Re: Feel and Technique, importance?
I'm a little confused here.
Not one person here has said "Technique is more important than feel".
It's fairly obvious that technique is a means to an end. The end being creative expression.
Means and ends are not of the same magnitude of importance, the end is always senior.
What Matt and I have argued is that those players whom we respect as having great "feel" are most often those with stellar technique.
Technique is improved through dedicated practice.
So the argument/discussion could logically evolve into a debate on the value of practice, i.e. "Does practicing technique improve one's feel?"
If not, then what are we discussing? It's painfully obvious that technique for technique's sake is not music. Please don't tell me that's all we can agree on.
Exactly,
Ok cards on the table. Here's my take.
Both of these povs are essentially driven by 2 unwashed majorities of literalists. In all candor, neither group is actually represented on this thread, because both points of view require sincere thought that the majorities are unwilling to devote any kind of time to. Still we are all controlled by the following 2 cliques, and both deter a reasonable dialouge.
1. You have technique clowns who listen to Slipknot day and night,entirely wrapped up in trying to play as fast as possible. Most of these guys are young and inexperienced but in some cases they're dedicated metal guys who claim they have to have those skills to play their music. But most times it's a bunch of 13 year olds trying to play as fast as possible. And again we have already determined that few who do just that kind of playing make it far anyway, past the rare blast beat perfectionist who hooks on with an established metal band. And even then, most of those guys have a difficult time making regular money,
2. Then you have the
feel holy men/women who were those
want to play fast kids back in the day, until an older cooler person told them about feel and economy. When those original 13 year olds became older, they developed a series of catchphrases...the stuff you read on youtube like
Being fastest doesn't mean best etc, etc, because they weren't actually thinkers or
feelers anyway, but wanted to be seen as such, because they were afraid of what the cool guys would think of them. They also weren't so interested in learning to practice correctly, because those same cool guys told them that practice wasn't really necessary, which was often a lie anyway, because the cool guy wanted to be seen as something extra special, and the kid he was yapping all that foolishness to was just naive enough to buy it. Later that
don't need to practice line turns into
don't have time to practice. This kind of
feel guy is the same one who falls over himself trying to get his hands on a copy of
Effortless Mastery, not so much for the actual content, but to find those 2 or 3 sentences that would possibly validate an obvious laziness as a musician. These players are no more serious than the speed kids they make fun of, and their so called
feel more often than is not poor time they claim is intentional. When the other side calls them on it, their reply is to say that the unwashed tech guys aren't sophisticated enough to understand the same feel they have never understood themselves. But their point of view will often register on the Internet because the Internet does love those catch phrases.
Again, I don't think either group has much of a shared identity with the posters on this thread. But we still get drawn in. And interestingly enough, even thinking introspective musicians gravitate to one of these groups over the other out of force of habit.
What makes it interesting on the Internet is the invisibility of the discussion. All groups of varying levels come to the same place in a way that would never happen in a face to face encounter of what are usually either like minds, or like intellect and/or development. This is especially true on a vehicle like Youtube. In other words the people like us and the unwashed majorities are all in the same closed space, and it's usually a mess. These kinds of arrangements also create more divisiveness than you would ever find in real life.
Eventually everything reaches a head and stupid things can occur. For example, both sides of the unwashed majority showed up at the same time here exactly one year ago when I set the trad grip speed record. I have never seen such stupidity in my life. And it came from both sides. But here was the bottom line. Most from those groups simply couldn't play, as in the drums.
They could not play. And yeah, for all the Internet attempts to level the playing field being able to play the instrument needs to account for
something.
Sometimes I think it would be cool for some of us to actually come together in more of a face to face encounter. I wonder how that could be set up. But I doubt it would ever happen.