August 11th, 2005
I am the whale that swallows you whole. I am the beast of the ocean that everyone fears and nobody understands. I consume you in your entirety but, after you escape unharmed, you return with your exploding harpoons and your steel cables. You come back to kill me.
-Bobo
* * *
Last night I finally got the bass part recorded to a song that has stuck in my craw for weeks. It's not as though I had any "creative problems" (a term I darkly suspect is used generically to represent all manner of musical mayhem including personality clash, a dearth of ideas, drug overdose, and plain old musical incompetence) but I had ideas in my head that my fingers couldn't follow.
I tried to record this song first about a month ago, and all I did was make myself frustrated and wear the skin off my finger pads. I have guitar calluses on my fingertips, of course, but bass strings appear to rub on different parts of the fingers. If I keep this up I'll have no fingerprints and can finally start my career as a cat-burglar.
Then I tried again two weeks ago, and had much the same results, except that this time I was able to get the ideas recorded—rife with mistakes, after taking what felt like 3000 attempts. Then I had a sore shoulder last week, so even though my fingers were recovered I had to wait until last night. In less than an hour I got it recorded with only one punch-in. And, in fact, I might even try again tonight to see if I can get it in one take. It wasn't a cake-walk; I still had to concentrate, but I got it so much easier than two weeks ago ... but without practicing it.
Hmm ... the one thing that I am reminded of is how we learn through some very mysterious processes that have little to do with what we traditionally think of as practice or training: We seem to learn by osmosis ... or long after the fact in our sleep.
I think it's a strange concept, but I side with what Sir Winston Churchill said: "You can't teach a man anything." Oh, sure, people can learn—provided they want to—but you can never just sit them down and teach them. And it seems that you can even remove the formal part of the education: I didn't even need to be practicing the bass part to learn it! I just had to want to learn it!
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