Insight for worship from a wild and angry drummer?

Rolling Stone magazine interviewed Ginger Baker in a somewhat thoughtless fashion and got given a fairly hard time. Toward the end of the article he is asked a question about practicing and replied:

"I practiced for a couple of years, in 1958 and '59, and since I haven't practiced at all. The only time I bang my drums is when we're on a gig."

 I have a recollection of Noel Redding (bass player for Jimi Hendrix) saying something similar about never practicing and only running through the songs before a gig sufficiently to make sure everyone knew what they were playing.

For me, the whole practice thing has been a double-edged sword. At times I have very specifically practiced to learn pieces that are not part of me or the way I want to play, so that I can use them in specific and limited scenarios. I have also deliberately made myself practice to try to regain stamina and strength after not playing for prolonged periods, most notably recently, where I was returning to playing in church after live worship stopped at the chapel. To begin with I couldn't play for more than about 5min without pain, and I still haven't really regained sufficient speed and precision for lead work, though that's coming back.

There's long been a train of thought that says one must continually strive to be better and better, as though music were an olympic sport instead of an art form. Paul Satriani made a comment probably more than 20 years ago about wanting to play a continuous fast stream of arpeggios - practicing until he could achieve it, and that thinking has had a vice-like grip on the guitar community. But Baker also made an interesting comment about this approach when asked if he still tried to get better & do new things:

"No. You can play what you want to play. What's the point of trying to play things that are difficult just for the fact of doing it? 

"

 And to a large degree, apart from when I've felt pressured to play what other people play, and occasionally inspired by what I've heard so that I want to learn how to do it too, that's pretty much how I've felt.

Music is a curious thing to learn.

With most creative skills we will normally go away and just do the thing we want to do, often gradually becoming better at it as we do it more. Music isn't taught like that, and from an early stage we are trained to break it down, repeat a phrase, passage or sequence over and over again until we develop muscle memory and the ability to reproduce the piece without thought. Often that is needed because we are playing (guitar, at least) too fast for thought, but the result of this practice is that we reproduce patterns or riffs without thought, and it might be argued, often without creating music ourselves. If we were painters, in order to practice we might simply grab a canvas, sit down and paint, but as a guitarist you're expected to draw that flower again and again and again until it's perfect and identical, each time, every time.

A friend pointed out that one big-name worship bands' live albums were tighter than most ordinary bands could manage in the studio.

My experience of playing in worship has gradually moved me in a different direction from that. There was certainly a time I'd sit & practice pieces to reproduce in front of others, but in the end I realised that although there was a sense of achievement in nailing CD intros, it wasn't adding to the worship because it was just a noise instead of being part of the creative stream. It was a bit like giving a painter a canvas and then telling them they needed to fill it using pre-cut stencils in a specific pattern. And while someone with a decent eye for design could probably create something very pleasing, it wouldn't really be much of an expression of their own creativity. There are times it can be useful to experiment and evaluate certain techniques or sounds, but they need to become our own, rather than remaining like a sticker that we carefully apply to our picture.

Now I'm not saying that we need to all desperately try to work out how we can be us in creating things, but within the worship community so much sounds formulaic that one has a sense there are few who are doing more than just rearranging a collection of words and using a contrived backing track to stop it sounding the same as the previous song. As my good friend Edward would like to point out, we all like our liturgies and patterns. But just as one can become religious about the way things are done in church, so it can be over music and song construction too.

And I'm not really advocating a sloppy anarchy, but for me, one of the important things about playing in worship is that we create and flow, rather than link a series of stencils together.