Minor Flaws (a very short story)

The dude came highly recommended, but the dude had serious tude! He strode into the studio with an air of arrogance I’d never before experienced, not in all my days of being a musician.

I needed some melodic percussion for a Caribbean flavored tune and I found him through the usual channels. The tune was fairly straight ahead, fusing reggae and calypso rhythms with a pop bent. The changes were simple, the chord progression was made up of mostly diatonic patterns in the key of F.

We started overdubbing and every time he played a line over a G- triad he played a B natural instead of a Bb. What the ?, I couldn’t understand it, neither could DP. We stopped recording and I asked our haughty percussionist to check his part, perhaps he was having trouble reading it, maybe the copy was smudged or illegible. “No”, he told us, “the part is fine”. When I pointed out that he was playing a B natural over a G minor triad in the middle of a diatonic pop tune in the key of F (context is important here- the definition of a “wrong note” has more to do with context than anything else) he went on to state that, “B natural is right, I’m playing the correct note.” We debated this for several minutes- so much for basic music theory!

I wasn’t about to engage in any further discussion on the matter, or teach a basic theory lesson to someone who was purported to be a professional studio musician and music professor at a local college.  I ended the session immediately (needless to say he was fuming and outraged that I dismissed him without hesitation).

I changed the arrangement, brought in new personnel and had a lot of fun overdubbing and mixing the tune. It worked out well in the end, and not a single B natural was ever heard!