The Difference Between Difficult and Good
Play something technically hard in a room full of musicians and you'll get a reaction. Nods, a few raised eyebrows, maybe someone asking how you did that with your right hand.
As I've said. Throughout the 90s. I was the international demonstrator for Takamine and Parker guitars. Which meant having to impress Clinics full of other guitar players on a nightly basis.
However I've been blessed to play in a lot of different environments. Play something simple, and true, and exactly right for the moment, in front of a room full of people who don't play an instrument at all, and you'll get something else entirely. Silence. Actual silence, the kind that means something rather than the kind that means nobody's listening.
Musicians are trained, by years of comparing themselves to other musicians, to value difficulty. It's understandable. Difficulty is measurable. You either played the part or you didn't, hit the notes or you didn't, and that gives you something concrete to be proud of. It's also, frankly, a professional habit, because impressing other musicians can get you work.
But listeners, the actual audience the music is supposedly for, are mostly immune to this. They don't know what's difficult. They only know what moves them, or sounds exciting and there's shockingly little correlation between the two. Some of the most technically unremarkable phrases in recorded music are also some of the most loved. Meanwhile plenty of genuinely virtuosic performances leave a room completely cold, admired rather than felt. Back in the day, my drummer in a band called "The Ash can School" Keith Unwin, almost made it his mission to seek out and force feed me music and bands that couldn't play anything technical but that just made the 'Right' noises.
It's still why Elvis Costello's guitar solo on "I Want You" is in my top 10 guitar solos alongside the Bensons, the Vais and the John Goodsalls of this good Earth. Nothing but appropriate feel….
In my Teens I used to think this meant audiences just didn't understand what they were hearing. I don't think that anymore. I think they understand something we sometimes forget while we're busy practising, which is that music was never actually a display of ability in the first place. The ability is just the toolkit. The job was always to say something true with it, and plenty of people manage that with far less toolkit than the rest of us spent years building. Having said that, I still love Dani Rabins rants, starting with this one….
Comments