Thelonious Monk’s Tips for Musicians (1960)
openculture.com
openculture.com
Young music students in the US are usually taught in a pre-conservatory style (analogous to how young students are taught in a pre-academic style). This leads to the mental prioritization of playing the correct notes, giving recitals once or twice per season, and following the movements of the ensemble leader. These are all terrible habits if you want a society where lots of people can play songs together and don't take music too seriously.
If you've ever been to a kid's recital and all the pieces sound awful, it's not because they can't play their instruments, it's because their teachers taught them the mental habit of stopping when they made a mistake, and then assigned them pieces at the upper limit of their competence. You must play through mistakes like they're not there, keep the rhythm with your foot and the melody line in your head. Also don't play the hardest stuff you just learned in recitals, play stuff you can do with your eyes closed while holding a conversation.
If you're a hobbyist musician, stop focusing on scales, theory, improvising, and correcting miniscule mistakes and start focusing on keeping perfect time and memorizing a whole shitload of songs. If you look up "Victor Wooten Music Lesson" on YouTube and basically watch every single thing he has to say you'll make more progress on your sound in one year than you did in the previous ten.
Music is meant to be played together, and to play together you need to keep time.
I was at a recital of adult piano students. "Kill me now" was my reaction when one of the students had that habit of stopping and playing every note "right" before continuing.
You are correct that keeping time (what an engineer would call "maintaining a common time base between transmitter and receiver") is necessary to play together with other musicians. But what musicians would call "feel" is what an engineer would call "phase modulation" -- whether a note is ahead of the beat, on the beat, or behind the beat; and by how much. Especially in Black American music (jazz, blues, soul, R&B, and a bunch of pop that's been influenced by those styles), there is a lot of crucial information there beyond what is conveyed in the "gridded" rhythms that are conveyed in Western musical notation. If you are not aware of this, you will still have problems playing with other musicians. From personal experience, it is anxiety-inducing to play with musicians who are ignorant of their beat placement and as a consequence have what an engineer would call "jitter" -- their timekeeping is correct on average, but on each given beat, they might be a little bit ahead or a little bit behind. You can play with a metronome for ages and never realize you're doing this wrong, as you're not consistently rushing or dragging, you're just inconsistent.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I actually lump this in my head under "rhythm" rather than "feel". One of the reasons that black musicians tend to have on-average better <"feel" for you, "rhythm" for me> is that they often have spent a lot of time physically dancing or playing live gigs at church/with their adult friends, and had to learn how to place notes just by hearing other people do it. This is a more effective method for training feel/rhythm than showing someone note durations on a sheet of music and telling them to figure it out themselves.
I think the way to correct the bad "feel" habits you're talking about is to play a lot with talented, on-beat musicians who will correct your playing in rehearsal. They will also assign you parts that you can handle that serve the sound of the band, rather than serving the intentions of the composer per the sheet music. Another issue that young western musicians have is that they most often play with other players at about their skill level, which stops them from being able to quickly learn good habits from better musicians.
Imposed on top of this is a culture of treating it like a contest. This is an easy trap to fall into, because the repertoire is organized by difficulty. But I quickly noticed that the most laid back parents were the ones who were performing musicians themselves. I'm a performing jazz musician so my kids have heard me play plenty of clams on the bandstand without stopping. ;-)
The parents have to get out of the habit of stopping their kids when they make a mistake. I read a comment from a famous teacher, that he doesn't stop his students when they make mistakes, because it kills their flow. Unless the mistake is repetitive. Isolated mistakes are not teachable, repetitive ones are.
My daughter's teacher had a really nice thing, an open recital at his house every Friday evening. Because it was so frequent, kids could just show up and play whatever they were working on.
There are alternatives to traditional classical teaching. In addition to their classical lessons, my family has gotten into fiddling. That's a totally different vibe. We went to a fiddle jam, and recognized one of the fiddlers from the previous night's symphony concert.
Now for my own opinionated opinions, not necessarily contrary to yours: 1) At least in classical and jazz, a player has to get over the hump and learn to play in tune at some point. In any event, intonation problems typically reveal technique problems. 2) "Feel" is not orthogonal to technique. Wherever the note belongs, your brain and body working together have to put it there. And "feel" is anything but absent from classical music -- you just have to listen harder for it because it's more subtle. You can hear it when it's too rigid.
Brilliant life advice in general, keep your head in the game, carry on and maintain the flow.
I learned rhythm so long ago (it was a core part of my elementary school music class before I ever started learning an instrument on my own) that I have no clue how to help him.
If he listens to you really well and wants to collaborate:
1) You can play a lot of rhythm games all the time. Here are a few starter videos with source material to improvise rhythm games off of:
Rhythm Yardstick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sw_trDFJw8
Counting Lesson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dALpbzL7xqo
Counting to Seven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njy7pMVKJ8Q
As a game for when you're waiting around with him in line or in the car or whatever, I also recommend challenging him to try to keep time differently with different limbs--can he tap quarters with left foot, eighths with left hand, halfs with his right foot, and the melody with his right hand? Can he cycle these responsibilities randomly on his limbs?
You can also play songs and challenge him to identify the time signature and count along to it, or sing the songs and clap along at the same time.
2) Listen to a lot of music together, and dance/snap/tap/head nod to the music. Really rhythmic music is good in this case--Irish, Bluegrass, Gospel, R&B, and Motown are typically the most exciting and danceable.
3) Play "call and response" improv games. Sit at the piano with him, play a jazz backing track, and play and sing him simple rhythmic phrases to play back by ear alone. "Quarter Quarter Quarter Dotted-eigth-sixteenth!" etc.
4) Get him drum lessons.
5) If he's totally rhythmically deficient, let him have piano as just a fun random hobby and teach him to fight instead ;)
The most important thing to remember is that a good sense of rhythm can take 5-10 years to really develop. It's more important to attack the same thing every day until it's really mastered than it is to press forward for unearned progress.
I play professionally and still use the metronome every single day. I tell students if I can, they can too. Some may see it as a crutch that prevents one from developing an internal pulse. I disagree; but maybe it’s a fake it ‘til you make it circumstance.
If you set the metronome to accent the downbeat, it is difficult to allow yourself the luxury of stopping and restarting on errors.
The most frequent issue though is starting the learning process faster than you can consciously process the music. When a student asks me about the correct tempo, my answer is always the same: it’s the tempo of perfection. If you play a piece no faster than you can play it perfectly, most things take care of themselves.
I believed in this as well for many years, but I've taken some lessons with famous bluegrass guitarists and all three of them said that you can't really play fast (which in bluegrass is "blistering") unless your body has a feeling for what it's like to be moving quickly at speed without tensing up. All three recommended occasionally taking a swing a tempo that was too fast just to get the feel there.
I've ended up on the following practicing diet, all to metronome:
CYCLE THROUGH:
- 1 rep Slow, No Mistakes (you can think really deliberately about what comes next)
- 1 rep Medium, 1 Mistake Max (you're using mostly muscle memory)
- 1 rep Fast, 3-5 Mistakes Max (focusing on how your body feels moving this quickly without tensing)
Then at the end of the practice session I'll take one or two (or admittedly five or six) inappropriately fast just for fun. I've been informed that this is possibly undoing some of the work I did in the practice session, but I'm playing music to enjoy myself, not to get as good as possible as quickly as possible.
Alternatively, you could always get him drum lessons. This is the meat and potatoes of what a good drum teacher would cover.
https://www.kropinski.com/english/timing-problems-getting-in...
Professionally I’m a collaborative pianist. My job is accompanying pre-college instrumental students in auditions, recitals, master classes. Trust me, there’s a near infinite variety of ways to sound awful, only some of which relate to the mode of practice you describe. (Stopping on mistakes is not an inherently bad thing, but it does require that you consciously reintegrate it, which most students do not do.)
I do agree with the observation that some of these problems relate to playing in isolation. This is true of the vast majority of piano students, most of whom will never in the course of their training play in chamber music settings, or even accompany others. This is a very neglected area of piano pedagogy. It also relates to the great difficulty of most chamber works for piano. There’s practically nothing out there for piano trio (piano, vln, cello), quartet, quintet, etc that’s not a RCM grade 10++ difficulty. By the time students reach this level, the rhythmic/collaborative horse is out of the barn.
You are SO right. I really wish that modern composers would come up with a bunch of chamber stuff that actually sounds good (i.e. like real baroque/classical/romantic music) but isn't incredibly difficult. I have never once played in a chamber ensemble as a pianist, and I was up to about the level of the easier Beethoven sonatas by the time I "quit" and started focusing on guitar. All of my favorite chamber piano pieces (Mendelssohn piano trios, Schubert Trout Quintet, Brandenburgs, etc.) would require 2-5 years of intense daily practice to even play a movement at speed with mistakes.
> Trust me, there’s a near infinite variety of ways to sound awful
Yeah, yeah, okay, fair enough. But I'd bet that the biggest improvement most of them could make right off the bat would be keeping time properly. (Maybe not if you're on a wind instrument and can only honk.)
I can't recommend Victor Wooten enough. His book "The Music Lesson" is also great.
(1) Learning as many songs and standards as is reasonable each week
(2) Focusing on improvising along to my teacher playing the melody on piano. He wouldn't stop unless I asked, so I needed to keep time with him. If I made a mistake, and lost my place, he would keep playing and I'd listen to where he was and jump back in when I found it again
The other big one is singing the lyrics to every song I'm learning, which I really didn't like at first. He told me the story of Ahmad Jamal recalling a time playing with the sax player Ben Webster when Ben just stopped playing a tune: "Why'd you stop Ben?" "I forgot the lyrics!".
> Interviewer: What’s it take to make a great trumpet player?
> Dizzy Gillespie: (long pause) Well, the first thing is to be a master shit detector. Detect what is valid and what is not.
And to the well-known Feynman quote:
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
What Monk is getting at is that when you're woodshedding (practicing by yourself) and trying to build up your playing and improvisation, you have to be your own critic a lot of the time. Are you really playing something hip, or are you playing something corny? Are you swinging? Are you making the chord changes? Are your time and intonation as good as you think? Amongst all the other musicians you hear, live and recorded, are you selecting the influences that are really going to build your playing in the way you want? If you're coming up with ideas on your own, are they really fresh and valid, or are they just the first thing that came to your mind?
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4deSYYzffM by Cab Calloway
Or the lyrics before the solo break in Zappa's "Zomby Woof".
https://fromtheothersideofthemirror.com/2009/04/09/the-origi...
Vout is Slim Gaillard's (very silly) language. Hear it spoken here with Bird and Dizzy, uh I mean Daz McSkiven Vout-o-roonee : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvxpIFZGfAE
> Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play.
I usually just tap my toes quietly within my shoe.
> Don’t play the piano part, I am playing that. Don’t listen to me, I am supposed to be accompanying you!
Sub piano for whatever solo or soli instruments have the spotlight.
> What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.
> A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
> Those pieces were written so as to have something to play & to get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal!
I love seeing articles like this.
Right. The conductor will hate seeing you tap your feet. So just don't let them see.
As a conductor and director in my experience this is the hardest one for many musicians to learn, and it even goes a bit against the “keep the time is #1“ rule.
As accompaniment, harmony, etc you need to understand who the lead is at any given moment and follow it. If you just keep the time robotically and don’t pay any attention you will destroy any possible magic. If you are homophonic harmony but you are out of time with the lead, it won’t be tight and may be bad (unless a loosely hinged style is what you want). The lead may be taking micro beats of time here and there with the line and you’ll want to follow this.
Even this has nuance though. Sometimes the lead might be taking time (or rushing time) and actually expect you to be keeping time, to stay in the pocket, to give him a landing zone to anchor back to once he’s decided he wants to come back in time on a cadence or a downbeat or something. And you need to know that too, as the lead goes in and out of the pocket what is his intention there?
In this way it’s beautiful how the really best music doesn’t require only experienced musicians, or even musicians experienced with each other (understand each others styles, tastes and intentions) but also requires a level of trust between them to be able to leverage those experiences in a special way. And that could be generalized to other areas of work and life
Of all these thoughts, this is the one I have found most applicable, and applicable to many areas of my life:
a lot of what I do as an artist is not for a general audience, but for the people I am working with directly.
When I write songs or come up with a set list, I focus a great deal on what the other musicians will want to do.
The same is the case with my other projects: what kind of projects can I do that are going to attract the kind of talented people with whom I want to work?
Now we have computers and digital audio workstation software, the possibilities are still greater.
What you don’t play can be more important than what you do play.
https://twitter.com/thot_exper1ment/status/14824898101743656... https://twitter.com/thot_exper1ment/status/14824953605849948...
I will still mail out postcard versions of these if people are interested.
good video from adam neely explaining this list
Ring any bells? I had someone tell me that I was completely high and it was Ellison, not Monk, but I cannot confirm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelonious_Monk suggests Monk belonged to this confession: ... during performances: while other musicians continued playing, Monk would stop, stand up, and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano.
It feels good, and I wish more folks felt free to layout for long sections of most songs.