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Hi all,
I've had this issue for much of my musical life, and I'm wondering if any others have felt this way and overcome it.
I spent an enormous amount of time learning and copying songs and solos that I liked, but I've never transitioned to the point of "feeling like a musician". I improved my technique and ability to play - I should say, to "execute" (reproduce the notes and even the feel/groove/timing) of quite complicated songs on guitar. But when not doing that, my musicality feels "small".
I don't feel I have improved my "musicianship".
Now I'm intentionally being a little vague with this question - because I want to see if others have had this feeling - and I'd like the comments to have more to do with your personal journey regarding how you feel about your playing and what you did to feel you reached the "next level" (whatever that meant to you). Especially if you went through a phase where you felt more like a song "copycat" record-player style mechanic than a "real musician"
I would prefer that it not become solely a discussion on how to learn the rudiments"....though I don't deny this may well be part of your answers and fit into what I need to spend more time on.
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Hi Joe,
I would suggest getting out of your comfort zone. You have learned a lot of songs and licks so just start there but put your own style to it. Another words just jam until something clicks, Note that is how most of my songs start!
Pick a BiaB style you are familiar with first then jam with it. Then move on to styles that are out of your comfort zone.
I have posted songs out of my comfort zone and some responses were you should do that more often. What I didn't post are the many failed attempts to get to a post quality, in my opinion anyway, song.
Another thing I have done is to input chords and have the melodist generate a lead. Then I take a section or two out of that lead and make a song out of it.
Learn the pentatonic scale and start jamming from them. There are books and video on how to play and generate leads from that scale. In fact when I was teaching I started my students jamming and composing started with the pentatonic scale.
I hope this helps.
When you are at the checkout line and they ask if you found everything say "Why, are you hiding stuff?"
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
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I don't think I've ever really felt like a "copycat". If you play an instrument, you are a musician. I think the defining point is when you play that very first song on your own, from start to finish and pull it off with a certain level of competence. And truth be told, that level doesn't have to be very high in the beginning.
My early years of learning songs on the radio were the foundation where I learned how to play by ear. This led to the backyard, basement, and garage jam sessions where people learned to play and improvise over the songs and chord progressions. I recall hundreds of jam sessions involving 1,4,5 chords played over and over. Essentially, the way I see it, whether you are creating only original music or playing 100% cover material, that qualifies you as a musician. No "ifs, ands or buts" about it.
You can find my music at: www.herbhartley.comAdd nothing that adds nothing to the music. You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both. The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
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I echo what Guitarhacker is saying. I'm certainly no pro but no "copycat" either. Playing (or singing) songs on a chosen instrument (or your voice) from start to finish is also how I define a musician. If the song is a cover, then adding elements to make it your interpretation is also important.
In my opinion, if you record yourself and then in your DAW have to cut, paste, copy, snip, stretch, move, flip, chop or otherwise perform major surgury on your recording to get it to a listenable state, then you probably haven't learnt the song to begin with and you are functioning more as a computer operator than a muscian. If there is a magic short cut here, I'm unaware of it. For those of us that are not gifted prodigies it takes work, effort, repetiveness, motivation and time; in other words, a journey that you have to invest in. And for me there is more satisfaction in the 2-steps forward and 1-step backwards journey than the end result.
Everyone has their own personal motivation(s). For me it's about three things: 1) the thrill of the hunt (that is, the process of learning the new song), 2) the passion for music and 3) the sense of accomplishment in producing a body of work.
I think for most people starting out, it has to begin with goal setting.
Edit: Another point to be made is that with todays tools it has never been easier to learn to play songs. Decades ago, tools to slow down a track, transpose it or loop it didn't exist. I wouldn't be surprised that some on this forum are well-aquainted with dropping needles on vinyl day after day in order to learn the riff causing the needles and the vinyl to literally wear out. We should admire such folks.
https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677BiaB 2025 Windows For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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Not sure but it happened around 1969 for me. Vanilla Fudge, Carlos Santana, BS&T and Eric Clapton among others opened my eyes in the mid-late 1960s by doing cover songs that didn’t sound at all like the original records.
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Perhaps because I started young, perhaps I started in school band, and perhaps because my father used so sit around and strum the uke while reading the chords from a music book as we all sang along, I never felt like a copycat.
While in school, we played classical music, note for note. The bandmaster/conductor directed, and we followed. Later on, as I heard different interpretations of the same symphonies, I realize we were playing his version, his expression, and his musicianship.
I also was in little rock bands, doing our best to cover the songs of the day. It was a great way to have fun, meet girls, and make s a little money.
After graduating I toured the country in a cover band, and little by little, taught myself how to improvise solos. It was a great way to make a living, have fun at work, and meet girls, who were by then, young women.
Now I do a mix of covers similar to the record, to covers entirely reimagined and completely different. It's a great way to have fun at work, interact with my wife/duo-partner, and make enough money to survive.
I don't think playing a cover song is any more of being a copycat than when I played my part in a great symphony when I was in school.
And I don't think of yourself as a copycat musician. Don't try to be a copycat, and don't try to not be a copycat, it'll happen by itself. Plus, it will happen gradually without you knowing it.
If you play a song enough times, your phrasing, your dynamics, and your musical ornaments will naturally come out. It just happens.
And as you learn more and more songs, what you learn will mix in your musical brain and eventually what you play will become your musical voice.
Mrs. Notes and I have been in a duo since 1985. We played cover songs for years at gigs. They gradually change by themselves. Years later, if we hear the original, sometimes we'll be surprised at how much we changed the song to make it ours.
Play any songs enough times, and it will happen to you, too.
Insights and incites by Notes ♫
Bob "Notes" Norton  Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com
100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks
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Great suggestions, thoughts and takeaways - thanks for sharing. And do weigh in if you haven't already : )
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That one's easy. I'm not good enough to be a copycat. 
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While in school, we played classical music, note for note. The bandmaster/conductor directed, and we followed. Later on, as I heard different interpretations of the same symphonies, I realize we were playing his version, his expression, and his musicianship.
I also was in little rock bands, doing our best to cover the songs of the day. It was a great way to have fun, meet girls, and make s a little money.
After graduating I toured the country in a cover band, and little by little, taught myself how to improvise solos. It was a great way to make a living, have fun at work, and meet girls, who were by then, young women. Not unlike how I started. I held down a symphony chair in high school. Audition was easy in 1969: Tell the local Youth Symphony conductor you can play bass.
BIAB 2024 Audiophile, 24Core/60CoreGPU Core M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia, M1 MBAir, 2012 MBP/color]
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Not unlike how I started. I held down a symphony chair in high school. Audition was easy in 1969: Tell the local Youth Symphony conductor you can play bass. I had the same director in both Jr. high school (middle school) and high school. Besides teaching us how to play the notes correctly he taught us how to express ourselves. Little things like dragging the beginning of a phrase and then rushing the end to catch up, or the opposite. How to rush the second beat of a Viennese waltz and to use our feelings to determine how much. How to use dynamics to turn those empty notes into saying something. And so many more. And he taught us how to listen to others doing those things (probably the most important of lessons) The result for me was never getting anything but "superior" in state solo & ensemble contests, and I sat "first tenor" in the all-state band every year. Besides being first tenor, I was also given the section leader title, so the first alto, who usually gets that title by default, had to listen and use my phrasing, my dynamics and my vibrato. I can't thank my first teacher enough for showing me how to find the expressive devices that are not and cannot be written into the sheet music. The nice thing about music, is you can live a long live and still discover more and more. Insights and incites by Notes ♫
Bob "Notes" Norton Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com
100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks
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That one's easy. I'm not good enough to be a copycat. Easily the truest thing yet. Try "covering" a very simple song from a 4 piece band. Bass, Drums, and 2 rock guitars ...... something like AC/DC. It's simple. It's easy, but very hard to do. I admire the talent in these tribute "cover bands" you see on YouTube that sound like the original bands.
You can find my music at: www.herbhartley.comAdd nothing that adds nothing to the music. You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both. The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
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How to rush the second beat of a Viennese waltz... Oh man, you had one of the good teachers! As a conductor, I have had to explain this to many ensembles over the decades. I learned about it from reading Oscar Levant where he wrote about his arguments with Gene Kelly over "By Strauss" in An American in Paris. I would make ensembles listen to this on my cassette recorder so that they would understand.
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<...snip...>
Oh man, you had one of the good teachers!<...> Indeed! And I thank him to this day. It's one thing to teach somebody which buttons to press, how to count rhythms in notation, intonation, and all the other fundamentals, but another to turn that into music that is expressive. In the early days of the Internet, I tracked him down, gave him a phone call, and thanked him for teaching me the skills to become a good musician. We had a nice long chat, and he invited me to come stay with him if I was ever in his area. Now I know how to listen for things like advancing or delaying beat 2 and 4 in various pop music forms, and how much to do it per song. (Swing feel included.) Various ways to phrase melodic lines. When to play in tune and when to play slightly out of tune for expressive purposes. Vary my articulation from legato to staccato for each note, depending on its relationship with its neighbors and the entire phrase. And so much, much, more. I not only use what he taught me, but since it opened my ears, I constantly expand by noticing and learning so much more when listening to and playing music. I now play sax, flute, wind synthesizer, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard synthesizer, plus vocals in various levels of competency and incompetency. Learning to sing was the hardest of all to learn. This enabled me to write aftermarket styles for Band-in-a-Box, and it supplements my main career as a professional musician. Understanding rhythm for different types of music allows me to make better styles that are more fun to play melodies to. There is a lot to be said about learning from YouTube and other Internet resources, but there is something that a good teacher can give you that you cannot get any other way. But it has to be a good teacher, like my first one. Thank you, Robert C. Monroe, for opening my ears. Insights and incites by Notes ♫
Bob "Notes" Norton Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com
100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks
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<...snip...> I admire the talent in these tribute "cover bands" you see on YouTube that sound like the original bands. I stared out in a cover band. We played Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and others. After school, I got in a rock cover band, we were terrible, but we were still kids. Fast-forward to today. I'm in a duo with the woman who became my wife, http://www.s-cats com We do some songs "like the record", some similar, some generic, and some totally reimagined. I use my years of on-stage experience to decide whether to cover it like the record, change the genre and everything else about it, or somewhere in between. Hopefully my intuition is right, and the crowd will love it. I've had some bad ideas, and it's back to the drawing board for those (and learn a lesson in the process). The audience will let the performer know if he/she is doing it right. I make my own backing tracks, and if doing a "like the record" cover, I learn a lot of new things that came from the minds of other musicians. I can apply these lessons to my original work. It also opens up my ears. I'm working on a request from a good audience member, Blood, Sweat & Tears' "I Love You More Than You Will Ever Know". Listening to the drums, bass, keyboards, guitar, organ, winds, backing vocals and everything else, one part at a time, made me hear things I never heard in the song before. It's time-consuming, but I'm having fun. We learn by copying others, and if I live to be 200, I'll still have plenty more to learn. Then we internalize what we copied, mix it up with everything else we've learned, and what comes out is you (or in my case, me). There is nothing wrong with copying, being in a cover band, being in a tribute band, being in an original 'art music' band or combining them. If you are enjoying playing the music, and the people who listen to it are having a good time, you are doing it right. Insights and incites by Notes ♫
Bob "Notes" Norton Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com
100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks
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If you are enjoying playing the music, and the people who listen to it are having a good time, you are doing it right. The bands I have been in have been cover bands. We mostly reinterpreted the songs into our our very loosely cobbled together style. The people liked what we did, danced, drank, had a good time, and came back to see us over and over.
You can find my music at: www.herbhartley.comAdd nothing that adds nothing to the music. You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both. The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.
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https://soundcloud.com/user-646279677BiaB 2025 Windows For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.
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My thought is to not waste my time. If you think the members of the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Chicago Symphony, London Symphony, Staatskapelle Dresden, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, Daniel Barenboim, Joshua Bell, Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Vladimir Ashkenazy,Alicia de Larrocha, and so many others are copycats, your opinion doesn't mean anything to me. Copying or originality has nothing to do with being a real musician. Insights and incites by Notes ♫
Bob "Notes" Norton Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com
100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks
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