The Notes I No Longer Need to Play

When you're starting out on an instrument, more feels like better. More notes, more speed, more everything you can physically cram in, because that's the only measure you've got for whether you're improving.

Don't get me wrong, I'm with Dani Rabin when it comes to blistering fusion solos, but we have to admit that in the main we're only going to impress each other.

Very few young ladies own Allan Holdsworth records…

It takes an embarrassingly long time to work out that this isn't how any of it actually works. That a single, well placed note, sat in the right silence, can do more than a run of forty perfectly executed ones. That leaving space isn't the absence of ability, it's a decision, and usually a harder one to make than filling it. Miles on Kind of Blue, is probably the best example of using space to define a sound.

I think what actually happens, if you keep going long enough, is that expression and activity slowly come apart from each other. When you're young you assume they're the same thing, that playing more is expressing more. Eventually you notice some of your favourite moments in music, other people's and eventually your own, are the ones where almost nothing happens. A held note. A pause exactly one beat longer than you expect. The bit where the player clearly could have gone somewhere flashy and chose not to.

Hence why I always say Andy Latimer from Camel taught me everything about guitar melody.

That choice is usually maturity, as far as I can tell. Not technical maturity, the finger speed stuff usually peaks earlier than people admit, but the other kind. The kind where you stop needing to prove you can and start only doing it because it serves the thing you're actually trying to say.

I still catch myself overplaying sometimes, usually when I'm nervous, or trying to impress someone specific in the room. It's a good tell. When I hear myself adding notes that aren't doing anything, I know exactly what's going on underneath it, and it's rarely about the music. Time to remind myself to grow up… ( Oh but it feels good….:-) )