The Mika Tyyskä interview is here!

Masters in Mechanics
#13

Presumably related to the platform changes @Troy and @Brendan have hinted at, I found mine not under “Credits” like past downloads, but already added to “Downloads”.

Only feedback is that there’s no longer a “date added” column in the “Downloads” table, so I had to “manually” know that there’s a new download available, know it’s name, and fnd that name in the list. I get there are compromises to be made re: how much information to cram into the screen, but the ability to sort by release date would be really handy. Or maybe have a separate “my-account” sublink for “newest 5 downloads” or similar, where I can tell at a glance what I don’t have yet (if anything).

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#14

Well, that was fast! We just turned this on about ten minutes ago. So yes you can now access file downloads from your account under “Downloads”. It’s greatly simplified. Just click to download files immediately, with no journey to another web site.

Previously you had to get a “credit” for something, then go over to Gumroad and “buy” the item for zero dollars. It was an annoying hack. So from now on, you can mostly ignore the “Credits” section.

We don’t have dates on products. We’ll think about sorting these some way. But someone who buys a bunch of a la carte items right now doesn’t really care what date those items came out in the distant past, only when they bought them. If anything, a date reflecting when you got access to that item, like a purchase, but not actually a purchase, is probably what you’re looking for, and that’s… more complicated!

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#15

Haha. We’re sneaky like that.

I like seeing the “You Got ____” emails in my inbox. For those of us that are driven to distraction and don’t always pick up on things in a timely fashion, the meta notice is awesome. Something similar would be much appreciated!

Coincidentally, just bugged a synth plugin maker to update their UI. As the years roll by and number of small, intangible cloud based items increase, nice to have the reassurance of being able to inventory easily.

Thanks for providing such amazing value over these past however many, many months. :slight_smile: Peace, Daniel

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#16

Was the Mika interview the final interview to be done outside of your new studio?

#17

Almost but not quite! More recently we also filmed interviews with Frank Gambale and Brendon Small in LA earlier this year.

We’re glad to be able to do most things now in the new studio, as it’s a lot easier for us to have a consistent setup all in one place. But we may still travel for interviews on occasion in the future if / when logistically necessary.

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#18

Interesting interview, although Not as technique orientated as I thought it was going to be.

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#19

I had to pause this at 26 mins to come over here and bust your chops a little. Everything he is telling you is music from a artistic standpoint. He is talking about characters, playing what a character would be doing, he doesn’t have a “bag of licks” for stuff… music is imagination man… you look at what you are doing and imagine.

#20

Are you talking about the part of the interview where I’m trying to figure out his fretboard map? I can see why you might feel this way - talking about improvisation is one of those sacred cows the way picking technique used to be. But the truth is you don’t just ‘imagine’ it and do it. Otherwise every player with ‘imagination’ would be equally eloquent on guitar, with a huge vocabulary of awesome things to play from every spot on the neck, no matter what chord is playing, and no matter what chord comes next.

Instead, there is a process at work of how he visualizes notes on the board. And great improvisers have a better view of this, so that they both have a bigger world of ideas to draw from, and better access to those ideas no matter where they are. So far what we’re seeing in our interviews is that their visualization is a mish mash of conscious and subconscious - even when you’re talking to really technical players like Gambale or Oz Noy. I’m trying to pull out the subconscious parts here and I’m absolutely still learning what questions to ask to get someone to where they can verbalize a subconscious thing. In no way am I great at this yet!

We do eventually get a little insight into how Mika thinks. He basically sees certain spots as home bases, in a CAGED sort of way, with some overlap to the frets immediately left and right on the neck. I don’t think we really got to the bottom of how he knows where the new notes are when the harmonies change out from under him.

Again, I’m still learning what questions work and don’t work with players on this subject. But there is no question in my mind at this point that you need a visualization system to be a good improviser, and that someone can be both very creative and pretty technical with harmony as a composer, and still not be very good at on-the-fly improv without it.

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#21

You are good man. I was just talking about the art side of things and tech talk not really meshing together in that section.

#22

That may very well be. Again, I don’t claim to be any kind of incredible interviewer. I think of it more like field work. I’m there to get the information and stay out of the way while doing so.

Re: creativity, I will admit I hate the phrase “hear in your head”. I have written lots and lots of music over the years. And very infrequently would I say I “heard” any of it in my mind first, and then recorded it. In fact, most of the things I walk around humming are pretty banal actually. The vast majority of the most interesting stuff I have come up with came from hands-on tooling around - playing something and going, hey that sounds cool, let’s try more of that. Somtimes on guitar, sometimes on keyboard. Different ideas spring from each, because the mechanics are so different.

We talk about this in Andy Wood’s workshops. I asked him how he writes tunes. He said the number one source of ideas was “gear related”. As in, turning on an amp to a sound that inspires him and getting an idea from that.

There may very well be people who imagine some melody in their mind, and work it all the way through to a completed piece. Mozart is said to have worked this way. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. It does conveniently fit with the “greatest prodigy ever” mythos that has grown up around him. So I think it’s worth being a little skeptical any time you hear stories of the greats and what they did or didn’t do.

But even if that’s true, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Mozart probably could not have written the intro to “Mean Street” by imagining it first. Considering the complex interplay of mechanical tinkering and music that is going on there, I doubt you can hear that without accidentally doing it first. Eddie is famous for that type of creative exploration. I take nothing away from him. On the contrary, it is one of his many gifts.

Maybe I’m reading too much into phrasing here. But when you have great players implying they’re walking around tuned to a mental radio with incredible ideas just pouring out of it all the time, I think it is potentially sending the wrong message about how creativity actually works. Sometimes the pedestrian hands-on things are where the ideas come from.

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#23

I’d love to find out how singer-songwriter types, or at least people who write music but don’t think of themselves as devotees of a particular instrument, do the same, particularly for vocal lines. I’m fairly convinced that you’re correct on this and that creativity doesn’t exist in some Platonic sense, so the development of that skill seems worth thinking about.

#25

I suspect it’s complicated. I would think there is always an instrument involved, even if it’s just campfire strumming on an acoustic - edit: or for that matter, just your voice. And I suspect that exerts an influence on the kind of music you eventually write. Mike Stern said this in our interview. If you’re a technical player, you’ll write more technical music. He was talking about Jim Hall and how wasn’t as technique-y but had great ideas.

I also suspect that the kind of instrumentation a person is familiar with also influences the “mental radio”. Someone may feel they’re being super off-the-cuff creative, but what they come up with will likely fit into categories they are already familiar with or have written before. If you learned music by listening to typical bass / chord type arrangements in rock you’re probably not going to wake up dreaming in counterpoint.

These are just hypotheses, and things that could be tested. Maybe a bunch of it has been. But if we hand-wave all the process away and go “it’s imagination”, that to me is similar to where we were in picking technique when the old guard was like “it works differently for everyone”.

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#26

A bit of a tangent, but this is why I hate this weird idea a lot of rock guitarists have that “I’ve learned all the modes of the major scale and how to build chords off of them, I Know Theory now.” The boxes you can’t see are the ones you don’t know how to deliberately break out of (and I’m sure there are plenty of boxes I can’t see, this doesn’t just apply to Those Other Guys).

#27

I know I go on about the “hearing in your head” stuff, but I don’t mean it to be an alternative to there being a process.

Martin Miller is one of the most systematic players out there and he will have students try to sing lines out of “nowhere” as part of improv training.

“Imagination” can only ever be a synthesis of stuff you’ve already got, and you’ve got to get it in there somehow before it can come out. For some people hearing stuff is enough, and for some people working it out on the instrument first is essential.

Here’s a view:

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#28

Sure! How else would a singer improvise.

Just to be clear, what I’m referencing with the “music in your head” thing is a specific type of comment, which comes up all the time in interviews with musicians, where they refer to their improvising or songwriting as being something they do in their mind first.

Even if we take those statements with a grain of salt, the repetitive nature of the stuff you find when you transcribe even stone-cold legendary improvisers suggests that this is not really what’s happening. Or if it is, then the internal “hearing” Hal Galper is referring to is playing back pre-recorded stuff a good portion of the time.

Which is fine! I can love someone’s creative output even if some aspect of what they do is repetitive, and even if I can tell they got the idea from some unromantic thing like the way the guitar is designed. Eric Johnson playing fives, or Frank Gambale playing those amazing fourths sweeps, is hearing a familiar voice that I love. But telling me that this simply comes out of nowhere from the music in their heads isn’t super helpful to someone who is learning.

And just to be double clear, I am not at all doubting there is an imaginative component to this. How could there not be? I just think we would probably all like to know more about how the imagination part works, and what role it plays in conjunction with the mechanical.

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#29

Any timeline on the Oz Noy, Frank Gambale, and the 2nd Martin Miller interview?

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#30

Yes, I’d like to know this too, and also an ETA on the Joe Stump interview.

I think it’s safe to assume the Oz Noy, Frank Gambale, Martin Miller and Joe Stump interviews will talk about technique more so than the Mika Tyyska one did?

#31

For sure. But it depends on what you mean by ‘technique’. In Martin’s case, getting his updated thoughts on his picking motion was the main point of him coming in again. And you’ve already seen a clip of Joe’s interview which is a discussion of economy mechanics. But we also spend a lot of time in that interview on metal harmony/modes, because that’s what Joe likes to talk about. Obviously in Frank’s case he likes to talk about sweeping so we did a lot of that. But we also spend a certain amount of time on fretboard access for improv soloing, which again, is what he is great at and knows.

So these are all different. It all depends on the player and what they like to talk about. Mika a songwriter and he thinks a lot about tone and gear so that’s what we talked about there.

Frank is coming soon, next week or so.

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#32

Sounds wonderful. Can’t wait to see Frank’s interview!!!

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#33

As I’ve spent a lot of time on sight singing related skills lately, and currently enrolled in a course on playing by ear, I can attest to the addictive nature of audiation as it develops. I find myself demanding I’ve a clear picture of what comes out of my hands. So while I have often groaned in response to that phrase myself, I have to say, I’ve come around 180 degrees as my ear and functional voice technique advance.

This is not to discount the spectrum of composition and instant composition styles in use out there and through the ages.

Oberlin professor, jazz guitarist Bobby Ferrazza impressed upon me the different levels of hearing that may be pursued and/or required. The biggest takeaway being that most of the time we are perceiving the shape of a thing, not the thing as a whole, and that only as one goes deeper with intent does the detail fill in.

Not essential for all musical styles, but pretty darn important to my happiness as a musician right now. Creativity married with fundamental music skills.

My two cents. Cheers.

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