Floatingbridge
Member
hey , i did a search last night for ben monder 2011 just to see if anything i hadn't already checked out was around and cam across this:
http://guitarinternational.com/2011/04/24/ben-monder-interview-focusing-on-the-basics/
... sorry if there is already a link to this floating around.
take care everybody.
Poparad
Member
Cool, thanks! I haven't seen this one yet.
jbroad
Member
great interview. ben's the man!
Matt
Member
interesting he talks about flunking out... my teacher says he knows guys who say Ben practices 8 hours a day as a routine...just in and ouyt apparently. explains his monstrosity!!
JorgeRubiales
Member
Nice floating! I'm reading it now!
jazznan
Member
This is the kind of interview I find frustrating! Good questions, but just scratching the surface, no follow up questions on what Ben actually said, i.e. "Could you give us one example of the kind of triad practice you are doing?"
Never gets below the surface....there's a bunch of these interview out there already. Get deeper please!
Floatingbridge
Member
i find it insightful . its vague but insightful. i just kind of trust it . i have been working on fundamentals and the thing with it is it goes on forever and the pay off is in the longhaul. if he would have tabbed out lil' licks it kind of just ends there. this is what feels so alone and scary about facing my wall , my limitation, with reading , with the metronome drooling out the next clack, with how i know anything that is from now on going to be generative...it's going to be a slow process. he even says how things he works on dont crop up immediately. he also alludes to trying to do prefab stuff comes off funny or bad ( as far as that goes with monder- this has also been relayed to me through another player that asked monder about specifically working out licks and stuff ... he said if he tried it it just sounds bad or he fails at it).
this is the difference than working on learning line up ( tristano ) and being able to rip it at tempo and sound articulate and impressive...( maybe its me ) but i didnt go back and look at what was happening harmonically too deeply- i learnt the lick and now that it starts on the 3rd of the V chord but i didnt think to look at the substitution ( for it's sake , the melodic motifs ( for their sake ; the rhythmic displacement ( as a study unto itself ) ... nope , i learned a rippin lick that will surely tell people i know something cool exists in the world...which happens to be really devoid of me saying anything other than i have a lenny tristano cd and i listened to it.not to say that others do not go far in transcribing and that real generative material and experiences can not come from placing yourself inside the pathways of someone else's ideas. he seems ( and this is an assumption ) to be saying things in general terms that are things that he considers IMPORTANT . in that mel bay youtube where he is forced to play on the boring ass dorian vamp he says he learned and worked with 7th chords and their inversions in a specific series of voicing and string sets. this is a lot of info, it just isnt some blue print to his lickscape...he is telling you how eating your veggies and doing pushups might be great for muscles that you can use to do??????
Gia5
Member
To me Ben Monder is not a "simple" genius. He's something more. Oceana is an incredible work of contemporary music.
Floatingbridge
Member
word.
jazznan
Member
I'm just saying that the thing I find frustrating about interviews, for example are:
How many times do I need to know that B. Frisell grew up playing clarinet in Colorado.
How many times do I need to read that Metheny taught at Miami U.
How many more Gary Burton and ________ guitar player stories do we need to hear!!!
JorgeRubiales
Member
+1 that. The problem is that many magazines are created for music aficionados or amateurs, and they don't want to know anything about deep harmony talks or geeky musicians' talk. Those magazines need to create content, and they need to give a "god's sneak peek" to name it some way.
But when you have a well trained musician making a serious interview to a master musician, those are the really valuable ones, where the artist feels undertood and goes into great details. Maybe they do in every interview, but just only to get edited out afterwards. Who konws....
+1 also to working on the basics. My teacher spent a week on Germany in a seminar with Markus Stockhausen, and they mostly worked with triads!
Floatingbridge
Member
wow , jorge that stockhausen story sounds awesome and somewhat surprizing. no, i totally feel what you guys are saying, i dont look to magazines anymore. i didnt care what kirk hammett thinks about anything since about the early 90's and they still talk about this shit. there is a guy alex rogowski who has a blog and a book out and several super informative and broad ranging texts at his site called " aguitarists notebook ".... sorry , it's hot and im underslept and feel that just writing that would be easier than showing a link , ha! check it out.
anyways trolling around ; listening to you guys; and imagining shit and googling it leads me to find the info i want also go to forums for other instruments ( guitar ones generally suck ... the old holdsworth one was good).
jorgemg1984
Member
I am also not sure if Monder wanted to have a deep talk about his practicing routine (and I can imagine it would be hard to describe it!)..
But yeah interviews on guitar magazines usually suck, I have read Pat Metheny describing his sound a million times (and its just an archtop, reverb and delay). It should be painful for them too...
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