The Good Musician

Why Songs Are Like Lasagna

by Arjun Muralidharan on July 21st, 2007

Picture this: Last night you might have eaten leftovers. Lasagna. Mmh. You don’t really care what’s in it.

But once you know there are carrots, tomatoes, some spinach etc. in there, you start savoring the single flavors of each item, enjoying your dish that much more. Now before I tempt you to run for the fridge, let me tell you that a musical piece is just like Lasagna. It consists of many components to form one smooth mass. You can even apply the analogy of layers to both.

Simple exercise: Listen to a song (like we learned earlier) and try to describe in your own terms these aspects:

1. Rhythm: Feel the beat, can you tap it with your fingers?
2. Harmony: Is is happy or sad? Does the main melody sound strange or pretty simple?
3. Orchestration: What instruments are around?

Today I want you to focus more on orchestration. Listen to a bunch of songs, try to find out the orchestration, then check using Wikipedia.

If you use MusicIP.com to explore unknown music, you can check yourself later to see if the band really consists of those instruments.

Orchestration is important, because it improves our understanding of music played in a group. Once you understand that songs are usually not a one-man show (not even in Jack Johnson’s case), you will be less frustrated with the fact that you can’t play the song alone in it’s full glory.
You can however, create a version just for the orchestration available to you. You can use a guitar to improvise percussion, don’t just play the part identical to the original.
If you have a band, but don’t have a piano, find a different way to play those notes. Or decide that this song is not playable by your formation, and waste less time trying.

In practice, you can learn a lot about formations if you try playing in jam bands. Kevin Palmer of b5media runs an excellent blog on jam band news.

Be sure to ask your questions in the comments below, learning music is never a one-sided operation. So drop the scare and ask your questions if something is unclear.

POSTED IN: Listening Lessons