Everyone collects riffs.
Four bars off a video,
slowed to half speed,
looped until the fingers own it.
Then on to the next four bars
of something else.
You end up with fifty fragments
and no music.
There is a reason
the old way was learning tunes.
Not exercises.
Tunes.
A player was measured
by how many songs
they could start
when somebody called one.
Nobody ever called a riff.
A whole song asks for things
a fragment never will.
It asks you to get in.
It asks you to get out.
Endings are their own craft,
and almost nobody practises them,
because the video stops
before the ending.
It asks you to hold a shape
for three minutes
while nothing exciting happens,
which turns out to be
most of what playing is.
And it asks you to play the parts
you would never have chosen.
The plain bar.
The one that exists
so the good bar
means something.
You cannot skip it
inside a whole song.
That is the point
of a whole song.
It also teaches form.
Not theory.
Form.
Where the thing lifts,
where it steps back,
how long you can stay somewhere
before a listener leaves.
None of that lives in the riff.
The riff is the result of it.
So pick a song
by somebody better than you.
Learn it end to end,
including the parts you dislike,
in the key it was written in.
Do not arrange it.
Do not improve it.
Do not make it yours yet.
Copy it honestly first.
Then play it for a month
and watch what happens.
Their choices start turning up
in your own playing,
in places you did not put them.
A way of leaving a chord.
A refusal to fill a gap.
That is not theft.
That is how the craft
has always moved,
hand to hand,
song by song,
and it has never once
travelled
in four-bar pieces.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)