I don't...disagree with you.
I remember Pete Townshend saying that after a while he felt he was in a rut writing on guitar, so he started writing on piano. He didn't know anything about piano and just worked things out himself. Suddenly a new burst of inspiration came! Very exciting. When he went to start recording his new direction in composition, the time came to put a few guitars into the arrangement, whereupon he began to realise that he'd recreated his five favorite tricks from the guitar...on the piano, which was a bit of a let down.
But he perservered.
One day he came up with some breathtakingly new and decidedly different! A breakthrough! Hooray! Some time later he realised that his new original piece of music was...something he'd poached from Keith Jarrett's "Sun Bear Concerts". C'est la vie!
TH
On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 6:38 PM, Rick Walker <
looppool@cruzio.com> wrote:
Travis said,
"I'm not saying you'll transfer the cliches from the old instrument to the new one, but for any instrument there are things that are easy to do, and those are the things that will become the new cliches. They'll just sound different from the ones you've been foisting off on your audience with the old instrument. When people change tunings on a guitar, for instance, they often carry over the same muscle movements and if those movements don't sound "bad" in the new tuning, they keep them in the their "new" playing, sometimes unintentionally."
I hear what you are saying, Travis, but there is also something to be said for
taking on brand new things precisely because you have limited skills on them.
What I mean is that frequently when given incredible restraints in our playing
a very creative musician will figure out all kinds of new things to do based specifically
on that limitation.