Becoming a Multi-Instrumentalist

0:01 What's good, it's Scoobert Doobert here on the microphone, today I want to talk aboutthe essential nature of different instruments, trying to dig into what that instrument means

0:23 to you and how you can best put in the time and effort required to get that out of thatinstrument. Little less oteric, I know, but let's dig into a few examples. The firstone that I approached like this kind of unintentionally was piano.

0:45 So I started on guitar and the guitar kind of journey for me was, you know, pursuing fluency, like I'm trying to master this instrumentnever will completely, but there was a different kind of perspective as to like what I wastrying to bring to the table on that one.

1:05 When I was learning keys in high school, I was going into the band room and during different kind of breaks and stuff like that, therewas like a little kind of piano area in a semi soundproof room that I was able to justkind of go plunk around. So nobody would listen to me as trying to figure it out.

1:23 Watchingsome of my other friends, played piano, the things that I started to notice was the breakdown between the two hands and learning how to do arpeggiation between the two hands. So breakingup chords in the left hand, the bass part, doing the root, the fifth, the root again.

1:40 So leavingkind of the color tones out and instead playing the meteor stuff, the stuff that you play on bass guitar, but I didn't really know that yet down on the left hand and then playingmore chords and melodies with the right. And that was kind of the magic thing that waslike, oh, okay, now it kind of sound like a pianist.

1:58 So if I just practice that essential thing and breaking them down between the two hands, now it all all of a sudden is startingto fill out. And so that was my first little taste of that. And then when I started teachingguitar to people, I found that, you know, bar chords was the linchpin.

2:16 When she figuredout how to make a chord using your pointer finger and you can slide it up or down the neck, that opened up the whole thing.

2:26 And then when I studied guitar like more deeply,I applied that same idea to triads and diads, these little mini chords up and down the neck.And I found that once I learned where these chord shapes were, you started to see more of these shapes around.

2:45 And that made it easier to solo and to write chords and to think of chords not just as like a C chord or a G chord, but instead all of the notes and the waythey all interact as colors, as shapes, it's kind of like breaking down that initiallike way that things are being taught into a way that makes sense to you. So then youdon't stay in the box.

3:07 You can kind of get out of that and you can start coloring your own lines. And so that's what I'm trying to get at is like, you know, each of these instrumentshas a different unlocking point. And I'm not saying that mine is the same for everybodyelse's.

3:25 But a good example for me is, you know, bass guitar, where just as I was saying with the left hand on the keyboard, the same kind of basic idea, basic idea on basswas figuring out how to groove in between arpeggiations that didn't, you know, ring out in weirdways. And so root fifth and root.

3:47 But the real linchpin for me was the attack and the release point. So the way that the bass guitar is treated by a lot of beginning players is to thinkof it more like a guitar, but the way that the expert players think of it, it's like a drum kit.

4:07 And that's why I like playing it so much because it feels like playing drums to me. And I'm notvery good at drums, but I'm okay with bass. So it's like, I get to kind of do this thing that Iwish I was a drummer. I've always wished I was a drummer, but I just haven't done it.And someday I will deeper. I just pots, you know, I haven't snare and so I'm playing.

4:25 I'm actually playing on a bunch of the songs that are about to come out. They have me actually playingdrums. Yes, they are edited and stuff like that, but they're my ideas and they're my feel andthey're all these little things. Might take me 50 takes, but I'll get it. And, you know,recording is a great way to practice.

4:40 But anyway, the transition from bass from looking at it from the guitar perspective to looking at it from the drums perspective was thinking like, okay,when a kick drum hits, you want the bass to either hit with it or slightly behind it. Sometimesahead, but usually not.

4:58 And to create this sense of pocket with the sense of like, you know, this, the, you have connected the musical, the note, the frequency with the impact of the kick drum.So then now the kick drum and the bass are glued together. And then the other natural places tolook, you know, high hats, narratives, all this kind of stuff.

5:18 Trying to find different areas that the bass can converse with the drums. And really what you're doing, there's like this scene,I think it was one of the Marvel movies, like Captain America, is grabs a helicopter

5:35 from the like bottom landing strip thing and then grabs a building. And using a superhumanstrength pulls the two together so the helicopter can't take off. And that's sometimes how I feelbass guitar can be, where you're grabbing the, you know, harmonic and melodic sense of therest of the arrangement and the drums and gluing them together.

5:56 But the magic of that instrument is not necessarily the notes that you're playing. It's important, of course, but it's where you'replaying them and not just where you're playing them, how you're beginning and ending them, the attackand the release.

6:10 That was the light bulb moment for me because sometimes you want to like have the instrument cut off right before the snare drum. And sometimes you want to have like a little ghost note,little right with the snare drum. And it creates a very different groove.

6:24 But that little nuance,that allows me to now like play one note on bass and groove hard because I'm thinking about the attack and the release. That was as important as bar chords or triads or the, you know, left handright hand interaction on keyboards. Another super good example is drums, hi hat specifically,is I was trying to think a lot about groove.

6:48 This is especially when I was first programming, which was mostly for this project. And figuring out how to make drums in the box in the recordingequipment that sounded like I had in my head, but didn't have to play it because it wasn't physicallycapable.

7:05 And so I listened to a lot of drums, I talked to my drummer friends, and the magic is not necessarily in the placement, you can place everything just robotically on a grid. The groove comesfrom variation. And it can be variation in placement, but more often it's variation in tone anddynamic. So if you play, you know, like the like a hat, hat, hard and then soft.

7:30 I don't know if you can hear that. That's the, that's the groove is that deck, deck, deck, deck, deck, that's what ends upcreating that groove. Same thing with like a shaker. It's the back and forth that ends upcreating the groove. And then also like on this instrument, perfect example is how tight you're holding

7:52 the egg shaker creates a very different timbre, a very different tone. And so you can play withthat when you're actually playing a part, you know, whatever I'm not playing very well, but that'slike that's the concept, you know, to find the like, it's almost like the accent of the musical instrument,

8:14 you know, put down the shaker now. But it's like the accent of speaking in this different dialect,right? I feel like very similarly with ukulele, it's in the right hand. It's in the up and downthe way that you're interacting with that instrument.

8:30 On acoustic guitar, I think a lot of it isabout whether or not you have open strings or not open strings like that barcourt idea, but even more so on acoustic guitar because those open strings ring more truly, I guess, on an acousticguitar or a hollow body guitar. And so they end up creating more focus for me on the open strings.

8:53 Just trying to look, look around my room, look at all the different instruments I have.

8:57 Recording stuff, you know, the magic is compression, understanding like how much things need toget compressed and where. Compression, what that's doing is it's taking those dynamics thatdoom, doom, kind of thing that we're talking about with the high hat. And it is flattening some ofthe dynamics, so the loudness of those things.

9:18 But in doing so, you're able to preserve some of the timbrele, the tonal, the textural changes while allowing them to sit in one place on a mix.

9:29 So the reason why compressors were even invented was because you had all these different signalsand, you know, like radio or whatever. And you needed to make it so you could go from onesign to the next and not blow out people's speakers. And that's kind of the concept of what you'redoing even inside of an individual mix.

9:44 You have a bunch of microphones, a bunch of different inputs, and you're trying to make it so that you don't have to constantly be going up and downon the fader throughout the entire song. You can kind of compress it and get it to a pretty goodplace. And then you have to do minor changes in automation for volume.

10:00 And you can just kind of let it ride, if you've compressed it well, if you found its little area. That's the other thing toowith recording and arranging is thinking about like the segments of the frequency spectrum.So, you know, from low to high and trying to figure out what stuff is living in each of thoseworlds.

10:19 And like it doesn't mean that you can only have one thing in one of those places, but some stuff takes up more room. And some type of stuff takes up more room in certain frequencyspectrums. And so when you're like singing to it, maybe you want to adjust the way that yourvoice is like shaped.

10:36 Like your mouth is shaped so that you can be like, where I've been here, or no, no, you can hear what depending on where in the frequencies you need to hit inside of the tune.And so like thinking like that helps unlock vocal technique and production technique,arranging technique. And that's like my little magic thing there.

10:54 What I'm trying to get at is not necessarily prescribing all these things to you that help me, but instead trying to show the kind ofthinking of this is my relationship to that instrument it can grow. But it allows me to notnecessarily have to devote 10,000 hours to shaker or something like that.

11:13 I don't need to be the best shaker player in the world. What I do need to be able to do is be able to write interesting parts,play them pretty well in time, and mess with the, you know, temporal stuff. I can fix some of thetiming stuff in the computer. I'm probably not going to play that much shaker live in my life,you know, whatever.

11:29 I mean, you know, like that last example, notwithstanding, I totally could play shaker live. And actually, to be fair, I have played it live, but not a, you know, not a commonoccurrence. The point is I need that for the groove and for the texture stuff in the recordingprocess. And so like I'm going to learn it with that in mind. Why do I want to waste all that time?

11:54 That allows me to like pick up other stuff, you know, for me, for me, like other people,they're percussionists. Like that's what they do. It's like you got to shed that to the likecraziest degree. I mean, like on bass guitar, like I'm planning on playing more bass guitarlive. So I'm practicing that in a deeper way. And I'm also recording it differently.

12:11 So like with shaker, for example, it's actually a bad example because I do have a lot of songs where I recordshaker all the way through with what's a good example of something I would loop super short,

12:24 tambourine, you know, tambourine. Like I might do an eight bar loop and record that 12 times and thenpick the best of those. It's the only eight bar loop with bass. I'm trying to like get the performanceaspect out of it. So I'll do the entire song and then I'll compile out of the whole songbecause I'm trying to add like a live energy.

12:42 And also like I've practiced it a lot and I want to play that live. So there's a different like thrust to it. There's a different goal. And then so therecording process reflects that different goal than me being a percussionist, you know, for thepercussion, I'm trying to get interesting and different dynamics, dynamic track textures.

13:02 For the bass, I'm trying to like sing with it. And maybe someday I'll be able to sing with percussion,you know, that'd be cool. But also maybe someday I'll just be able to like have money and hirea really great percussionist. That would be even cooler.

13:18 But anyway, the concept of like what I'mtrying to get at is allowing your goals to inform your practice, to allow your exploration of an instrument to take on certain like fundamental characteristics that you want to develop.

13:34 Likedynamics on percussion instruments, attack and release on bass, left hand right hand interaction on keys, everything on guitar, you know, all that kind of good stuff. So that's what I'm trying towhat we're trying to put out for you guys. And then also maybe get you if you don't play an instrumentor whatever get inside the head of a multi-instrumentalist and see how we apply to different things.

13:55 You know, I feel like Steve Brickman is a good example of somebody that probably doesn't thinkas much like I do. He kind of said that he did with guitar a little bit. But he's so good at abunch of different instruments that's he's kind of the outlier. You know, I'm good at a fewand passable or at least I have hit my goals and a bunch of others.

14:17 And that works too because the real goal of all of it is to view all of these things as instruments. You are the musician.You're training yourself. You play other things. It's so easy to get down on yourself when youcan't do something physically on an instrument like with me and drums.

14:35 You know, there are timeswhere I have played drums for four or five hours in a row recording the whole thing and then leaving completely frustrated because it all sounds like crap. Saxophone. That's a good example.I suck at saxophone. I keep playing it, but my current situation having neighbors so close doesnot make that very conducive to playing that very often.

14:55 But I have recorded hours on end and messed up my lip and all this kind of stuff because the read slapping against it and had completelyunusable takes. I need to not walk away from that session feeling like I'm a bad musician

15:11 because you're not, you know, you're just bad at that instrument or you're growing at that instrumentor you've yet to find the magic thing that makes the whole instrument click because I have yetto find that on saxophone and maybe there isn't one because that instrument is super hard

15:27 but I digress. Maybe I'll ask this saxophoneist when one comes on. Like Steve Brickman, I probablyshould ask him. Maybe he'll come back on again. Anyway, that's my little spiel for the day talkingabout instruments. So coming up, we've got some really fun guests coming down the pike that I'mreally, really excited for you to meet.

15:45 Some people from around the world, some people from around the industry, different looks at it and it's going to be quite a journey with all of it. I hope itmakes you love music more. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe, rate it five starsand share it with your friends. It's the best way for us to grow. And I hope you tune in next week.

16:05 Hopefully we'll have a guest on for that one and you can check out all of my music at www.scoobertdoobert.pizza.See you guys later. Bye.