Shownotes
What matters more in music: technical skill or emotional feel? In this episode, we dive deep into this question with saxophonist and composer Toby James, who shares his experiences navigating the extremes of music, from composing on a deadline to performing spontaneously without sheet music. Toby makes a compelling case that skill and feel are not opposites but rather interconnected elements that can unlock each other. We explore how musical skill is essential for communication, while feel brings depth and authenticity to that communication. By the end of our conversation, we arrive at the idea that true balance between skill and feel might not be a simple 50/50 split, but rather a full embrace of both in harmony. Join us as we unravel this musical conundrum and discover how to blend technique with emotion in our creative endeavors.
Takeaways:
- In the realm of music, the debate between technical skill and emotional feel is ongoing and complex, as both elements play critical roles in creating impactful sound.
- Toby James emphasises that skill and feel should not be seen as opposites; rather, they can complement and enhance each other in the musical process.
- Listening and internalising musical elements are vital skills that underpin emotional expression in music, proving that technique can enhance feel.
- The journey of a musician often involves balancing their technical ability with the emotional aspects of music, creating a unique and personal sound.
Produced by Gareth Davies at The Sound Boutique
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Transcripts
What matters more in music?
Speaker A:Technical skill or emotional feel?
Speaker A:Is it about years of training, or is it about that spark that makes people move?
Speaker A:Saxophonist and composer Toby James has worked in both extremes, writing scores to a deadline and stepping onto a stage with no sheet music.
Speaker A:Asked to sound like he's been there all along.
Speaker A:In this episode, Toby explains why skill and feel aren't opposites and how one might unlock the other.
Speaker A:In this sound session, we're asking the question, how do you balance musical skill with feel?
Speaker A:Welcome, Soundmaker.
Speaker A:You're listening to the Sound Session, where creators explore how sound shapes our world and how we shape sound.
Speaker A:If you enjoy what you hear today, please follow the show, leave a quick review or share it with someone who loves sound and music.
Speaker A:And if you'd like to send me your favourite sound, head to thesoundsession.uk I'd love to feature it in a future episode.
Speaker A:Before we get to Toby, then, let's hear this week's listener favourite sound.
Speaker A:This is from Matthew Bliss, who says, I remember the sound.
Speaker A:My wife and I closely relate to Australia and don't hear anywhere else.
Speaker A:We magpies, Aussie magpies, make a unique sound and we layered it into our own podcast, From My Home to Yours, in a travel episode when we moved from Australia to Ireland.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:So it means a lot to us and when we hear it, it's very nostalgic.
Speaker A:Let's have a listen.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:That certainly is unique.
Speaker A:Thank you for sending that in, Matthew.
Speaker A:If you'd like your sound to appear in the podcast, you know where to go.
Speaker A:Thesound session.uk.
Speaker A:now back to our guest.
Speaker A:In every sound session, we begin with the guest's favorite sound.
Speaker B:I mean, it's a cliche to say the sound of my children laughing, but with my son very definitely in the throes of being three, the sound of him laughing is quite a relief to all the complaining.
Speaker B:So I think certainly the sound of my kids being happy.
Speaker B:If it were just me in a tent with the sound of rain pitter pattering on the canvas, that's another nostalgic memory for me.
Speaker B:And I love the sound of that.
Speaker B:I was trying to hone this down into something more musical.
Speaker B:I love the sound of a choir of instruments in particular.
Speaker B:I think a sax section or a big band or an orchestra or a choir.
Speaker B:I think there's something harmonious about that already.
Speaker A:You can hear both sides of our theme.
Speaker A:Personal emotional sounds on one hand and the disciplined craft of arranging on the other.
Speaker A:Skill and feel side by side.
Speaker A:Talking of Feel.
Speaker A:I asked Toby about the first time he really noticed feel in music.
Speaker B:Yeah, I can't.
Speaker B:I was thinking about this.
Speaker B:Whether this is showing my age or not, I don't know.
Speaker B:But because I grew up listening to music from my parents era which didn't have quantize and didn't have, you know, such an onus perhaps on technique.
Speaker B:I grew up listening.
Speaker B:My mum was a big blues fan and my dad listened to a lot of country.
Speaker B:But also, you know, things like Chaz and Dave and all of that, which is all very kind of feel based music.
Speaker B:It's all very vibey and certainly hearing, you know, the old blues guys, Howlin Wolf and Albert Collins and B.B.
Speaker B:king and all those boys, you know, kind of hammering away.
Speaker B:I think that feel has always been at the forefront of the music that I grew up listening to.
Speaker B:I mean, there are instances of, you know, the first time I heard the Stan Tracy Big Band, the first time I heard a sax section playing together.
Speaker B:You know, all of those kinds of things stick out as being available.
Speaker B:But all the music that I grew up listening to was felt.
Speaker B:Came from a place of feeling rather than technique.
Speaker A:So if feel was always present, what does skill mean to him?
Speaker B:Musical skill is the ability to communicate through music.
Speaker B:Now communication varies, doesn't it?
Speaker B:So whether that's that you're communicating an emotion, whether that's that you're communicating a story, or whether that's simply saying, look at how hard I've practiced this thing.
Speaker B:Which therefore encompasses feel but also technique.
Speaker B:You can be musical in how you mix a track.
Speaker B:You can be musical in how you write a track, even if you don't play.
Speaker B:So I think there are all these facets to skill and I think that it's just, yeah, the ability to convey an idea through music in whatever form that takes for you is what technical ability is.
Speaker B:As opposed to feel, which is.
Speaker B:Is the right terms you're going to say quite.
Speaker B:It's that thing that you can't really write down you in the same way that you can't write down the subtleties of a language.
Speaker B:You have to experience them.
Speaker A:So does Toby think then that feel can exist without skill and vice versa?
Speaker A:Can skill exist without feel?
Speaker B:I don't personally think that feel can exist without skill because it takes skill to internalize.
Speaker B:You have to be good at listening.
Speaker B:Even if you don't read a note of music, you have to be good at listening to figure out that the snare's slightly late or this is how you bend a note.
Speaker B:You have to have a skill to be able to then internalize those and turn them into what you want to communicate.
Speaker B:So, no, I don't feel that they can exist separately.
Speaker B:Does it work the other way?
Speaker B:I think that you can get so far with technical ability, but something's always going to be lacking, you know, Toby.
Speaker A:Gave me two stories, one where skill carried him and one where feel carried him.
Speaker B:I quite often have to score pieces of music extremely last minute that I know nothing about.
Speaker B:The example that I like to use is at panto.
Speaker B:The director suddenly said, I'd like this to be a ballet.
Speaker B:And I don't know anything about ballets.
Speaker B:I know about classical music, but I know nothing about ballets.
Speaker B:I had to get it done.
Speaker B:So my studies of classical music, if you like, from music college, and my knowledge of orchestration meant that very quickly I was kind of able to cobble something together that a bunch of people could dance to.
Speaker B:It's not necessarily my wheelhouse.
Speaker B:It certainly didn't have any feel, particularly other than I was guided by my ear in terms of being a composer, which I suppose we all are to a lesser or greater extent.
Speaker B:So, yes, in the theater world, when people go, oh, I think I quite fancy a bluegrass section here.
Speaker B:And you go, oh, my God, all right.
Speaker B:And 10 minutes later you've got something that approximates AI playing Hank Williams, but it sort of gets you through a sticky patch.
Speaker B:I suppose the flip side of that is where feel has carried me through.
Speaker B:It's not uncommon as a gigging jazz musician to turn up and there'd be no idea of what you're about to play for the next two hours.
Speaker B:And yet you're being paid quite a lot of money to entertain some people at their wedding or whatever.
Speaker B:And so, you know, people will call, I don't know, we're going to play this.
Speaker B:It's rhythm changes in F sharp and you can hear your way through it.
Speaker B:I was once booked in the morning to play for Clem Curtis, who's a Motown star.
Speaker B:I was booked to play that afternoon.
Speaker B:The sack player had let them down and I turned up to the gig and they didn't give me any dots.
Speaker B:And I was marched up in front of Clem and the keyboard player said, he's got no dots.
Speaker B:The sax player's not left the dots.
Speaker B:And Clem just looked at me and said, pardon my friends, but Clem looked at me and said, your ass better be good.
Speaker B:And then we walked out on stage in front of however many people at this open air festival.
Speaker B:Unfortunately, there was Nothing wrong with my bottom and I was able to get through the gig.
Speaker B:But that was entirely because I knew what Motown should sound like and I knew how my part should fit to it.
Speaker B:So I guess some of that came from technique and came from skill, because I'd studied my instrument.
Speaker B:But quite a lot of it came from feel.
Speaker B:There's quite a nice.
Speaker B:I don't know whether this is a nice little sound bite, but I once heard an interview, I think it was with James May, and he has this quote, and he doesn't know where it's from.
Speaker B:And I've looked for it and I don't know who said it, but the quote is wonderful.
Speaker B:It says, technique is the liberation of the imagination.
Speaker B:And I think that that is hugely important.
Speaker B:It certainly informs quite a lot of what I do.
Speaker B:And it's this idea that it doesn't matter what ideas you've had, but if you don't have the technique to get those ideas out, they're just ideas and they're just going to stay in your head.
Speaker B:And so that for me, is learning your instrument, learning orchestration, learning whatever that technique is that's going to best serve the idea in your head will set that idea free.
Speaker B:And the ultimate goal, I suppose, is that you get to a place where they're indistinguishable from each other.
Speaker A:So how does all that work in the commercial music world?
Speaker B:Because.
Speaker B:Because of the work that I do, everything that I do needs to be validated by someone else.
Speaker B:So it's difficult to know when you struck the right balance without someone else telling you that you have done.
Speaker B:And as soon as they do that, it stops being your music, in a way.
Speaker B:I recently quizzed Iron Mike Langley about this.
Speaker B:I was writing a disco track for a library that I'm trying to get placed.
Speaker B:And to me, to my ear, it needed a tempo change, it needed to get quicker.
Speaker B:So it started at 118 and it should have gone up to 124.
Speaker B:And this didn't sit right because I knew I was trying to sell it.
Speaker B:And it's sink and people are going to have to Frankenstein it together to make it fit their thing.
Speaker B:And so I thought, I'll check with someone with more experience.
Speaker B:And if anyone's got more experience of it, it's Mike Langley.
Speaker A:Mike Langley, composer, songwriter, producer, very nice guy.
Speaker B:He said, nah, forget it.
Speaker B:Split the difference, put it in the middle and then.
Speaker B:And just have it at one tempo.
Speaker B:And that's great and awful in equal measure, isn't it?
Speaker B:Because it Stops being your vision, but is more commercially viable.
Speaker A:Which led me to ask if perfectionism kills feel.
Speaker B:My wife is a perfectionist.
Speaker B:This is not music related.
Speaker B:And so it's amazing that she's, you know, settled for me, but it stops her doing everything.
Speaker B:I think perfectionism can be a real joy killer.
Speaker B:It can be wonderful.
Speaker B:But I done is better than perfect.
Speaker B:Music is a language, isn't it?
Speaker B:And learning a language.
Speaker B:If you're a perfectionist, you'd never speak, would you?
Speaker B:You know, I mean, the amount of times I've stuttered, the amount of editing you're gonna have to do to this interview to just make me sound coherent is astonishing.
Speaker A:All part of the job, Toby, because.
Speaker B:You'Re thinking and you're trying to, you know, but communication is the key.
Speaker B:I mean, I speak to a certain extent Italian.
Speaker B:I've spoken Italian for a long time.
Speaker B:I'm nowhere near fluent, but I can talk to people.
Speaker B:I can communicate, you know, if I make a mistake, I mean, the cultural differences.
Speaker B:The Italians are very welcoming when you.
Speaker B:You at least try to speak their language, but they won't correct you.
Speaker B:They'll use the correct term in their response.
Speaker B:Do you know what I mean?
Speaker B:They're not saying you're not valid because you're not communicating.
Speaker B:And music's the same.
Speaker B:As long as you're communicating, you're serving a purpose.
Speaker B:You have musical skill because you are able to communicate.
Speaker B:You are able to speak to other people.
Speaker A:We also spoke about today's landscape, Streaming short form content, even AI.
Speaker A:Toby was quite philosophical.
Speaker B:I think there are always a set of problems to be solved as a musician or composer, as anyone, really.
Speaker B:But I think that whether you're working to a brief or whether you're writing music for the coronation of the king, or whether you're performing music at someone's wedding, your song, solving problems constantly.
Speaker B:Now, I think those problems change, and I think that's what drives composers and musicians of a new generation, is they have a different set of problems to solve than I had the same problems now, you know, so short form content.
Speaker B:Sure.
Speaker B:The problem is, how do you get people's attention in 20 seconds or three seconds is the.
Speaker B:Is the received wisdom, isn't it?
Speaker B:How do you write something and I can't do it because I like intros and things, and they are wildly forbidden now.
Speaker B:But how do you get someone's interest in three seconds that will make them stay for 30 seconds?
Speaker B:AI, how do you ensure that your music doesn't sound like AI, which I've been accused of you've AI'd this, I wouldn't know where to start.
Speaker B:It's just a different set of problems and it's just.
Speaker B:It's creating a different breed of composer in the same way that, you know, when we all got sample libraries, we're solving a different set of problems, aren't we?
Speaker B:We're working to a different brief.
Speaker B:So I don't see it as necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker B:It's just a changing landscape.
Speaker B:So I. I don't think that composers are being pushed more towards skill or feel as separate things.
Speaker B:I think it's just they're being pushed to use the tools available to them in a different way.
Speaker B:So whether that is driven by feel or technique is down to the individual.
Speaker A:Finally, I asked Toby the big question one more time.
Speaker A:How do you balance musical skill with feel?
Speaker B:For me, the goal is to get to a place where they are synonymous, where they're indistinguishable.
Speaker B:I think that if you can understand something, I sort of coined it 360 degree understanding.
Speaker B:If you can understand from an analytical point of view, you can study technique to a point where you're just going to.
Speaker B:You're going to max out.
Speaker B:And I think it's the same with feel.
Speaker B:You're going to get to a point where you need some technical ability.
Speaker B:It needs to be everything all at once.
Speaker B:In order to balance those two things, they have to be in distinct.
Speaker A:So there we have it.
Speaker A:Skill unlocks feel, feel gives skill meaning.
Speaker A:And maybe the balance isn't half and half, maybe it's 100% of both.
Speaker A:My thanks go to saxophonist and composer Toby James.
Speaker A:Thanks for listening, Soundmaker.
Speaker A:If you enjoyed this episode of the Sound Session, please share it with a friend or leave a review wherever you listen.
Speaker A:And if you'd like to send me your favourite sound, head to thesoundsession.uk until next time, keep listening and keep creating.
