Music lives through its breath - the merit of silence when jamming with others

When making music with many people it's rather easy to see the merit of restraint and individual discipline. There is only so much "space" on the frequency spectrum if you will, and so when the musicians jamming together do the most they can rather than the most fitting they can it all becomes a giant mess in no time. A tiring mess.

Soon it's impossible to make out your individual voice. Soon it becomes hard to be continuously inspired by one another because the track can't breathe. The musicians jamming tend to feel less connected to the track and to their contribution while some may try to "paint" over that same sense by turning the volume even louder.

It's the same with having good friends join in for a get-together at night when half the guys are jamming together. Soon the friends on the couch start to hit the drums in their own way and timing; shortly thereafter it all sounds like a thick wall of noncoherent noise, even if there is a gem of a track buried and coded in there somewhere.

So rather than always playing the best or the most fitting maybe being a good musician has a lot to do with playing less, with willingly sacrificing one's own impulse to contribute anything and instead opting to leave that tiny time segment free and open in the hopes that the others won't abuse their power over the silence either.

Overall a really important lesson again but it was also frustrating because the ears tire quickly and I just can't get myself to go along with it when I don't particularly feel it. The beauty of bands and musician collectives comes precisely from the finetuned interplay of all the musicians in the band, not from all of them hitting as many notes and ideas as possible all at once without caring for the collaboration.

Sounds rather obvious if I put it like that but when making plans to jam with four people tonight I really did underestimate how easy it would be to clutter all th silence space with redundant sonics and not finding our mojo because of it ;) Well, at least the last track we started worked better in this regard - it could breathe and had lots of space free and open. Marvellous!

How did Mozart allegedly put it?
"The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between."

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