To a hammer, everything looks like a nail… 😂

There’s only one common thread at this forum. We all use arrangers. Not that we are all ‘entertainers’, not that we all sing, not that we all play professionally, not that we all sit alone in our bedrooms with headphones on, unwilling to force others to listen to our noodling… No, our only thing in common is that we own arrangers.

I sometimes wonder, when the focus of one’s life is to brand oneself an ‘entertainer’ and happily admit shortcomings in playing music, whether one engages much on forums that are specifically for ‘entertainers’, singers etc.? Or is it only here that we receive the benefit of your life’s direction?

There’s probably a forum somewhere where young singers with minimal playing skills want hard won advice about a career as a lounge and restaurant entertainer. Or maybe not, given how different the business is nowadays, and how utterly different making modern music is. But I wouldn’t know. I’ve never joined one of those forums. I wonder if you have?

My only interest is in using arrangers to make music, as one of the arsenal of different types of keyboards I own, and use for both professional use and home enjoyment. And I think the one thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of playing just about everything with keys on it ever invented, from piano to accordion to pipe organs to electronic organs, from clavinets and Rhodes’, Wurlitzers, string machines, monophonic synths to polyphonic synths, from workstations to samplers to loopstations and virtual synths and yes, arrangers is…

None of them sound any good until you play them well. But the only one that can fool you into thinking they sound good when you don’t is the arranger!

It gets pretty hard to find a thread here that sooner or later doesn’t trot out the old ‘but I can’t play professionally so I use an arranger’ excuse. As if owning one of them somehow means that improving your playing is no longer necessary. I sometimes wonder if the admitted hours, days, weeks that some people admit to spending to find a workaround for not being able to play full chords or inversions would pay higher dividends is that time had been spent actually practicing the chords so you never have to worry whether a chord scheme gets dropped by a manufacturer, or you have to unlearn an ingrained habit so you can move to another manufacturer’s product!

And this goes across the board….

Sadly, there’s no silver bullet, weaknesses in your technique are only all too apparent to all but an audience that is barely listening to you. I am convinced that most of us waste most of the time necessary to fix basic playing errors worrying about styles, or sounds, or the necessities of figuring out the shortcuts that arrangers provide.

An hour a day. A half hour a day. Ten minutes a day. What can you afford..? How much are you already spending not playing, but figuring stuff out on your arranger? Spend as much on simply learning a new chord voicing. Spend as much on learning to bend and breathe like a sax player. Spend as much on two handed piano playing (and turn on your arranger’s Piano Mode). Spend as much on working on not rushing….

That’s time that will pay off for the rest of your life. Work on the minutiae of arranger operation only pays off until the manufacturer changes how they do things… and we all complain about how often that is!

An arranger gives the illusion of musical progress. The backing sounds better each generation of model. But without basic work on the stuff YOU play, there’s one thing that sounds as bad no matter how often you pay a fortune for a new arranger.

Playing better isn’t isn’t a ‘professionals only’ thing. It’s a ‘musician’ thing. And unless you are content to live out your life knowing you have to rely on being a great singer to cover up something you could have fixed in an hour a day, or 30 minutes a day, whatever, I think it’s worth the time and effort. Or one day, you might be penning a post explaining how, the less you played, the better you sounded! 🎹