Mistakes are the portals of discovery

[oldgitplayer]

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

James Joyce

 

What's a mistake anyway? I was re-watching an old BBC documentary entitled, 'Imaginary Man'. It's about Ray Davies.

 

At one point he's sitting at a piano and talking about the writing of 'You Really Got Me'. He plays the riff in a bluesy way and explains that the song was conceived in that manner. It was his brother Dave on lead guitar that converted it to the raw driving sound we know.

 

The song is in the key of G, and when he was first playing it to Dave, he muffed his change up to C and played A by mistake. And hence the 'mistake gave us the song we know.

 

Does anybody know any other songs that were born of mistakes?

 

[video=youtube;Eq_KQYVPadQ]

 

[Lee Knight]

I don't know about other songs but... I will say that just about everything I work on contains "mistakes" that I embrace. My performance career, and some wonderful mentors showed me how to skate on the edge of "correct" to find the unique. Aiming for the common gets boring fast. It's why I love using capoed guitars as overdubs. It puts me in a new key and set of guitar voicings that allows for some rightness with a wrongness. Bends the ear, upsets the norm, takes me away from comfort and juts me into ears mode. Half step clangs that die on paper but shine aurally. I do the same on keys. Shift the keyboard to a new key and... Wow, what was that!?!! I try to wing the new key and see what happens. ALL the time. Same with melody. Turn off the chordal bed and sing to the bass and drums. Turn them back on and... I like that. Mark DeCerbo, my good buddy, is a master at that.

[oldgitplayer]

^^^ Those are some good tips Mr K.

I agree that looking at things from a different place often brings new perspective to the table.

Ever since I watched a Gypsey Jazz player, I've learnt most of my chords as triads on the bottom 3 strings of the guitar, and those voicings usually open up another pathway for me.

[Oswlek]

I have yet to put together a mix where a mistake didn't lead me in a better direction than I had planned. On "All in Good Time" somehow I slid a lone backing vocal into a completely wrong spot (something I have no recollection of, nor can I even recall needing to move said backing track) only to sound so right when hearing for the first time on playback.

 

Stuff like that happens all the time. On "Unbury" I forgot to mute a reversed lead guitar track and it sounded awesome when listening.

 

Every single time. Usually the coolest ideas of the entire song are inspired by a screw up.

[mbfrancis]

Just saw this great talk by the Cataracts guy. He has some great stuff about producing, and finding out your strengths and weaknesses, and when to work with other people. But he also tells how the hook for "

" came from accidentally dragging the lead part into the bass MIDI lane in Reason. 15M records, boom.

 

[video=youtube;gNQj9aEqFSg]

[blue2blue]

I think anyone who has paid much attention to Jimi Hendrix's guitar playing has a sense of how he would turn 'mistakes' into often quite cool little mini-adventures (or at least interesting head-scratchers).

 

In this short-ish video essay on jazz guitarist Jimmy Wyble's 'two line improvising' (basically a counterpoint framework that could be purposed to on the fly improvisations), he mentions that Jimmy wanted to find a way to incorporate his 'mistakes' into his improvisations -- because, as Jacobs quotes him, 'I never know when I'm going to make them.'

 

[video=youtube;2PyTC9t9PLc]

[Oswlek]

Just saw this great talk by the Cataracts guy. He has some great stuff about producing' date=' and finding out your strengths and weaknesses, and when to work with other people. But he also tells how the hook for "

" came from accidentally dragging the lead part into the bass MIDI lane in Reason. 15M records, boom.

 

[video=youtube;gNQj9aEqFSg]

 

This is really cool, but I have to admit to absolutely loathing that song. 5 million sold? Astounding.

[Lee Knight]

No time to watch all of that right now but wow. The first 3 mins are fantastic. I'll be gutting back to that!

[oldgitplayer]

 

[video=youtube;2PyTC9t9PLc]

When I watch guys like this I am reminded that I still know very little about playing the guitar.

 

[blue2blue]

When I watch guys like this I am reminded that I still know very little about playing the guitar.

Tell me about it.

 

I've been trying to puzzle out Jimmy Wyble's two line improvisation approach since two different, much more advanced (not to mention academically trained) guitarists gave me handmade tape copies of the original Etudes release in a two week period back around 1987 or so when I asked them both for advice on where to go as someone who wanted to be able to improvise fingeerstyle. They'd both run into Wyble and his 'disciples' like Jacobs (Howard Roberts, Steve Lukather, Howard Alden, Larry Koonse and Smokey Hormel are also counted among that number) in their academic lives. When both -- who did not know each other in the slightest and who were very different sorts of guitarists and people -- gave me the same tape in a short period, I decided that was synchronicity telling me to dig the iceberg under the waves that had those two peaks breaking the surface, looking like two small icebergs but really... well, you know. (Not rushing to put that metaphor in a song.)

 

Anyhow, I guess if the music hadn't also really reached me -- as soon as I put it on I thought, this is something I was looking for but couldn't quite conceptualize.