who's "she?"
i'm kiddin'. [my mother always had a "thing" about people speaking in the third person when said person was in the same room. ok, ok; so we're not really in the same room.]
The more people package it for you, the less you'll truly process the insights being offered, because you'd merely be consuming those insights, not reaching your OWN insights...
you know, i think this statement, particularly the 'reaching your own' insights thing, more or less crystalizes some of the thoughts i had prior to posting the question.
if ya couldn't tell by now, i have a lot of opinions about a lot of things [ya don't say, smoggy?], and i listen to a fair amount of music. i'm pretty sure i mentioned at the start of the thread that i had arrived at some of my own thoughts/conclusions about certain players [though not all, by any stretch], and i thought that since i'm not a seasoned player, all i was walking around with were opinions, which on some level, didn't seem cool. that's why i thought it seemed like the right thing to do was to 'look to a higher authority,' so to speak.
but now i realize that's more or less what everyone else [musician] is walking around with, too. opinions. just seems some of the same opinions are held by enough people such that they filter down as 'truth.'
since i doubted that i might've reached any 'truth' of my own accord, [kinda like when you're sipping wine next to a connoisseur, and you say it tastes 'peppery' and they praise it as 'dung-like', you feel stupid], it seemed logical to reach out to more 'credentialed' musicians, thinking they might set me straight, coz i thought the generalities i was getting at [eg; when i listen to tlc, i always just
feel 'this is really deep' or 'this is really intuitive'] were kinda wimpy. they seemed rooted in a purely emotional response, not a technical one, and for whatever reason i thought the technical answers were the thing i needed to get at. i guess it's a balance of the two. like tony said, music can transcend a lot of words.
i got a lot out of this thread, though, despite not getting some 'Understanding the Great Drummers for Dumbies' guidebook. if anything, it served to remind me that i'm sort of on the right path, in terms of just listening to what i encounter that moves me. now i gotta get to the airto 'listen and play, listen and play' thing, then go on to transcribe, which is hard for me still with some of the music i like.
but between this and the music theory post, i am totally spent, so... how 'bout a beer?
your treat!
