Repetition is only good in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Which is to say, that no one, absolutely no one, likes being led to the same thing over and over and over again. Variation is the key to success!
Small variation, large variations that open doors to other ideas, other thoughts. But in the end, variation. Taking an idea and then reversing it, or slowing it down, speeding it up, speeding up a part of it (musically), slowing down a piece of it, taking off the beginning or the end and reversing their positions. This is variation.
The same idea can be expressed in different ways, but not the exact same way, over and over again. It’s annoying. It’s a little like fingernails on a chalkboard.
There’s a way around the problem of Repetition: Listen to the music, not your ego, and not what you ‘like’ to do. The music will tell you where, when, why, and most of all what to do, and then here comes the hard part – how to vary your ideas.
And so that we’re clear, ‘variation’ in this case is not new vocabulary, but rather a small change the order something is led, or when, or how.
