🏳 I'm giving up

(plus: Bob Marley's Is This Love)

RIFFS:

I’m giving up…

…on reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

So many people love this book, but I just can’t vibe with it.

But I did find this gem in the opening pages:

“I can’t grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise, I’d never know what running means to me.”

This is exactly why I write charts.

The act of writing it down is a forcing function.

There’s a bunch of half-formed notions floating around my head that give me the illusion of understanding a song. Committing it to the page fills in all the gaps. Even if I never read the chart again, it helps me remember it easily.

Anyone who’s ever taught anything can relate.

When you explain it to someone, it exposes the gaps in your understanding. All those places where you’re operating from intuition are now clear. Wait… what am I doing there?

Writing a chart is just teaching a song to yourself.

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RECS:

I love this idea from Bryan Sutton.

Some folks treat the click like a referee who’s going to penalize them for any tiny infraction.

But instead, he likes to imagine that the click is a member of the band.

The five & a half minutes starting at 14:30 is great:

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CHARTS:

Over the weekend I played this with the trio.

Dropbox folder with PDF, Sibelius, & musicXML files here.

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SMARTS:

I’ve probably listened to Is This Love a thousand times.

But there are so many things I didn’t realize until I charted it.

(Trying the “Smarts” section in video form this week. Let me know what you think.)

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That’s all I got this week.

See you next Wednesday,

Josh