Of all the things that I have done in my quest to get better at playing the banjo, I have discovered that recording myself playing the tunes that I thought I was pretty good at has done the most good for improving my tone, timing and taste.
Not too long ago I started acquiring some recording equipment that was way more sophisticated than the old cassette recorder I used for recording lesson highlights for my students. I thought it would be really great for recording the things that I was teaching and the ability to add guitar, mandolin and bass to the tracks myself without relying on someone else’s schedule or availability was icing on the cake.
It took about a week to gain enough knowledge about the studio equipment and the different types of microphones I had before I was able to record anything, and I have a long way to go before I am comfortable mixing and setting levels and all of the other things that are necessary to produce anything marketable, but I have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge about myself and my playing … in particular, the things I do when I play that aren’t so good.
On the surface, it would seem that just knowing that the thing most delineated by my purchase of the equipment was that my playing isn’t so great seems like it would be a bit crushing to one’s ego … and it is, however, the knowledge I have gained from the test recordings is making my playing better … much better.
Now, I’m not talking about learning hot licks or complex pieces of music, but rather the sometimes subtle, ever-important elements of one’s playing that makes what you do know sound like you know what you are doing. Instead of stretching into places that I am not quite clean playing, the recordings highlight those places in my playing that aren’t anything like I thought they were while jamming or playing otherwise. This allows me to isolate, clean up and reintroduce myself to the discipline of playing any given piece cleanly first, then taking it to another level, all the while relearning to play cleanly and precisely.
I discovered that there were certain passages and other elements of my playing that I wasn’t playing in time, either. I soon discovered that I needed to make peace with the click track … or kill it in its sleep. I opted to make good friends with it and now we get along a lot better.
A friend and world class fiddler, Megan Lynch, said it best one day (and I paraphrase) when she said that everyone has an internal metronome … a natural rhythm that they hear and feel, but it must be synchronized regularly with an external one that is in time.
So, I have learned to listen to my own playing and learn from it, and improve on it and to take what started off as an awful experience and turn it into one of the best musical, self-improvement challengee I have ever had.
Richie Dotson
11/06/2009 | 
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