John Moxey

Every working musician carries three different relationships with instruments at once, and most of us never separate them out. There are the ones you play — where you’ve lived in the instrument long enough that technique gets out of the way. There are the ones you fake — where, given retakes and the forgiveness of a DAW, you can get a part down that holds up in a mix, even though you’d be exposed inside eight bars live. And there are the ones you understand well enough to write for — instruments you may never touch, but you know the idiom, the register breaks, the voicings a player would actually choose. The third category is the one most of us underrate. It’s also the one that quietly separates a workable arrangement from a great one.