Realisation

Two nights ago I had a group of four musicians over at my house playing music.  We weren't playing for rehearsal or anything; just fooling around to experiment and stuff.  Even though it wasn't a performance, and it wasn't even a serious interaction, I still came to a musical realization that is definitely worth mentioning here and applicable in some upcoming shows I have...

So, my realization came from the couple hours I spent with these people trying to play the same thing together in order to sound like a band.  I realized that a piece in a song (at it's most basic function) is a combination of rhythm and melody.  A musician must recognize these to play with another, and so it follows that in order for this to happen, the music must be rhythmically and melodically recognizable.

Rhythm: the thing that makes rhythm understandable to people is for it to be guided by a tempo.  The rhythm is a repeating phrase, each with the same number of beats in the tempo.  A rhythmic musical exclamation is known as an accent.  Accents can have different length, or value.  An accent that takes up the entire phrase is a whole note.  One half is a half note, on fourth is a quarter, on and on until it becomes difficult to play that fast.  Most of the time accents are on the tempo beat, but not always.  They can be in between the beats as well.

Melody: melodies that obey the laws of musicality follow chords and are derived from one chord, or a keynote.  A lot of melodies begin on the keynote, and a great number end on them too.  Say for example, a song was played in the keynote of C major.  It would involve combinations of notes in the C major scale- CDEFGABC.  If the song had a chord change- say, G -the melody would have to find it's way to the G note in the C scale and then direct to the G major scale- GABCDEF#G.  This is the logistics anyhow.

So, this pertains to performance in the sense of playing something that a person with no musicality can listen and groove to, just by their natural sense of rhythm and melody.  In my songs, I need to pick out a rhythm and a melody and then stick to them, at least to begin with.  The deviations will come late,r but not until the establishment of the song's source.

Failure

I don't have a video or anything of my performance a couple weeks ago at my church, but if I did I honestly might be too ashamed to show it...  I played a rendition of an old christian hymn 'In Christ There Is No East or West', and the show was undeniably the worst I have ever played in my life.  It was painful to hear.  It was 50 seconds of utter nonsense.  If I had any sense at all, I would have started over.  But I didn't.  I just kept floundering, trying to jump back on the rift.  Unfortunately, I never did, and after about a minute of chord guessing and plowing on with the lyrics, I just gave up.  And walked off the stage.  The audience clapped politely.

So, I guess I should specify exactly how it went down.  You see, the song I had planned was a simplified version based around the chords and melody that was in the hymnbook.  However, I wasn't satisfied with just repeating the song in the version it had always been played before.  I decided to write my own original intro by tweaking the melody a little and changing the chords to suit it.  I mean, this is how songs evolve, and it's not worth playing something everyone has heard before.

\But when it came down to it and I began the song, my voice sang the melody in the book, and my guitar played the chords I tweaked.  This mistake caused my song to train wreck, but instead of stopping the train I just kept driving, playing chords and guessing to get back on the tracks.

This experience was terribly embarrassing and discouraging, but all that means is that I have some major things to learn from it, in order for me to enjoy my shows.  So, even though it is painful to recall and analyze, I did and established the distinct reasons that caused my terrible performance.

• I did not practice the song within a half an hour of the performance.  This is important because it was not ingrained well enough into my mind
• I was too nervous getting up onto the stage.  I was out of breath, my mind was racing.  This was the problem that set all the others into motion.  I realize now how important it is to take a minute to calm yourself into a meditative state before you try to do it.  It is completely a state of mind.

So I suppose what I'm taking away from this terrible performance is the need to master my inner state.  The feelings of the performer shine through to the audience very clearly, and so I need to be happy and enjoying what I am doing in order for the audience to feel the same.