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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #212 (Instruments)

Published about 2 months ago • 4 min read

Family Photo:
Instruments

The neighbor a few houses down has a band. It's a pretty big band: a couple singers, a couple guitars, a bass, drums, violin. They practice in his garage, and we can hear the music when we pass by. They mostly play Fleetwood Mac covers and other stuff like that.

They're quite good.

We bumped into the neighbor one day on our way to the park. One thing led to another, we mentioned we liked his music, and he invited us to visit their next practice session.

So we did.

When we knocked on the garage door, I think the band was as excited to see us as we were to see them. It's fun to play for an audience. Rob, our neighbor, introduced me as "Josh—no not that Josh that calls the cops on us," and invited us to have a seat. They gave Calvin and Lawrence a little egg shaker and a hand drum and encouraged us to play along.

It was fun.

We sat for a few songs, and then continued on our way to the park. Lawrence left the garage beaming with pride, "I played that drum perfect!" he remarked.

I remember a lot of music classes in elementary school. They weren't fun. Music education should be fun. Music education should be playing with a band. The thing about playing an instrument is that you're bad at it to start, but you get better the more you play. Maybe some virtuosos do play perfectly from the start, but I don't know what that's like... I'll have to ask Lawrence.

Some kids are forced to practice their instrument, get very good, and then turn into adults and never play again. That seems like a shame.

--

The cousins visited the following week and we stopped by the neighbor's band practice again. When we got home, the kids all wanted to have their own band practice. They gathered their toy instruments in the living room and made music together for an hour. We recorded some of the songs on our phones, and then spent another hour playing them back on the TV for ourselves and grandparents.

That was also fun.

​It's fun to play for an audience.

Dad Joke(s):
Instrumentalist

video preview​

Mr. Bean - Playing the Invisible Drums (1991)

Highlights:
The Intrinsic Joy

​8 Pieces of Advice for Struggling Young Musicians (or Other Creative People) by Ted Gioia​

(1) Focus on the intrinsic joy of making music.
(2) Every day learn more and get better in your craft—and take satisfaction in this.
(3) Collaborate with other musicians and become part of the larger creative community.
(4) Connect with listeners on whatever level you can—even if it’s just playing on the street corner.
(5) Never let gatekeepers control your sense of purpose and self-worth.
(6) Use the digital tools that are available, but don’t let them control you.
(7) There’s no shame in doing a day gig in addition to your music—be proud because it testifies to the sacrifices you make for your craft.
(8) Don’t be afraid. There’s a place for you.

​Personal Best by Atul Gawande​

“The great challenge in performing is listening to yourself,” he said. “Your physicality, the sensation that you have as you play the violin, interferes with your accuracy of listening.” What violinists perceive is often quite different from what audiences perceive.
​
“My wife always says that I don’t really know how I play,” he told me. “She is an extra ear.” She’d tell him if a passage was too fast or too tight or too mechanical—if there was something that needed fixing.
...
​
The professional singers I spoke to describe their coaches in nearly identical terms. “We refer to them as our ‘outside ears,’ ” the great soprano Renée Fleming told me. “The voice is so mysterious and fragile. It’s mostly involuntary muscles that fuel the instrument. What we hear as we are singing is not what the audience hears.” When she’s preparing for a concert, she practices with her vocal coach for ninety minutes or so several times a week. “Our voices are very limited in the amount of time we can use them,” she explains. After they’ve put in the hours to attain professional status, she said, singers have about twenty or thirty years to achieve something near their best, and then to sustain that level. For Fleming, “outside ears” have been invaluable at every point.

​The Man Who Fixes the World's Finest Violins by Elly Fishman​

“For my dad, I think there’s this idea of, if he’s not going to do this work, who is?” says the son. “There has to be someone protecting these special works of art, and they have to do it right. He really cares about preserving the instruments in the right way.”
...
​
“We are caretakers of these instruments. We move on, but these instruments continue to the next generation.”
...
​
Asked to explain his precise methods, Becker points to instinct. “These instruments have a certain soul,” he says. “People think it’s magic, but it’s just experience.”

​Is Popular Culture Really in Terminal Decline? by Spencer Kornhaber​

"Music is turning into a rights-management business,” Gioia said. “There are vested interests now that don’t want new music to flourish. The private-equity funds just want you to listen to the same songs over and over again, because they own them.”...If Bach were alive today, “he’d spend a few weeks trying to break into the L.A. music scene and say, ‘Ah, I’ll be a hedge-fund manager instead.’”
--
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[T]he ethos of the bedroom musician, once an indie phenomenon enabling outsiders to gain a foothold, quickly became the record-industry default. Producers can skip the studio to work on their devices at home, commissioning instrumentalists and beat makers who live time zones away. Music is now widely made much in the manner that it is consumed: by people who are alone, encased in their headphones.
​
This state of affairs, Brooks thinks, is antithetical to music’s purpose. Listening to songs once meant getting a window into specific, communal circumstances—into the churches where R&B evolved from gospel, into the block parties where hip-hop fermented, into the clubs where rock bands jammed. Now most music is shaped by and tailored to a fake place, an intangible scene: the internet. It only feeds the broader trends of cultural fracturing and personal solitude that are now clearly depressing people’s sense of well-being.

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Josh Knox

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