Originally Posted by Bob Womack
People kill music.
I've long referred to lead guitar as the "finger olympics." People want to experience other people attempting great things and either succeeding or crashing and burning. That's where part of the excitement comes from. So it is with music. Without attempting and accomplishing or failing, music becomes equivalent to wind-up music boxes. Part of the joy is experiencing excellence in performance, accomplishment. It is that way whether you are hearing a Baroque minuet or a solo acoustic piece or an ensemble piece. Way back in the 1980s they discovered this with the whole MIDI revolution. They could play the whole band with a handful of keyboards and a TRS-808 drum machine but it was BORING and mechanical. They had to bring in guitarists to play with imperfect humanity to bring the thing back to life.
I'm reminded of "the curse of CGI." These days in film, quantity and size of practically everything is created with CGI. It can look quite impressive, but the knowledge that the bigness of the scene never actually happened, never existed, takes the wind out of suspension of disbelief for many in the audience. For instance, modern film representations of swarms of WWII aircraft flying might be impressive on the surface but the knowledge that they are only graphics underlies our consciousness. When you compare that to a movie called The Battle of Britain ("BOB"), filmed in 1969, it pales. BOB battle scenes contain a large collection of WWII aircraft. The bombers were the entire bomber fleet of Spain. At the time, the collection of fighters formed the largest private air force in the world. The flight scenes there are FAR more believable, even with their shortcomings, than modern CGI. Similarly, for the D-Day film, The Longest Day, they had 2000 extras in uniforms run away from the strafing run of the two (2, count 'em) German planes that were actually able to make it to the beachhead on the actual day. For Twelve O'Clock High, a stunt pilot actually belly-landed a real B-17 bomber, something no-one wants to do. All this contributed to a feeling that you were actually witnessing something big occurring. By contrast, the modern Red Tails movie depicting the Tuskegee Airmen was hampered by the fact that the CGI fighter aircraft in the combat scenes behaved more like Star Wars spacecraft than piston-powered prop-driven aircraft.
Thus it is with music: you must maintain the suspense generated by the possibility of failure in order generate excitement. Your big attempts need to be big. Your parts need to have humanity. When I am producing and performing in the studio I tend to buck the trend towards perfection. When I am creating and performing lead guitar parts for music I try to perform them all the way through, front to back. You know, you often improvise these parts. While I may play until I crash and burn and then punch-in again until I crash again, etc., once I get a solo that I like I'll usually come back and re-perform the solo front to back as a whole so that it contains that challenge of attempt and accomplishment. Without it there is no excitement. There's no fear of failure.
Bob
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