Re: my future looping....

[Kim Flint <kflint@chromatic.com>]

At 04:35 PM 7/29/98 -0400, Frank Gerace wrote:
>>Dennis Coggia wrote:
>>
>>>I second the motion for listening to even more of other peoples work. 
>>>It's like getting an education which is surely need in the present 
>>state
>of the music world. ...
>>

>>Listening to others music is great but sometimes it can be very
>>difficult to understand how that music was created.  Understanding
>>another persons creative process can provide the kernel for each of us
>>to add another approach to our own process no matter what level we are
>>performing at.
>>
>>
>        Sometimes its just a valuable to have no idea whatsoever about how
>something is created and try to figure out a way to do it yourself.  This
>results in finding a way for you to do something that you have 
>'discovered'.
>you may find out later that your preconceptiuons were in error, but you
>managed to do something creative all the same.  
[...]
>        By not knowing how something is done, you have to use your
>imagination and engage that in conjuction with the toys at your disposal.
[...]
>        So listen to lots of stuff, the more varied the better.  than try 
>to
>do what you think you want to do with your music woithout being concerned
>with how others did their stuff.  

perfect, I was about to say the same thing. Listening to other music is a
great education. But you need to be careful that you don't come away from 
it
with just another set of licks or rules that locks you in. 

For me the best thing to do is to listen to some new sort of music and try
to remember the way the music feels while you listen to it. Then  turn it
off and go do some other thing for a while so that the specifics of it 
leave
your head. Then later, pick up your instrument, and try to create something
that "feels" like whatever you were listening to. Don't recreate the music,
necessarily, but the feeling/atmosphere/whatever about it. This is hard, 
and
you will certainly fail miserably at first. (I always do...)  After a while
though, you will begin to create stuff with that new feeling and begin to
understand how to do that. The important thing is you will be doing it in
your own way, and not through regurgitating someone else's ideas without 
any
real understanding of them. In fact, it's always a good idea to listen to
music that doesn't even include the instrument you normally play so that 
you
are forced to rethink things and adapt things.

The next step is to take that "feel" you've added to your vocabulary, and
bring it back to whatever you were doing before, and mix it all together.
Makes a huge difference....

kim

________________________________________________________
Kim Flint, MTS                 408-752-9284
Chromatic Research             kflint@chromatic.com
http://www.chromatic.com