Lessons Learned (Guitar): Take Time to Breathe

 Continuing on with my "lessons learned" comments in regards to songwriting and recording/mixing, I must say that one of the more recent lessons that I've really learned (the hard way, of course) is to, well, not play so much.  I don't mean practice, of course, but I mean don't play constantly when you're playing. In fact, music needs to breathe more often than you'd think, and a quality of a good recording that I never really thought about before was allowing the song to have some space.

This also seems to be a fairly common stumbling block for most musicians, I think.  I know in my last band that this ran rampant between us and, now going through the recording sessions that we did, it's a bit tricky trying to meld everything together because no one ever seems to take a break.  Doing this creates ear fatigue; it also sometimes masks a good performance because you can't actually tell where the good performance is.

For example, when a song starts, don't feel like you have to play at a level of 100%.  Again, I'm not talking about precision or accuracy...I mean don't be strumming or soloing like your life depends upon it.  Instead, work up to it, change it up, and don't be afraid to do simple downward strums as an accent rather than playing each track like a punk rock tune at 180 bpm.  Just like fine wine and cheese need to breathe, I think music does as well.

I've particularly been learning this while working on the new instrumental album, where I'm basically soloing jazz style for quite some time.  I have a terrible tendency to play at 100% right from the start, meaning speed, number of notes, etc.  When I'm doing it, I think it sounds great.  When I play it back later, it sounds like complete garbage because there's just no build-up to anything since I'm already built up from the get go.  It's like a story with no build-up...just an ongoing climax that ends up being anti-climatic since it never actually changes or builds.

You'd think playing less would be easy, right?  It is in technique but trying to get your head around actually doing it for real is much harder than you'd imagine.  It's almost like my brain feels judged by playing too little, and I think that's part of the problem.

So, remember...don't feel ashamed to play an easier riff or simpler strum and instead work up to a more climatic style of playing.  Your recording will thank you later on.