{"id":53,"date":"2005-09-20T09:09:41","date_gmt":"2005-09-20T17:09:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbueno.com\/wp\/meisakuki\/2005\/09\/20\/less_is_more\/"},"modified":"2005-09-20T09:09:41","modified_gmt":"2005-09-20T17:09:41","slug":"less_is_more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/2005\/09\/20\/less_is_more\/","title":{"rendered":"Less is more"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I noticed something about the way I&#8217;m writing these days.<br \/>\nLast night, I took this 16-measure sketch that&#8217;s been sitting around since 1999 and finally fleshed it out to a 3&#8217;20&#8221; song. At the time I wrote the sketch, I thought, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s part of the song &#8212; I&#8217;ll need to go back and add more later.&#8221;<br \/>\nAs it turned out, I added about six measures of new music to that sketch, then went about cutting and pasting the three different segments of the song till it reached a good length.<br \/>\nBack in 1999, I probably would have thought I needed a middle eight and a longer chorus and bridge to the chorus. Instead, I took a single melody and repeated it over and over again, but cut it up in asymetrical ways to keep it interesting.<br \/>\nA sketch that sat around for about six years was actually a song that was 72 percent complete.<br \/>\nI read a quote paraphrased from Igor Stravinsky back in music history class lo so many years ago, in which he said limitations stimulate creativity. A more specific way to say that is less is more.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m at the point with my songwriting where I even resist putting in middle eights. One of these days, I&#8217;m going to write an entire song on one chord!<\/p>\n<hr size=\"1\" width=\"50%\">\nAnother reason &#8212; probably the main one &#8212; this sketch went untouched for so long was because it&#8217;s a guitar song written on a keyboard.<br \/>\nI dashed out the main tidbit using a patch called Fluid Guitar, and I liked the way sounded. Thing was, I didn&#8217;t know much about guitar playing back then, and I didn&#8217;t want to end up writing keyboard music that can&#8217;t be transcribed easily to guitar.<br \/>\nNow that I&#8217;ve had time to get familiar with the guitar, I felt confident knowing I could avoid such pitfalls.<br \/>\nAnd it sounds pretty decent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read a quote paraphrased from Igor Stravinsky back in music history class lo so many years ago, in which he said limitations stimulate creativity. A more specific way to say that is less is more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkir-R","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/meisakuki\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}