You can stare at the Mona Lisa and just feel its power, or you can wonder why she doesn’t have eyebrows and miss the experience.
If you’re constantly getting lost in the details, you might miss out on the enjoyment of things.
Life is like an Impressionist painting: You look too close and it’s just confusing, blurry blobs of paint, all textured and ugly. Stand back and all those unsettling, seemingly random clumps become Monet’s Water Lilies. That’s why I’m a big picture guy … or at least I try to be.
But I’ve noticed something in myself as well as fellow musicians. We tend to look too closely at music and totally miss the big picture. Por ejemplo, I suspect musicians rarely enjoy live music as much as civilians do. Go to a show with non-players. They bob their heads, sway, bounce, dance, then they start shouting and shaking their fists and applauding like their hands are on fire. We stand there mostly stone-faced, watching and making notes in our heads.
We listen critically while the normals are letting music flow over them like a mighty river of groove and emotion. As I write this, I just remembered a college class I took called “Critical Listening,” where the prof put on records and we talked about what we didn’t like about them. (How stupid is college, right?) Maybe I chose the class because it sounded like an easy “A,” but the fact is, musicians do listen critically. I would much rather play music for the normals than for our nerd herd any day.
Ever notice that when another guitar player watches you play, they’ll say, “nice tone” or “cool 335,” but they rarely say anything about the actual notes? I think we musicians tend to be a bit socially awkward by nature, but this is beyond that. I suspect guitar players get caught up focusing on the details and miss the performance.
When I listen, I find myself tracking the groove, wondering if they’re rushing or if my internal clock is dragging. Or I’m counting and subdividing the beat or trying to guess how a guitar part is being played. If it’s a live show, I’m critiquing the mix and studying gear and comparing tones of different instruments. Joe and Jan 12-Pack sitting next to me can’t tell and don’t care if they’re hearing a Les Paul or a Strat—they’re too busy connecting to the Universe through music. Meanwhile, we guitar nerds are wondering what kind of overdrive pedal the guitar player is using.
I know every inch of my main guitars. I love them about as much as one can love an inanimate object without being creepy.
I wasn’t always this way. From 4th grade through 9th, I played in the school orchestra. I loved music but had no real feelings for my personal instrument. Although I played it five days a week, I’m not sure I could’ve picked my violin out of a lineup of 25 violins. It was just a tool for music that I had to be careful with because my parents would be pissed if I broke it.
Now I know every inch of my main guitars. I love them about as much as one can love an inanimate object without being creepy. I’m not as deeply invested emotionally with my amps, pedals, etc., but I waste even more time on them. I’ll have a night open where I’m just going to play guitar but instead spend hours just swapping pedals or tweaking my amp and auditioning different gear rather than actually playing.
These lost evenings are rarely satisfying. Whatever pedal/amp combination I settle on at 1 a.m. never sounds as good to me the next day at the gig. If I’m not actively tweaking my amp and pedals, I’m wondering if I should be. I catch myself on these late-night tone-quest obsessions and I try to talk myself down, thinking “this is ridiculous, just stop, go to bed.” But then I lie down, close my eyes and imagine myself changing pickups in a guitar. My obsessions seem a tad crazy. However, the fact that you’re reading a guitar rag suggests you can relate. Passion makes life worth living, but obsessions aren’t fun. They’re a compulsive preoccupation.
Examine anything critically and you’ll see what’s wrong with it. You can stare at da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and feel its power, or you can wonder why she doesn’t have eyebrows and miss the real experience. Similarly, you can listen to Jimmy Page’s isolated guitar track from “Ramble On” and shake your head at the timing and intonation or you can crank up the full song and be transported to a different world.
I’ve been trying to apply a “Big Picture” mindset to everything. When I look at my life too closely, at times it can easily be mistaken for a train wreck. But when I pull back, I see how all the jagged pieces of this beautiful catastrophe fit together perfectly even as they’re falling apart. It’s miraculous. Focus on the minutia, and you’re missing the best part.
It might not be perfect, but if you give your all you'll get closer to where you want to be.
I heard Matthew McConaughey say in a YouTube clip recently: "Don't half-ass it. If you're going to do something … whatever it is, easy or hard, if you give it your all and you don't half-ass it … whatever the outcome is, at least you're not going to have to wonder, 'What if?'"
McConaughey is so damn handsome and charming that I can't help but want to believe him. Even factoring in my bias, I still must admit he's mostly right. Although I don't regret a lifetime of half-assedly making my bed or brushing my teeth for only 15 seconds per day, I do regret my half-assing in music.
I probably wasted half of my first 10,000 hours of playing music. In the beginning, I was all in, but I was born and raised in sparsely populated Montana, long before the internet (or even cable TV in my home). I didn't know how one went about getting to the next level other than copping what I heard on records. I didn't work at it; I just played. Mostly out of ignorance, I skated rather than pushed myself.
When you are half-assing, you are half-living.
When I moved to Nashville, everybody was light years ahead of me. Getting to that level seemed like something you had to be born with. It felt impossible, like painting like da Vinci, so I just played well enough to get work and continued to half-ass. At gigs, my fingers were moving by rote, more like a typist than a musician. It was a lot of repetition of clichés. Safe and not very satisfying, but when you're making a paycheck touring, it's easy to coast. When I played at home, I wasn't there, either. I'd replay what I already knew, mind drifting, not even really listening. A lot of the time, my fingers were moving silently over an unplugged electric as I mindlessly watched TV. My growth as a musician was slow and stunted, giving me back what little I put in.
I recently demo'd the new Alex Lifeson Epiphone Les Paul Axcess. To prep, I rewatched the documentary, Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. There's a fascinating chapter where Neil Peart discusses going back to school, taking lessons from the Yoda of Drums, Freddie Gruber. Although Peart was the gold standard of rock drumming, routinely winning all the polls for "best drummer," he felt his own playing was too stiff and robotic from all those years of locking with a click. Gruber told Peart, "You can have a beautiful body, but if it's not breathing, it's not alive."
Gruber took Peart back to the basics, which got him thinking of drumming more like a dance: not focusing on the hit, but the motions between the hits. Peart totally retooled, even changing to traditional grip, which had to be incredibly awkward after roughly three decades of using the powerful matched grip. It takes huge cajones and humility to start over, but to do that hard work when you're on top is almost unheard of. The irony is that after all this work, frustration, time, and expense, maybe .001 percent of those who heard Peart could tell any difference. But Peart didn't do it for his audience. He did the work and made sacrifices for himself and for his art.
"The pull of habit is so huge, and that's what makes kids so beautifully creative, is that they don't have any habits, and they don't care if they're any good or not." —Ethan Hawke
The truth is practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Peart was getting farther away from where he wanted to be the longer he played the same way. It reminds me of something Ethan Hawke said in his TED Talk: "The pull of habit is so huge, and that's what makes kids so beautifully creative, is that they don't have any habits, and they don't care if they're any good or not, right? They're not building a sandcastle going, 'I think I'm going to be a really good sandcastle builder.' They just throw themselves at whatever project you put in front of them—dancing, doing a painting, building something: Any opportunity they have, they try to use it to impress upon you their individuality. It's so beautiful."
It feels safer to set limitations and pretend like you don't care. What's the point in climbing Mount Everest when you're safe and warm, staring at your phone from your couch? But half-assing steals the full experience of life. Keep in mind, the full experience always includes frustration, failure, and the torture of self-doubt, but you gain a lot even when you don't succeed. When you dig deeper into anything, hidden layers of subtlety and nuance are revealed to you, and you gain compassion and humility.
As far as I can tell, the meaning of life is just to be alive. When you are half-assing, you are half-living. May we all whole-ass our way through this painfully blissful, miraculous catastrophe, make loud mistakes, and hopefully stick the landing now and then.