To Riff Or Not To Riff
To Riff Or Not To Riff?
by Dave Latchaw
To Riff Or Not To Riff, that is the question. Early on in my musical adventures, inspired by players that could do cartwheels up and down their ax and compose equally extreme music, so of course that was what I tried to match. I wanted every tune I soloed on or composed to have in-your-face riffage. Not that I could pull it off, but that was how I wanted to play and write. As a young player and composer I thought that music could only be valid if it is complex. Exploring simple ideas just was not part of the early routine. Like most musicians in their early development, the knowledge of what was musically suitable and hip was not always obvious to me! Fortunately, if a musician is honest and open with themselves, musical appropriateness and the diversity between simple and complex ideas can evolve, especially as one musically matures and develops their own voice.
Now, as a player, composer and music educator I have to laugh at myself when I think about those early musical days. I was keen with no clue or ability. Thankfully at some point I realized that you have to walk before you can run, which is a fundamental idea for practicing and developing interesting solos and compositions, and as well as over-all musicianship. If one doesn’t take the time to develop a good musical foundation there will be gaps in capacity and a certain instability in playing and composing. With the way society is, it is hard to be patient and take the fundamental steps to develop one’s ability.
Being pratical about your current musical skill is important. How does anyone think they are going to be able to solo over a harmonic progression with quintuplelets if they can’t do it in quarter notes? How can someone think they can solo over a tune at 300 bpm when they are not solid at 100 bpm? Younger players sometimes think they are being heavy when they go for the “sheets of sound” riffing when they solo. They mainly think they sound heavy because they are not on any one given note long enough to make it obvious to them they do not know the changes. Denial can occur in the younger musician who receives praises for being able to play many notes. There becomes a point though when the young improvisor needs to ask themself, do I know what I’m doing or am I just developing “confident jive”? When a player can analyze their capacities, growth is possible.
Learning as much as you can about harmony will make both riffing and compositions more valid. If you don’t know which notes belong to a certain set of chord changes, you are using the “search and destroy” method of improvising. Knowing about harmony makes one able to manipulate tension and release both compositionally and improvisationally. Harmonic knowledge increases development of the artistic voice. If one can walk through any set of harmonic changes it will be easier to run. There also has to be rhythmic control that goes with harmonic capacity.
With composition, if every tune you write makes the veins in the player’s head pop out like Clint Eastwood, you will reduce the effect of that intensity! Even bands like Metallica realize if there is no contrast to the fast and loud with slow and soft you are losing potential musicallity. I used to think the challenge to writing music was to make it complex enough, then it would automatically be cool. When I was in the Scottish Rock band “The Heat”, I began to realize that it is just as challenging to write music for the masses. Writing music that only other musicians can value is cool, but it becomes easy to be tragically hip. One shouldn’t dismiss the ability to write something that nonmusicians can dig also. There is an art to that too.
As a musician matures it is most important to keep finding where the gaps are in their musical foundation and fill them in. Being self-aware is essential for the growth of one’s musical ability. If we don’t try to expand our musical foundation in both complex and simple directions we will stand still in our musical lives, which is never good.
