careful thought.
That’s a lot, right there! You could easily spend years in university learning how to do all of the above in a classroom. But if you have the fundamentals mostly there, sometimes diving right in is the best method to fail and learn.
There are non-music elements, too. I’ll follow up with those next time!