Play What You Want to Hear (It’s Not Hard)

Imagine you’re sitting in a room, on a chair, facing another person. You’re talking. Back and forth. How much do you think about what you’re going to say before you say it?

Chances are that in a normal, casual conversation, the words just pour out of you.

When I hear people say they need to practice more, my response is always “no you don’t.”

You need to create internal and external conditions that allow music to fall out of you. 

You need to play more, not practice. You need to loosen up so that your ears can listen. 

You need to listen to what you’re playing and develop the self trust to decide if you like it or not. 

You need the loosen up so that you can change what you’re playing in the moment if you don’t like it.

You don’t need to be a master of an instrument.

In fact, knowing too much can be a problem.

• On a piano, for example, you can play what you want to hear while plunking one finger at a time (just hold down the sustain pedal and build a chord one note at a time).
• On a guitar, you can play what you want to hear playing one string with your left hand and hitting any strings you want with your right (just tune the guitar to an open chord that sounds/good interesting to you).
• You can play what you want to hear on drums (or a drum machine) by mashing buttons.

It’s not hard from a technical standpoint to play what you want to hear. It doesn’t take many notes to express something. The challenge usually comes from a mental block. 

If that’s you, try taking pauses. It’s like taking breaths in a conversation. You’re not going to talk and talk and talk and talk without breathing. Take a pause to listen and play only when you have something to say. At some point, you’ll find the music just pours out of you.

How does this work while playing with other people?

In a conversation, it’s a lot more fun when you have someone to talk to. Similarly, it’s a lot more fun to play with other people than it is yourself. But when other people are involved, you have to share the sonic space.

Especially when there’s 5 or more musicians playing at the same time, there’s only so many lines that can sound good at the same time. 

If you think about every beat in a song, which pitches are being played at the moment? How many pitches? Maybe at a given moment, the bassist is playing an E, the singer is singing a G and the guitarist is playing an F# and B. Perfect. Sounds like a nice chord. 4 notes happening at the same time.

But 5 notes happening at once? It’s getting kind of busy. You risk covering up the most important pitch, the melody.  

6 notes and you’re really muddying things up. Let the melody breathe!

At the point 7 notes are being played at once by a group, I’d ask why you’re playing each note. Is the song lacking without every one of those notes? 

In my experience, people play a lot of notes because they want to impress the people listening or prove their technical prowess to themselves.

Technical ability matters, but music is special because of its ability to convey emotion. And a lot of the time, blazing through the scales muddies up that emotion. 

The best songs breathe and have space for the listener to digest the notes that are being playing. 

So you want to play an E chord

Let’s use an example: you want to play an E chord. What type of E? Major, minor? Is the bassist already playing an E? Do you also need to play an E? You want to add a major 3rd to indicate that it’s an E major? Ok. Oh, you want the 5 too? But why? There’s someone else playing that note. But okay, another 5 can’t do much harm. Oh, you want to play octaves? Why? Octaves are cool? Okay. And you want to add in the 7th. Why?

Asking why you’re playing a note is tricky question. There’s no concrete answer you can give besides “it sounds good.” But when I’m eating a plate of spaghetti with the finest bolognese sauce, I’m not going to dilute that sauce with onions and parmesan and red pepper just because those ingredients taste good. I want to appreciate the finest bolognese sauce. There will be other dishes and plenty of room in my stomach all the ingredients I like. But for this particular meal, I want to make space for this fine sauce. 

I’m a pianist with 10 fingers, but I almost never play 10 keys at a time. That sounds exhausting. That sounds like effort. I’m not here to work. I’m here to play.

I’m excited about the prospect of locking into 1 or 2 notes I really like and staying with those for a while. And if I’m compelled to, I’ll add more. If the people I’m playing with operate with the same discernment, chances are we’ll end up with something real nice.

Don’ts

• Don’t need to practice to play; be present to play.
• Don’t play to prove your worth or feel like a rockstar

Do’s

• Play what you want to hear and the rest will take care of itself
• Listen to what you’re playing because you want to hear it
• Change what you’re playing when you want to explore