Musicians, what keeps you inspired to play?
 

Hey folks,

This weekend past, I got together with my old band to shoot some shit and play some music. Wow, I was rusty.

How do you guys keep going, keep playing? I can rarely find the ambition anymore to pick up my bass or git, how do you guys stay inspired?

Although I've been a lover of music for as long as I can remember, I just started playing guitar and I suppose what keeps me interested in learning and playing guitar is the fact that I almost always have music going through my mind and soon after playing guitar I realized that the things I had learned and the drills I've been doing had been playing in my mind...

As cheesy as it sounds, being able to hum along to my own songs while they play in my mind is what keeps me interested.

I absolutely love playing. I could play 3 hours a day if I had the time. Not only that, but being a pianist I have the ability to play almost any genre of music at a whim. I can play a baroque Bach piano concerto, then move right on to a Stan Kenton standard, then Coldplay, then Debussy, then...etc. There's something freeing about it.

Well dang if that isn't the million dollar question.

I'm always looking for great players to listen to. This tends to get me motivated. I want to "have" what they "have," and I do that by stealing their stuff if I can and learning to play it. Sometimes I learn the hard way that it wasn't a lick or a method of sound production that gave them what they got, rather it was the rhythm section or studio sound that day. Still....even if I can't directly steal a specific thing, I can keep the feeling in my head and try to capture it some other way....perhaps in a composition.

If you write music, there's a good chance something extra-musical can inspire you to compose. For example, I was so moved by Joe Sacco's graphic novel, Palestine, that I wrote a tune called "Through Sacco's Eyes." So that's a way to stay inspired... find a way to translate you experiences into music. This isn't necessarily easy.

Live music is probably the most potent force in keeping me inspired. These days, there's no telling what's going on in the studio as far as "improvements" to someone's sound. When you can hear them getting a great sound live, you know there's no messing about.

Increasingly I find the idea of bringing music into others lives is an inspiration to me.

for the last while......writing has been so easy.......the music just won't stop coming out.

even when i'm at work,something will pop in my head and i almost want to leave just so i can go drop it on tape.and once the idea is put down,now's where the fun stars.......adding other instruments,layering etc.

that in itself is plenty of inspiration.

I have a criminally short attention span and I get bored very easy. I'm constantly flitting from thing to thing. Playing guitar is one of the few treasures of my life that I can do for hours and hours without stopping.

Whatever magic there is in music that keeps me satisfied is what keeps me inspired.

I was thinking about taking some lessons, maybe learning a bit of theory that I've long ago forgotten and perhaps learning some more blues inspired music. As a bassist, primarily, I've long thought that having a solid foundation in blues is key to being able to improvise a solid bassline that will work with just about any style of music. It's a thought I've not acted on, yet, however, because there's just not any teacher within a 2 hour comute that inspires confidence.

What keeps me playing is that I can play the songs that I want to hear when I can't actually hear it. And it's a good way to entertain guests.

I did a quick check and it looks like you're close to Mohawk College. I did a search of their site and found that Pat Collins is on faculty. See if you can somehow get a lesson with him. I have no doubt that a single lesson with one of Toronto's many fantastic bass players would give you a good kick in the pants.

Toronto is, I think, the bass capital of the world.

geez--i have no idea how to answer this question.

the piano is a huge abstract soundspace.
playing is sculpting time.
and it's my favorite drug.
but do the drug well, you have to practice.
practice is discipline and i go through phases with it.
right now, i am in a kind of in-between space, playing when i can but not having a routine set up yet.
the routine is important: i rely on it, i enjoy it: it gives me a space to shift out from underneath language and do other things in other ways. it is a space to play too many notes at altogether too high a speed and a space to play the smallest number of notes that you can stand while still implying the speed.
it is neither of those things.
it is a period in a box with a piano nearby.
it is a vacation from other people.
it is not that either.

this explains nothing.
i dont know what keeps me motivated.
i am not always.
i dont know how to answer the question.

My inspiration comes from recordings
from playing with amazing musicians every day
writing music
performance
my peers
recording
the future
teaching
going to see live music in a great venue

to know i can pick up my cell and put a group together and jam with world class musicians in a half hour just because we can.

I think to answer the question you have to look at what music is to you. For me, my guitar is my drug, my medication that keeps me sane. It's a safe place to go when the shit hits the fan. It doesn't have to sound good. It doesn't have to impress anybody. In fact I don't give a fuck about what anyone thinks about my guitar playing: it's mine and I play for me. Not only that, as far as I'm concerned it always makes beautiful sounds. You can get so wrapped up in it that the rest of the world just goes away. I think it's the way any art should be. It's also one of the reasons I also love chess, nothing else even exists, except the board in front of you, or the strings under my fingers.

As a tenor sax player variety works for me. It also helps playing with people who have more skills. Nothing like trying to keep up with better players for inspiration.

No, mohawk isn't too far, really, but certainly far enough that I wouldn't want to do weekly lessons.

The odd bit is that there are a tonne of really good git players and drummers locally, but bass? Not that I've seen yet.

Well...just start with one. That'll give you enough for a while I bet.

Joe Strummer: The FUture is Unwritten
 

Well, as a lead guitarist and a vocal of my own band, Joe Strummer keeps me inspired to play.

I almost give up in my band until I read the review of the documentary film of Joe Strummer's true to life story. Very inspiring movie of Joe Strummer. I'm looking forward to that movie.

Thank you very much Julien Temple for making this kind of documentary film.
I really appreciated it. You give us strength again to pursue our goals in this kind of industry.

Get inspired!!

For me, apparently nothing. I don't think I've picked up my guitar for months. The trumpet even longer. Sat behind the drums for 10 minutes a couple of weeks ago, but that was just horsing around.

i'm going to DC in 2 weeks to spend it writing, rehearsing and performing concerts to be broadcast over the web for the Kennedy Center. That keeps me inspired :D

i guess i just have natural ambition for playing the guitar. If i go without it for more than a day i start to go off the deep end. I love that damn thing.

oh and pot helps too :)

I just use my performance as a bench mark. Every day I notice something that I have improved at, or something I can do differently or more efficiently. The classic dream of perfection i guess....appreciate any progress you've made, but tell yourself that you can do it even better.

madness
 

Yeah, you're right! At this moment I can tell to myself that I can do it even better. As I read the film review of the documentary film of Joe Strummer, I just change the concept of writing the songs. For real, I was so inspired of this man Joe Strummer, he is now a legend as a musician.

This is not the official trailer but more closely related. :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmJPwv3fm7g

I myself have recently taken my guitar playing more seriously. This, after years of casual messing around with easy rock tunes.

I decided to get into a style of music that will hook me. I'm a big Beatles fan, so I went with what got them into music: the blues (i.e. R&B, rockabilly, etc.).

I picked up a book that will teach me the blues basics, and I'm going to go with it. I'm saturating my ears with recordings of all the greats: classic blues, blues rock, rockabilly, R&B, etc., and it's sitting me down with my guitar on my knee. I'm already practicing things I've never practiced before, such as the pick-strum technique of country blues. Plus, I'm much better at the pentatonic scales than I've ever been, which isn't saying much, but, hey, I've always been frustrated with teaching myself. Now I'm seeing progress because I'm working toward something I love in music: them blues, the grandaddy of rock & roll.

Popular rock music, definitely.

The Guitar Is Beautiful
 

Iv been playing the guitar for some years in bands & as a accompanied player & also as a soloist. This instrument keeps me inspired because it's portability to any place & it's sound. I'v seen many great players over the years & with this instrument you can learn any genre known to music. One thing the guitar has over other instrument is the back beat technique. That is when using the plucking or strumming hand you use the edge of the palm to hit the string giving you percussion kind of sound. It's sounds really cool once you learn that technique it take you to another place in your playing that's what inspires me and is really entertaining too.:) :) :) :)

Since this thread went dormant (take a trip through the way-back machine, Peli?), I've started taking piano lessons for the first time since I was 16. I found this GREAT jazz piano teacher who's totally breaking my habits down and rebuilding them again. Every single lesson, I leave with my head spinning about some new way to look at chord voicing or scale selection or SOMETHING. The main effect it's having on my playing right now is, it's turned even the tunes I'm fluid at into halting, jerky messes. ;)

The main thing that keeps me motivated is the challenge of it. He's got me thinking in ways I've NEVER thought about music--and it's not easy, and it takes work, and I'm totally up for it.

doing something entirely new for you is a big source of inspiration to continue, yes.

parallel to the other rb's post: i am halfway through a sound residency now and have used it to explore the curious world of prepared piano. well, electro-acoustic prepared piano. it does and doe not resemble a regular piano--it looks like one, it is one, but the materials that you put into the wires and the electronics that we pump through the soundboard significantly alter the sounds it produces. it splits pitches into lots of microtones, generates gamelan sounds, bell sounds, wood sounds, rubber sounds, damped sounds, bendy pitches where no bendy pitches should be. it is also an exploration of materials used in the wires, on the wires--and of the interactions of materials with electromagnetic fields.

i had practiced all summer a series of techniques that i cannot use. what is happening is entirely different from what i expected, which is the adventure.

last night i spent a few hours going through stuff, including the main piece i listened to over the summer to get my head around the idea of using sound to generate an environment rather than to make a piece of music in any straight sense. it was david tudor's rainforest 4:

http://www.emf.org/tudor/Works/rainforest.html

and was suprised at the extent to which thing shave been moving conceptually in a straight line, and at how much of tudor has leaked into this project. rainforest happens in a large space and involves a considerable number of metal sculpture suspended in various sectors, the audio signals from which are mixed live with a simple mixing board and some effects (delay)...the inversion we are doing works entirely inside a piano soundboard, but is mic-ed in such a way as to make the soundboard the equivalent of the huge space the rainforest requires.

i write this from the land of preoccupation.
i am sure that there is a level of the insufferable in it.
but it is a land that exists for a finite period only, and being there is pretty interesting.

moral of the story:

change your sound from time to time and use the change as an excuse to rethink the instrument.

The same thing that inspires me to listen to music inspires me to play music: the feeling. Who's music could I possibly feel more than my own?