I noticed that in many fields, simplicity is something that is pursued. Depends on the context, I agree on the saying “less is more” (unless if we are talking about Yngwie Malmsteen who said “less is less, more is more”). But what does it mean to be/do simple?
In Technology
The term Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) is often emphasized on many literatures about coding and software engineering [inetractive-design.org][wikipedia]. Software engineers tend to do something efficiently. In many cases, simplicity, if combined with efficacy, is efficient. Yet, writing this kind of software is not necessarily easy.
Cloud Native Data Center Networking book has a chapter just about the importance of the simplicity of network designs. One of the keypoints in that chapter is simple things tend to fail in a simpler way, which is easier to examine and fix.
Another thing that I notice is that simple also comes from the understanding of problems that we want to solve. So, it’s not only about doing less, but it’s about addressing the right problems. We tend to think too broad if we don’t understand the problem, making our solution is too long, ineffective, and even we sometimes don’t understand the solution itself.
I think this formula may work to address the right problem and come up with the right solution:
What?
Why?
How?
Why?
Try to understand the problem first by asking “what’s the problem?”. Then, try to understand the problem by asking “why is that a problem?”. We then try to find the solution by asking “how to solve that problem?”. We also want to criticize the solution by asking some “why”s like “why do we offer that solution? why does that solution work?”.
In Music
BB King plays relatively simple notes. Plain pentatonic, no sophisticated scale with weird names whatsoever. Yet, he is a huge guitar hero who had influenced the history of guitar playing. Matt Schofield and Victor Wooten explained in these videos:
Unlike technologies which are normally measured by some metrics, measuring music with any metric is useless because it depends on the taste and experience of the audience. Nonetheless, BB King showed that more notes did not necessarily make a greater player.
Some of BB King licks are not that difficult to copy (I repeat: some. Some other of his licks are very hard to imitate, especially the bendings and the vibrato). But, try to do as simple as BB King in a jam while killing it like he always did is very very very hard.
If, in technology, the simplicity basically relies on the ability understand the problem, in music, I think it relies on the ability to feel the rhythm and hit the perfect timing to play the notes. Of course it takes more than that, but at least that’s the starting point. And both require knowledge and experience.