So last week I talked a little bit about the relationship that is necessary between a songwriting teacher and student. Generally speaking, the idea is that a teacher needs a high level of investment in the student to understand how they can improve. One key thing that I didn't cover at all in that last post was the musical ability of the student (or teacher for that matter). Now I think it is relatively obvious that a person with advanced technical ability on an instrument can have a real edge over someone who can't play at all. Why, though, does it seem that there are so few truly phenomenal writer/instrumentalists? I mean you find the occasional Richard Thompson, Jason Isbell, or Eric Clapton out there, but by an large the great songwriters of the modern era have been your average joe strummer (pardon the pun). I think the reason for this is that the folks out there who excel in the technical aspects of any instrument are less melody oriented that the person who has a general, chord oriented skill set. Though a technical master may eventually reach a state in which their skill enables highly memorable, melodic playing, it takes a long time focusing on individual techniques to reach that point. A songwriter, on the other hand, doesn't really need to play anything at all. In fact, many of the best songwriters out there write without an instrument in their hand. Insanely successful writer/teacher Jason Blume swears he never writes with an instrument. Instead he just hums, scats, sings, and generally experiments with little bits of melody in his head until he is happy that a melody is super memorable. In the early parts of his career, even after being a singed writer, he had to bring in guitarists to figure out the right chords to go under his melodies. His publishers didn't care about this though, because, really who ever remembers chords? Everyone remembers melody. In fact often his lack of technical skill on an instrument freed Jason Blume to think outside the box and therefore come up with some totally fresh ideas. I hear a lot of people say, "I couldn't write a song if I had all the time in the world." I always disagree. I'm not saying you're going to write like Timbaland if you can't even strum a guitar, but anyone can come up with a melody and that's what is really important.