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Notes from the Field

Goals and Aspirations and Focusing my Perspiration.

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It all begins with goals. It is true what they told you, if you don’t know where you are going it doesn’t matter how you get there.

Classical management tells us that only after establishing a goal, you figure out what you are going to do to further your progress toward your goal, and how you are going measure your progress, etc. Make the goal, make the plan, work the plan, measure the results.

It has taken me a bunch of years to figure out what the heck I am trying to do with my life in the music. I have had healthy ambitions in many directions, and no doubt that some of them could be achieved if I put all my resources in that direction. But the effort/reward equation is different in each direction, and I often wonder where my true north really is.

Additionally, without a goal, it becomes hard for me to know how to feel about myself in relation to someone else’s playing. It is too easy to feel inadequate. Or to decide, perhaps too quickly, that playing like that person was never my goal so I don’t have to feel bad. The need to think harder about this has been impressed on me in finding myself like a marble in a bowl, running around directionless, ever more exhausted, abandoning this to work on that, and abandoning that to work on this, and then finding I am not making progress on either this or that and generally chasing my inabilities all over the compass.

I tried to solve this by saying, “well I just want to get better”. Such a goal has no handles, nowhere to grip. Better at what? To whom? As measured how?

I tried real specific goals, learn this tune or that riff or those chords. But once achieved, I am in a sense, done. With nothing to do. And in the mean time getting there has cost me time and effort. And the question, what the heck did I do that for?

Recently the topic has shown up in the forums, which encourages me to share some of my thoughts on this. This is especially true in that I find myself having approximately none of the goals others have listed, worthy as they are. And also, all of them.



My goal, simply stated, (and I didn't come up with this but learned it from a youngster), my goal is to be more fun to play music with.

Period.

I think it has always been my goal, but I didn’t always know it. Or I thought other things were my goal. But I am pretty clear now. It is achievable to a large extent. Indeed I achieve it to some extent regularly. At the same time it is never entirely achieved. It requires constant work, can always be improved, so I am never stagnant.

To be more fun to play music with.

And, of course, whatever that entails.

I admit it does involve to some extent developing mastery of many of the tasks everyone seems to be mentioning as goals, that is, getting better at sight reading, or playing fast, or playing faster, or playing more expressively, or more accurately or better volume control or tone control or developing a better stage presence, or learning more tunes, or more chords, or working out more imaginative breaks and improvisation: better left hand, better right hand, better coordination between them. None of these are an end in and of itself, however. Not for me. The connections between these tasks and my goal are sometimes obvious and sometimes not. And the extent I work on mastery of these tasks is really dependent on how clearly I can see that mastery will lead to more people wanting to play music with me. As Calvin (no, not that Calvin) said, while playing with a yo-yo, you have to keep in mind who is going to be impressed.

For example:

The better I can play, the more people I will be able to play with. Am I correct in attributing to Jethro Burns the idea that being able to play faster allows you to play with more people? Well it is pretty clear to me. The value of mastering and improving the left hand, the right hand, the tone, the volume, the speed, the control, the accuracy, is that playing better will allow me more access to more musicians. (Playing better is intrinsically more fun, I admit, even if the path used for getting there isn’t always. Thinking of the fun I will have playing with more and more accomplished folks, though, really motivates me to work on things.)

The more tunes I know the more people I will be able to play with. This is not always true. But in the jams I am most accustomed to, knowing their tunes, or versions of their tunes, is an almost instant in, and having tunes to share that are not well known is something a lot of folks really like. I think also the more genres of music to which I can expose myself to and get conversant, the more different kinds of folks I will be able to play with.

I think an ancillary skill here is to be able to be enthusiastic about a tune. To love a tune to the extent that it is evident in my playing of it.

The more interesting my improvisations the more folks take notice and perhaps would like to play with me. I think this is true. If I can interest folks in my playing, and they “get the fever” there is more willingness to join in. (I distinguish between interesting breaks, and brilliant breaks. I don't think brilliance does much for me in terms of making me more fun to play with. More on this later.) An interesting break, that exploits the chord changes and mood changes of the tune, and perhaps makes the tune’s inevitable conclusion a bit more dramatic, I think makes the tune more fun to be part of.

Playing more expressively. I have to clear up a confusion. Playing more expressively is not the same as expressing myself more. The latter I have no interest in. I can tell my whole life story in ten or fifteen minutes and I am done. And my emotions and feelings are not all that profound, or even interesting, and quite frankly, nobody's business. And, most important, why would you be interested in playing with me about my feelings? I haven’t a clue.

But playing the tunes more expressively, expressing better what is in each tune; well yes that is very important. And does attract folks to the music. A good tune well played grabs folks with the power of the tune itself, and musicians often want to jump on board.

The skill of listening is everything. Playing well with others is all about listening. Being able to hear the tune, and hear the chords, is critical to being able to quickly play something useful, if not the tune itself, with the others and in response to the others. Nothing makes a jammer feel more welcome than when others pick up his or her tune and run with it. Or back him or her effectively.

But more than that, being able to hear where a person is at with a tune, so that when you pick it up it doesn’t feel like taking over or taking control, or “this is how it is supposed to go”. Sensitivity to other musicians goes beyond sensitivity to how they play. It is sensitivity to what would make the other musician feel more welcome.


Playing more musically. This is something I am working on. It involves other things besides raw skills development, with the exception maybe of better volume control. The idea, I think, is to make my playing more and more invisible, and make the music more accessible. Like the carving of a duck decoy, where the more you see the duck, the less you see the craftsperson’s effort. If I can get you to hear and appreciate the tune I am playing, what is wonderful about it, what is fun about it, I will, hopefully, attract you to joining me. Certainly the tune has more power to attract you than does my playing of it.

Learning more and better ways to support other's playing is huge. Chords, harmonies, alternative melodies, fun little riffs to stick in here and there, all of this central to my goal. What can I do while you play the melody that makes it more fun for you to play it with me?

On brilliance:

I have little or no interest in performing. Brilliantly or otherwise. I have little or no interest in impressing folks with my playing. Sometimes you have to, in order to “establish your credentials” so to speak, but as a goal, I find brilliant playing to be rather shallow. Getting folks to drop their jaws can be fun, (if you can do it), but I am not sure I can see any connection between that and becoming more fun to play with. If you feel that I am capable of blowing you out of the water, how does that make you want to play with me? Your jaw might be dropped in rapture, or respect, or envy, but rarely would you feel like joining me. And if I am just good enough to engage your competitive instinct and make you want to play to beat me or test your metal against me, well to my thinking we have just destroyed a lot of the fun of music. For me anyway. I would sooner let you beat me and be done with it.

And my realization of this has helped me to prioritize the tunes I chose to work on. There are more than a few tunes which have become showpieces, Rawhide, Brilliancy, and others, which are little more than vehicles to demonstrate your chops. And unless such a tune has a musical value beyond just showcasing finger busters, I don’t bother with it.

Looking at the end game – playing on a stage, joining a band, having a commercial recording, appearing on stage with this person or that person, being able to play absolutely brilliantly, or to be in demand for performances and gigs, to write killer tunes and songs picked up by name performers, to have Marty Stuart like my playing, or any of a number of goals one might have, none of these mean much to me if I have not a mass of friends who enjoy playing with me. And when I look down and see myself working on “Avalon Quickstep” or easy to find minor seventh chords, or new ways to play Snow Deer, or trying to decipher that tango rhythm, I don’t wonder what in the heck am I trying to do.

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Updated Jan-21-2022 at 10:42am by JeffD

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Comments

  1. Gary Ivory's Avatar
    Thanks for writing this, Jeff. I had come to the same conclusion about my own life with the mandolin. I am 67 and started mandolin lessons at 65. And I am clearly a man of finite musical talents. So, having others want me to play with them seemed the perfect goal for me. But you have developed the idea much more fully than I had, and I really appreciate that.
  2. JeffD's Avatar
    I only wish I had figured it out earlier.
  3. catmandu2's Avatar
    If you want to be fun to play with, and sought after--get a doublebass...and a nice bag in which to carry it
  4. JeffD's Avatar
    Yep.
  5. Mark Gunter's Avatar
    That's a thoughtful and thought-provoking exposition, Jeff, and resonates with me on a deep personal level - as I'm sure it does with many of us. A great deal of the fun is in playing with others, and a great deal of my own reasoning for wanting to play well and improvise on any tune known or unknown is to be able to fit in and contribute, playing well with others.