🎼 TREE 789: A different kind of middle
Thank you to producer, engineer, mixer, musician and FFOREST friend Steven Lee Tracy for an enlightening exploration of the middle! Catch up with posts one, two and three. —Jeff
I can finally acknowledge that I am a professional. I make my living producing and mixing other artist’s music, and I have the pleasure of being paid to give them my opinion. I am also a high school dropout, didn’t go to university, and have never taken a music lessons or received any formal instruction on how to do my job. (BTW, this is not the best recipe for avoiding imposter syndrome.)
That being said, my strength has been my instinct and taste, not my academic background. BUT! Instinct doesn’t go very far when a classically trained musician points to a measure on a music chart with a question. Instinct is not what I was panic/grasping for when I had to fake a phone call and excused myself to watch a quick YouTube tutorial on what a dotted eight note looked like on paper.
The other side of that coin are my trained musician friends that could be hired to sight read anything perfectly on their first try, but struggle to have a potentially non-linear conversation with a recording artist about how a piece of music should sound like autumn. THERE IS NO MUSICAL NOTATION FOR AUTUMN!
My work has been to go back towards the middle and fill the technical gaps that I had missed. I needed to be able to communicate in a language that made sense to those with an academic background in the effort of achieving an artistic response.
Perhaps, their work is to make their way towards the middle and learn to engage their gut and instinct. Perhaps they are on the hunt for what it is that connects certain music to the feelings that many of us have when we hear it.
I’m fairly certain it is a scientific fact that Ella Fitzgerald’s and Louis Armstrong’s version of Autumn in New York sounds more like a season than piece of music.
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I have a friend who speaks Spanish, and her background is Chilean, but she cannot really write it or read it very well. She only lived there a short while and moved to the states when she was quite young so she learned the Spanish language mostly by ear. That is how you are with your music. You can play it and use it, but have not learned the “language”music theory. Some musicians might say you have done it backwards, but as you said you’re intuition is not something you can learn in school; it’s a gift. I play the piano much by ear, although I have a somewhat theory background, but I do not like following music. Every once in a while I do like to tackle a good Bach piece, just to challenge myself, but if someone says, can you do a realistic medley of Elton John‘s greatest hits? I’m ON it…no sheet music. One is not better than the other. I like how you brought up the point that the arts like music can be done in a different way.
Oh yes, uh huh, it’s autumn🍁🎼🎺