Kutandara mstudio part 12: CHURCH GUYS SHARP EARS If you are a church musician in Zimbabwe im sure you are used to how anybody in the congreagtion can just stand up and goes to the mic to sing a song with the band without practicing with the band,and as she sings the band quickly figures out the key,tempo and the chord progressions chopaz,nomatter how complicated the song is,yes i know that its very very unproffesional,but nomatter how unproffesional it is,it has trained the ears of Zimbabwean church musicians seriously. When you get used to that system,your brains can easily calculate the melody and find the suitable chords to accompany the singer.In my experience as a session musician and music producer,i have noticed that musicians that have a church background in Zim have very sharp minds when it comes to figure out chords and time signature for a melody.Most singers come to the studio with just the vocal line,without knowing what chords to accompany the music,it will be up to the producer and musicians available to figure out the suitable chord progressions for the song,the most difficult songs are the slow ones,the ballads or the worship pieces,usually if its our afrocentric choruses its just 3 simple chords,so you just need to create the melodies for the guitars and other instruments chopaz,so that also trains your mind to be a fast composer.If its a slow song that has changes you need firstly to figure out the map of the song,and the best people to use there,beleive me,are the church boys. When i became a Christian on Tuesday 28 June 1994 its one thing that i hated about playing in church,but i quickly adjusted and got used to the system.Then i spent the next 6years as a church&crusade musician and it seriously trained my mind and ears and it helped me a lot as a session musician,people who hired me were always amazed at how fast i quickly understood their songs and normally i played ma one take full album rese. One time a friend of mine Pastor Chimusoro reffered a lady to me for piano lessons sometime in 2001,she was from U.s.a,i asked her to play before we start lessons to see what level she was at,i was shocked,she was a serious classically trained pianist,so i asked her why she would want lessons from me when she was that good,she told me that she&her husband had opened a church in Harare,she was suprised every sunday how the local church musicians would join in a song they have never heard before correctly and even guess the chord progressions changes correctly,she noticed the trend in almost all church musicians she met locally,and yet all these musicians played by ear,none of them could read music or had been to music schools,most didnt even know the names of the chords but their ears and minds were so sharp.She was classically trained and relied on the paper to play,if she memorised the music that would be after practicing by sight reading. The first four or five Hifa festival opening nights i was part of the combined bands where they would pick instrumentalists and singers from all over the world from participating bands,the guys from overseas were given the score sheets with the music written in detail,whilst all of us the local guys were given chord charts that we used just for the first rehersals only,i then realised that playing by ear also trains your memory,because our fellow classically trained instrumentalists from overseas had to rely on their papers every single practice session,even when the songs were not very complicated,even on the night of the gig,and if you made any slight change to the music they wanted it written down. This does not mean learning the formal side of music is not important,but i beleive if all our sharp eared guys could learn the formal side of music they would have an added advantage over everybody So lets not look down upon ourselves,we also have something chakapenga...... Meet you at the Monolio groove garage,the small place with a big sound.feel free to visit: monoliostudios
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 03:47:21 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015