tocharian wrote: I will say, though, that you'd be hard pressed to find a hot-shot classical musician who can't improvise something mean. They have the musicality, theoretical and technical chops to do it. Are rock musicians' improvisational skills generally comparable to jazz musicians'? I'm not quite sure what this is all about.
I have opposite experience.
In my two years of writing and producing music for TV commercials toward the end of the tape-and-musicians era, I worked with Chicago Symph. Orchestra people six or seven times.
Three of those times involved a rock or jazz soundtrack. I have news for you. While fine people, these musicians were the least improvisationally inclined or gifted I ever worked with in or out of a studio. They were avowed white-knuckled sheet-clingers. I will never forget the deer-in-the-headlights look we got from them when simple discussion of the simple score took place outside of the visual language of the manuscript.
When the session copyist (his fee an expense only necessary for these sessions with orch people) forgot to spell out tiny rests that a drummer would just feel in half a second, it hurt progress.
I'm not talking about geriatric people here, either. These were people maybe ten years out of school. They weren't being difficult on purpose, either, you could tell they just had a comfort zone and that was when the instructions were in front of their noses. Take that away, and they would actually stare at you blankly.
Anyway, thought I'd suggest that being trained to read / worship instructions can seriously get in the way of developing similar proficiency at writing / proposing instructions. It can certainly get in the way of having a conversation using music.
-r