Why Write Music With A Different Instrument?

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village and I'm going to talk to you about writing with an unfamiliar instrument. Now you may be asking yourself why on earth would I want to write with an unfamiliar instrument? As you can see I have a bass guitar here. I'm not a bass guitar player, I can play a little bit and I play the piano a little bit but I found that writing with those two instruments often offers much better results in the end than if I just write with my guitar. With a guitar I'm so comfortable playing it that I end up playing the same thing over and over again, I end up going into four chord progressions. Nothing too interesting because my fingers are just used to doing certain things on the guitar that I just do it by instinct. When I'm playing the bass or I'm playing a piano I have to be more exploratory because I don't really understand the instrument and in doing that I come up with new ideas, I try new things that I wouldn't have done otherwise. But what I find what happens when I play an instrument that I'm not particularly familiar with is that I think more in terms of melody. Ultimately when you're writing a song the melody is the most important part. So for example with a bass guitar, as you can see I have a pick in my hand I'm really not a real bass player. I can play along withe the bass and I hear melodies and often those melodies don't fit the typical chord structures and in doing that I end up writing chord structures that wouldn't have written otherwise. The same thing happens to me with piano. I know a few basic chords on the piano but a lot of times I end up coming up with harmonies that work, it isn't decent music, it certainly works but isn't stuff that's the standard one of the mel that you would come up with. Instead of writing four chord songs I'll write songs that have eight different chords in a cycle and become much more interesting, much more complex. So I would really recommend if you're trying to find a way to breakdown barriers in your own songwriting, break that writers block, sit down with an instrument you can barely play, something that you can pluck out notes and really just build ideas. You'll be surprised what you come up with. You're going to be writing stuff that doesn't sound like your other stuff because you weren't using the same tools to write and that's very helpful."