The Four Heavenly Kings, the most prosperous representative singers of the Chinese music business, are often accused in the current Internet environment: "The Four Heavenly Kings don't know musical instruments, so they fade out of sight", "The Four Heavenly Kings lack professional ability in music" and other topics. So do the Four Heavenly Kings really not know how to play musical instruments? The answer is: No.
Among the four heavenly kings, Jacky Cheung, Liming, and Aaron Kwok all have guitar playing ability and live guitar singing, Andy Lau has played erhu, Aaron Kwok and Andy Lau have all played drums. It's just that the number of times is very small, Jacky Cheung has played and sang the guitar about twice, Liming has also twice, Aaron Kwok once for drums and once for guitar. Andy Lau once erhu, once Jinggu. Basically, he has to perform two or three musical instruments in his career.
If we start purely from the perspective of musical instrument performance, then it is obvious that the answer to whether the Four Heavenly Kings will play musical instruments is: the Four Heavenly Kings have the most basic C key decomposition chord quarter note accompaniment ability, but do not have the ability to record music and perform musical instruments, including but not without: complex strumming rhythmic patterns, 32nd note syncopation, Solo, BPM time recording of quarters, eighths, sixteenth notes, custom techniques (hooking, overtones, dotting, kneading, etc.).
Therefore, in essence, the musical instrument performance of the Four Heavenly Kings is more inclined to a commercial image shaping rather than a real employment instrument performance. Therefore, it is wrong to talk on the Internet that "the Four Heavenly Kings can't play musical instruments", and the Four Heavenly Kings obviously have the ability to play in C key, but they are not so skilled. However, "the lack of professional ability of the Four Heavenly Kings in music" is to be discussed, if you stand from the perspective of singer-songwriters such as Jay Chou, it is true that the professional ability of the Four Heavenly Kings is insufficient.
Not being able to play musical instruments in private life does mean that the professionalism of the Four Heavenly Kings in music theory and basic skills does not meet the high requirements of a singer-songwriter, because the significance of musical instruments for a singer is biased towards the training and auxiliary meaning of music harmony, compositional thinking, and basic skills of pitch and rhythm.
From the 20th century to the 21st century, the requirements for singers have progressed from the era of commercial idols of the Four Heavenly Kings to the era of music professionalism. So why can musical instruments basically represent the depth of a singer's professional ability? Why don't the Four Heavenly Kings take musical instruments as an opportunity for them to rejuvenate their music careers? Just like when they took care of both film and vocal learning? Pick up musical instruments?
The significance of musical instruments for singers: the development of music concept and the improvement of music cognition are equivalent to the arsenal of soldiers
Singers, for us public, generally think that the singer identity of the Four Heavenly Kings is a job for the guy who eats with his vocal cords and throat. But in fact, in the industry, the singing of singers is called vocal music, and the performance of musical instruments is called instrumental music. Note: Vocal music is essentially instrumental music. That is to say, in the world of music: the human voice, the logic of our vocal cord singing, can be seen as a musical instrument that we naturally have.
However, there are the following musical differences between the two major artistic fields of vocal and instrumental music:
1: The vocal range of vocal music is limited, and the upper and lower limits are narrow. For example, the vocal range ability of the Four Heavenly Kings is generally concentrated in C3-C5. The expressiveness of instrumental music is unlimited, and the upper and lower limits are free from the physiological limitations of our vocal cords. Moreover, for instrumental music, there is no such problem as difficulty in vocalization, and the playing is perfect. Instrumental music makes reasonable use of mechanical and physical abilities to liberate the pitch limitations of music.
2: The timbre of instrumental music is fixed, while the timbre of vocal music is ever-changing. The fixed timbre has a specific strong color and musical style, while the variable timbre is highly malleable, and the emotion is more personalized and uniquely recognizable.
3: Vocal music is generally solo scenes, and instrumental music is generally ensemble scenes. This brings us to the lowest source of beauty in music: the four-part harmony – harmony. The most intuitive difference between a musical instrument and a non-musical instrument is the singer's understanding of harmony. and derived from harmony: basic skills of pitch and rhythm.
The main differences between instrumental music and vocal music correspond to the singer's three higher-order abilities: composition, arrangement, and harmony. Most of the vocal music is known, but instrumental music is still very typical of the lack of knowledge circulation, and for singers, the essence of whether or not there is an information gap is - instrument. These three abilities are the prototype of singers moving towards singer-songwriters, arrangers, and choral assistants, as long as singers get any one of these three fields, they have completed a major breakthrough in professional ability. For example:
- 1: Jay Chou's ability to compose music is to learn instrumental music, and then use the basic plate of composition to radiate and explore the ability of arrangement and harmony.
- 2: After dropping out of school by liking the guitar, Li Ronghao made a background and used the guitar as a cut to gain arranging ability, which then radiated to composition and harmony.
- 3: GAI Zhou Yan does not have the ability to compose and arrange, nor can he play an instrument, but Zhou Yan's pitch and instrument pair cooperate and gain harmony ability.
Whether it is composition, arrangement, or harmony, the professionalism of singers is increasing exponentially, and it is the basic requirement for singers to start playing music. In fact, the reason why the Four Heavenly Kings are gradually declining on the road of music in the 21st century is that music is more of an entertainment commodity for the 20th century, but in fact, in the 21st century, the public's requirements are increasing, and the essence of music products is: the emotional value of hearing. This value requires more professional techniques to express it.
The three main differences in vocal range, timbre, and ensemble will lead to certain cultural barriers in composition, arrangement, and harmony - singers' musical cognition will be divided into very distinct fields due to different attitudes towards musical instruments, such as:
1: The understanding of musical instruments in the idol market is polarized: there will be no musical instruments to sell faces, and there will be crazy publicity of musical instruments. But in essence, the use of instruments is still focused on playing and singing and simple C accompaniment, and posing will be more important than musicality.
2: The understanding of musical instruments in the folk market has become a fixed number: folk guitar is the mainstay. There will also be polarization here: youth ballads dominated by Da Bing, essentially beating characters with a guitar on their backs, and going to bestsellers. It has nothing to do with music. The other group is Zhao Lei's main folk song creators, and their main creative method is the guitar. This is where the transition from folk songs to composition is presented.
3: The understanding of musical instruments in the pop market is more professional: musical instruments will become the main means of composition, arrangement, and harmony for singers. Jay Chou, Lin Junjie's piano, Li Ronghao's guitar. and the arrangement and harmonic performance that all of them will have. The pop market will also show a kind of solo thinking because of the difficulty of playing and singing musical instruments: do not play and sing unless necessary. In other words: a singer-songwriter who plays an instrument and sings must not be as good as a soloist.
Because pop is different from folk songs, the difficulty of singing folk songs is low, and the threshold for guitar performance of folk songs is not high, so the field of folk songs will be more suitable for playing and singing character shaping. However, the popular professionalism, especially some R&B, funk and other music, their performance is very high, and in the case of difficult performance, instrumental performance and vocal singing can only do one of the two. So in fact, playing and singing is not necessary for pop singers. The underlying thinking is: the compatibility of harmony and beauty.
The musical instrument of the Four Heavenly Kings is positioned in the field of idols, and when the market demand is specialized, why not turn to specialization? Answer: The cost is too high;
Let's go back to the Four Heavenly Kings, the Four Heavenly Kings have only two or three instrumental performances in their twenty or thirty years of music career, and they are actually positioned more towards the idol market. Because the logic of the idol music market is: personality is more important than professionalism. For top commercial singers like the Four Heavenly Kings, two or three musical instrument performances can support the character label of the musical instrument, as for whether the instruments in the album are recorded by the Four Heavenly Kings themselves, obviously no one cares.
So, when the era enters the 21st century, especially in 2007, after the Four Heavenly Kings began to gradually fade out of the public eye, the professionalism of the entire industry has improved rapidly, so why are the Four Heavenly Kings not like back then, pay close attention to learning to make up for the professionalism of instrumental music, and complete the high-quality music production of composition, arrangement, and harmony? The answer is: the cost is too high and the risk is too great.
It takes a full 3 months for an instrument to go from being able to play it, or 3 years to play it casually and accidentally. Therefore, the Four Heavenly Kings also worked hard to learn musical instruments at that time, so that they could perform those two times. Generally speaking, it is difficult to play an instrument without three or five years without saying that you know how to play an instrument, and without ten years. This kind of self-confidence is very time-consuming.
This kind of time cost is actually very difficult to have for commercial singers, because for commercial singers, profit is the key, and music quality is not a must.
To sum up, the Four Heavenly Kings are good at musical instruments, but the learning cost cycle of musical instruments starts at ten years, and the excessively long investment period makes them give up the professional advantages brought by instrumental music in the current era.