Developing Your Own Style Part 1 of 2
As a musician, I am a combination of every teacher who taught me, every musician I jammed with, every record I ever listened to and every musical experience I was a part of, all mixed in a pot and poured out to what my style is today. When you add the fact that I accepted Christ and allow the Holy Spirit to dictate my play in many ways, it makes for an unduplicatable, innovative style unique to myself… Not better or worse than anyone… but mine. When you develop your own style, it will allow you to usher in the Holy Spirit being yourself.
It's hard to listen to a preacher who uses other pastor's sermons all that time or quotes exerpt's from books he read, acting like they are ideas he came up on his own. I like the preachers who speak from the heart and are guided by the Holy Spirit with thoughts that are there own. Music has to be approached the same way. Even when you are playing other people's music, it is YOUR interpretation that music that allows your genuine self to shine through, and allows the Holy Spirit to shine on everyone.
Let's also face facts: It's fun to play our favorite songs. However, no one goes to college for four years, or studies music theory half of their life to play other peoples music for the rest of their life. The true goal of basic music theory is so that you learn the mathematics of music so that you can express your ideas on paper to convey it to other musician's…so that they can learn how to play the music that YOU wrote.
For the next few lessons, I want to teach you the very basics of music notation: Note and rest values, and time signatures. Once you understand the infrastructure and math behind music notation, it will make it easier to fill in the blanks with your own ideas.
NOTES AND RESTS VALUE/TIMING
Knowing time signatures, note value and rest values is not only key to writing your own music (and reading
other people's), it is essential to developing your own style.
It's simple…the notes are the keys or chords you strike, and the rests are the gaps of silence, no matter how small in a phrase of music.
Using 4/4 time as an example (which will be explained in this lesson,) Whatever combination of notes and rests you create, they have to fit within the dictated time signature…
HOW TO COUNT 4/4 TIME
There are several ways to count 4/4 time for notes and rests...
The first way is simple: 1...2...3...4...
For a whole note, you hold down the note for all four beats.
For a half note, you hit it and hold it for"1...2," then hit and hold it again for 3...4.
For the quarter note, you strike the note for each number of the count....1....2....3....4...
To count eighth notes in the same 4/4 time signature, you count it off like this: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and…the note is struck eight times in a 4/4/ count, giving you and intense, thumping bass line (listen to the bass line in Hezekiah Walker's “Every Praise” to hear the mastery of the eighth note.)
Sixteenth notes (not explained in this lesson) still fit under the 4/4 time frame, and have a rapid, more pulsing count: 1 of and a 2 of and a 3 of and a 4 of and a...
The same time count applies to rests.
Once you get the hang of the note duration, you can create any combination of notes,
chords and rests per measure as long as it all mathematically fits in that 4-beats-a-measure time frame.