can’t see the forest for the trees
An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at thesituation as a whole: “The congressman became so involved in the wording of his bill that he couldn’t see the forest for the trees; he did not realize that the bill could never pass.”
If there is one overriding theme to this phase of my life (the one where I am returning to music school after two and a half decades) is that I spend too much time “in the weeds” (to mix metaphors a bit), searching for trees and forgetting about forests.
One example of how I tend to make things harder on myself is that many years ago I started learning the USC “Zone System” for playing changes from a friend who had just gone through their Studio Guitar program. I won’t go too into the specifics of it other than it was a great way to learn how to build Bebop phrases from chord tones. I also probably only learned a small portion of the system in the few lessons I had. The result of those lessons was that I started playing chord changes in jazz tunes mostly by embellishing chord tones and playing arpeggios and mostly ignoring scales outside of modal jazz tunes. It really focused my rock and blues playing but when I came back to school I would get really hung up on things that were simple to other musicians like playing over “rhythm changes”: https://www.learnjazzstandards.com/jazz-standards/bb-rhythm-changes/
Here are the first four measures of a typical set of rhythm changes (or a song based on the chord changes to “I Got Rhythm”):
The old me would have been so busy trying to hit the chord tones in every chord that I wouldn’t have made a very interesting melody. In reality, with the exception of the G7 and the Edim7 all of the chords are in the key of Bb major and if I wanted to just play that scale over these eight measures that would work too. Or I could play bars one and three in Bb major and treat the ii-V chords in bars two and four as dominant 7th chords and play something more interesting there, but now my brain is freed up a bit more to play something more interesting in a melodic sense. Think of each chord as a tree and the entire section of this song as the forest. Songs based on rhythm changes can go by so fast that hitting all of the “right notes” will take up all of my brainpower. By grouping things that are more similar and then thinking more about telling a melodic story I’m better able to navigate songs like this. And if I want to aim for some of the more interesting chords (like the Edim7) then I can do that but I don’t have to, either.
This is really just one example of how I’ve had to make sure I know the details about how something works but then I need to bring my focus out and pay more attention to the bigger picture in order to make sense musically. Before I get too buried in something like this I have to ask myself a few questions:
- What should be the end result of my efforts?
- What details are actually vital to focus on and which ones are not?
- Am I wasting time/effort on something that draws away from something else more important about this tune?
I bet by tomorrow I’ll have thought of other things to add to this list but that is the core of it all. And honestly, I see my students doing things like this all of the time. I bust them for it and then I go right ahead and make the same mistakes in my own practicing. A big part of taking lessons with a good instructor is that they lead you through and past mistakes like this, and my own guitar teacher is really good about getting me refocused on what is important but now I need to try and make it a part of my own process for learning and performing music.
As you go through your practice sessions or jams or however you are enjoying playing music think about how you might be sabotaging yourself by having a focus on your music that is too narrow or specific. We practice the details at home to make them an instinctive part of how we play…practicing scales and rhythms with a metronome or memorizing notes or bits of musical information on the fretboard so that when it comes down to making music, the actual production of the sound is second nature and our brain can get into a more creative space. If you are spending too much time trying to remember notes to play or the way you hold the pick makes it difficult to play certain rhythms (for example) then you should focus on fixing those things in your practice sessions. Conquer that stuff as part of your daily practice routine and as they present themselves as difficulties in your performing of music. When you want to play music your focus should be on that forest and not those trees.
This wasn’t supposed to be a lesson on rhythm changes (especially since I don’t feel like I’m in a position to be teaching it yet) but here is some info for you to check out:
If you’re wondering what “rhythm changes” are, it is a chord progression from a Gershwin tune that many, many musicians have used for their own melodies.
Here are a few takes on how to play over this stuff:
