This is one of the several million dollar questions in music, and, in fairness, I can see why so many people are so interested in finding their own voice in music. What interests me more, though, is looking at the process the student is going through to find it. This post is by no means an article outlining the finished or complete process, but there are some things I have noticed many people do that never quite seem to get them where they want to be.
“So what have you done already?” I ask the student. “Well, I spent some time fiddling with the EQ on my amp but that didn’t really work. Then I thought I should come up with some signature licks but they didn’t fit into my band’s songs. So then I bought some new pedals and tried a load of them in different orders and I found something that sounded great on one tune, but as soon as my band wrote another song, the pedal set up sounded terrible, and I don’t understand why. I thought I had found something really unique”. This scenario is very common. Perhaps this is something you have experienced yourself either as a teacher, a performer or an artist. Taking the above scene as an example, it is important to understand that there are a several issues that need to be addressed. The first is this. Just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean that it is a good idea. It might well be unique but that fact doesn’t immediately give it value.
If you take this point outside of music for a moment it becomes very clear. Let’s say that I’m not a musician. I’m in the business of space travel. I work for NASA in the late 1960's and my goal is to (safely) land a small crew of men on the moon. At this point in time there have already been several rockets (both manned and unmanned) that have successfully gone into space but none that have landed on the moon. The head of NASA has been growing increasingly frustrated and has said if anyone can think of a new approach then he’s open to any new, unique and interesting ideas. And it just so happens I have one. So off I go to the head of NASA to pitch it for the next mission. “Sir, I’ve got it. Everyone has been sending up rockets but they can’t get to the moon. Why don’t we just build a massive ladder? Straight from earth to the surface of the moon”. Now, suppose for a moment that this idea would work. Yes it’s something that hasn’t been done before but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. In fact it’s a new but terrible idea. Granted this idea does, in some ways, supply NASA with what they want. They will view the idea as a new and unique way of getting their men to the moon. However, they will also view the idea as something else. Completely implausible. They will only view my idea about the ladder as viable if it is new, unique and genuinely useable. My goal was to find a way to get astronauts to the moon safely and the list of problems that the ladder poses are huge. Maintaining the ladder would be impossible, astronauts would tire and die climbing from one end to the other, and there are also many more issues that could be mentioned here. The point is simple but of great importance. Just because an idea is new and unique doesn’t make it good. My idea about the ladder is new and unique but also stupid, ridiculous and totally implausible for all sorts of reasons.
The moral of the story should be considered on returning back to our musical example. Granted uniqueness and originality are important in music. They always have been. My point is the sound has to be something more than just unique. For it to begin developing toward the level of Pat Metheny, Chopin or Charlie Parker, it has to be something more than unique. It has to be useable and good. Let’s say that my sound is just me cutting every frequency on my amp apart from 9K. I don’t think I have heard a single bass player, past or present, who has that sound. (If you know one please write and tell me). So in that regard, my sound is totally unique. Try this at home. Cut everything apart from 9K (treble) and play something. What you’ll get is a sound unlike any bass player you hear at this moment in time. Next put a drum loop on or play along to one of your favourite songs that you know. Your sound completely disappears. It’s almost like you’re not even playing at all. You get “swallowed” by the other instruments. The sound is unique and new, but not good or useable in the slightest. It’s simply a sound that no other bassist is making. This doesn’t make it a good bass sound. It makes it unique for a clear and definite reason: it sounds uniquely terrible. Would it get me any gigs? No. Sessions? No. Tours? No. This is exactly the situation of inventing the space ladder. Whether I’m spending hours trying different pedal set ups, fiddling with logic presets or boosting and cutting frequencies in an EQ, the end result always seems to be the same. It doesn’t work. So how do you decide on what is good then? This is perhaps the exact moment where many people go wrong.
So many times over the course of my career I have heard people say words like “No one tells me what to do with my music. I don’t listen to what anyone else says about my sound and that makes me a true artist. Other people just don’t get it”. The mistake being made here is assuming that just because this is your sound, only your perspective, thoughts and opinions should shape it. This is a long way from the truth. Look at figures from the past and present who have managed successfully to create their own sound, their own voice in music: Charlie Parker, Michael Brecker, Chris Thile, The Beatles, Chopin, Bill Frisell, Pat Metheny, for example. They (in my opinion) all have two things in common. The first is a unique voice in music. The second is that they have all invested hours upon hours (which is much more accurately described and years upon years) studying the music of other people. Brecker is on record saying “Coltrane was such a tremendous influence….the power of his quartet was one of the reason’s I chose music as my life’s endeavor”. Legend has it that he (along with Dave Leibman) transcribed every single John Coltrane solo in existence. Not only is that an enormous task, it is one that (at the time) involved Brecker giving a huge amount of thought, time and energy to Coltrane’s perspective on playing rather than sticking with only his own. It doesn’t stop there. Check out this interview with Chris Thile. The interview is about his recently released “Bach: Sonatas and Partitas” album. Thile is a musician (like Frisell, Metheny etc) of incredible quality. Many have rightly labelled him a genius. He released records before he was a teenager, he had won his first grammy award by the age of eighteen and he even won the MacArthur award at the age of 31 which made him the youngest MacArthur winner of 2012. If you look back at the last question Laurie Niles asks him in this interview the idea of studying others becomes very clear. “Are you going to do volume II with the remaining three sonatas?” to which Thile replies “Absolutely! Give me another two or three years. I have a lot of outstanding recordings and I certainly want to be able to give them my full attention”. Three years not only studying someone else’s music but also studying other people’s recordings of someone else’s music. This idea of studying other people doesn’t stop here or even in any specific genre. Whether it’s The Beatles having learnt several Chuck Berry songs to record and have in their live repertoire in their early years, Bill Frisell discovering he likes discordant harmonies and going onto transcribe every Thelonius Monk tune or even Chopin, who was a fan of Bellini and Italian opera, incorporating much of the colla voce style of writing and ornate melodic decoration into his compositions, it seems one thing that is essential to creating a unique voice as a musician is actively engaging with a large amount of material that inspires you and has come before you. In other words, to help create your own sound it is of huge importance to study many different perspectives on music, rather than not looking beyond your own.
The penny finally dropped for me on this subject a few years ago. I have been asked several times by other musicians, during car journeys to gigs or during lessons with students, “If you could’ve played on one record out of all the ones in history which would it be?”. My answer always seems to surprise people a little. “It would be Alison Krauss & Union Station’s Live album” is my response. Most people who know about my playing career know that I have done a really wide variety of gigs. I have been in rock bands, jazz groups, ethnic fusion acts, played with orchestras, theatre bands, recorded film music, played for pop artists and experimental groups too, yet it would’ve made me truly happy to be on that record, playing mostly a root and fifth pattern for a few hours. Why? The bass player from this record is called Barry Bales; for the best part of ten years now, I have been listening to his playing on this record, and I always find it so immensely satisfying. So one day I decided I would start transcribing his bass parts. It didn’t take long because, in all honesty, they’re not hugely complicated parts. Harmonically, I was able to understand them very quickly. Most of the time he plays the root and fifth of each chord and connects them together using passing tones or scale runs . Having transcribed and played through several of the songs I thought: “This can’t be right; how can he achieve such a brilliant and characterful sound playing only these notes; there must be something more to this than notes.” So I put my bass away, found my best pair of headphones, turned off my phone, sat down, closed my eyes and listened to the record start to finish. The first song on the album is “Let Me Touch You For Awhile”. Bales enters at 0:41. As soon as he did I was struck harder than ever by how dynamically sensitive his playing is, but also how much he supports every aspect of the music. His time keeping is rock solid. He never rushes or makes the time of each song feel uncomfortable. He never plays over other instruments or obscures the melody to cram in a “signature lick”. In fact it was only after several years of listening to this record that I actually found a moment where he executes a fill. His knowledge of the form of every song, the harmonic structures, the meaning and sentiment behind every song is flawless. And he does it all without any pedals, any plugins, any strange EQ settings. He uses nothing more than an upright bass, standard technique, a standard country bass method for navigating chords (using the root and fifth) and no signature licks. It’s his delivery, his incredible time feel and awareness of dynamics and sentiment that have given him such a unique, good and useable voice within music. In other words, I was able to pinpoint exactly what factors of his playing I felt gave it the character that it has. His list of credits is enormous. This is clearly a musician who has spent years recording, learning, touring, performing and studying music that isn’t his own. I’ve never had the chance to speak with him, but I wouldn’t at all be surprised if he has hundreds of stories about how he learnt to listen one way from this musician and how his playing developed after a time working with that musician. This is a musician with a sound.
After this experience, I have spent many days, months and years studying other musicians of different genres, but I always keep the above points in mind. I have always tried to approach a musician and find (what are often minute) details in their playing or writing that appeal so strongly to me. I have transcribed Pino’s bass lines, Kieth Jarrett’s piano playing, Brecker’s Sax solos and Ari Hest’s incredibly deep song writing, and I’m still going. My goal now is to absorb and engage with as much outside of my own field of vision as possible and so far, I feel it’s working. I’m busier than ever, my phone rings more often than not and people are calling because they want me and what I can bring to their musical situations.
I should add a few disclaimers at this point. What I have discussed above is nothing that is style or genre specific. Nor is this something that comes quickly. I had been listening to that Alison Krauss record for almost seven years before I was able to discover why I loved it so much. And in all honesty, I’m still listening to it because I feel there is still more to come from this recording. The point is this. Acquiring a unique sound takes years. Decades even. Even being able to put my finger on why I like some musicians as much as I do has taken well over a year for me before. Again I have seen (and also been guilty of this myself) musicians before put a record on once, sit in silence whilst they listen, adopt a serious face and then emerge out of the other side of the listening session saying they have cracked it. They get why this particular record is so important to them when, in fact, they haven’t even located the ice berg, never mind scratched its surface. It takes years of honest, hard work. And you will go through patches where you simply can’t find music that will give you such an important moment in your development but that is all part of it. Just keep looking, keep your ears open and really listen to what other people from all areas of music are doing.
It is NEVER too early (or too late!) to start this process. Yes it’s a difficult task, yes if you are anything like me you will find the idea of transcribing music off a record daunting at first. I had no idea where to start but I was given some great advice which is this. The point of all of this is to learn, not to get things right first time. To this day I go back to transcriptions I did years ago and almost every time I think “why did I think that was right?”. Nor is the point to do this at any great speed. Even if you only work out one note a day then that’s fine: all the time you are working on material that will go onto provide you with much more than any pedal, plugins, instrument or amp ever will.
Lastly, remember that this process is hard and it will take time, but you should never be discouraged by that. I’m still very much going through this process, and I’m by no means the finished article, but the point is, I never will be. Anyway, never mind. Perhaps Alison Krauss is planning a new record soon.
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