OK,
I'll admit it – a) I'm from Derby, and b) (possibly because of a) )
- I'm not really into football.
But
everyone loves a good underdog story, and you have to love the fact
that a team with a fraction of the budget of the Arsenals, Chelseas,
and Manchester Uniteds have taken on the big buys and beat them fair
and square. Certainly, a great many of my students have been nursing
hangovers this week past..
So,
what can us musos learn from this? Leicester's secret – as one of
my drummer friends told me several times, in various states of
inebriation – has been playing as a team. No showboating, no
egos. No one member out to make a name for themselves.
Let's
take a moment to think about how this applies to guitarists. A look
through a list of the greatest session guitarists will reveal names
like Steve Lukather, Steve Cropper, Nile Rodgers, Tim Pierce and
Cornell Dupree – not all of them exactly household names, but all
of them consistently working across years and sometimes decades.
Check out their discographies and prepare to scrape your jaw off the
floor.
So
what do these guys have in common? What makes them so consistently
employable?
Steve
Cropper described his approach as “listening to what everyone else
was playing. It didn't make sense to me to be stepping on a drum fill
or a bass line or a horn line. I would stay out of the way of
everyone else,. And then, when I'd find a hole, I'd jump in there and
fill it”.
Nile
Rodgers: “To me the more information you hear, the less funky it
is. Less is more in my world.”
Tim
Pierce (On the Goo Goo Dolls sessions): “Johnny (Reznik) plays all
of the acpustics and quite a few electrics and then I come in to try
to fill what's missing.”
Steve
Lukather: “I don't think I'm the best guitar player, matter of
fact, I'm very self deprecating. I don't think I'm that good at all”
Cornell
Dupree (as described by Bernard Edwards): “We never stepped on each
other's toes – it was like a polite conversation.”
Claudio
Ranieri (Leicester's manager) - “We fight for each other on the
pitch. We are 11 when we go on to the field and in all my career I
don't think I have known a team as strong at being together.”
The
message is pretty clear – any team enterprise, be it band or
football team – you're a team. And a team is only as strong
as it's weakest link. Don't be that link.
