Make Money from Music course

On the 20^th October I am running a course about making money from music and it will look at building a business involving playing and teaching and creating streams of income that support one another.
The whole idea of this is an extension to the teaching that I do and that many of my pupils go on to play and teach, and like all things you can fall into the same traps that we all do trying to run a small business.
Many errors that are made are due to the fundamental attitude of running a business. You might not fail because you are a bad musician but you will fail because you are bad at business or bad at communicating.
I think the reason that I have lasted so long is that I am quite good at building a rapport with pupils and this does give me an advantage over a number of other teachers that I know, none of whom are guitarists I hasten to add.
If you are interested in attending contact me on vichyland@msn.com  the cost is only £50 for the day and this will repay itself many times over.
Vic

Discovery using old technology

I like to spend time watching and talking to musicians who play music unfamiliar to me, I find their music inspiring and on many occasions incredible and gives me new ideas about my music and my teaching practices.
Stepping outside ones comfort zone is very important for the process of learning and yet it is the very thing that we are not doing and as a society it is becoming endemic that we are ring fencing what we know. This is happening in a way that you may not spot because it is happening all around you; I will sum up it in two words, Google and Amazon.
As a kid I spent lots of time in the library and one of my favourite books as a child was an encyclopaedia. I had and still do have a fascination for new ‘facts’ and ideas and I have always made a point of looking at things in circles. I looked at circles that touched the circle of what I knew and then moved into a circle that touched that, so as an example I might look up the Roman empire which would take me to the Greeks and then to the myths and then to Hindu myths and then meditation and then to Ayurveda and so on.
Also you would stumble by ‘accident’ on something you really did not know so you might in a library see a book that was put back in the wrong place etc. this does not happen if you follow the rules of Amazon because they suggest books to you based on what you have browsed or have bought so it reinforces what you already think. Now if you throw dice to determine what you did well that would really open up the possibilities of learning!
Google gives you things that are chronological common in your searches so you get the stuff that others are searching, now for someone who is rather weird like me that is not what one wants. I know that raising your profile through traffic on twitter and Facebook makes it possible for you to compete in the traffic online easier (!) but not for discovery in something old which brings me back to the book found in a second hand shop or in the library. Let us face it that was the old World Wide Web maybe it could help you to discover things and be creative in ways that may in the near future be different from the crowd.
Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk one day course in October to make money from music contact for details

Someone is controlling your life and guess what, it isn’t you….. at the moment.

I was preparing for a course that I am running next week which explores creative techniques of playing music and within that I wanted to show how much we are controlled by the outside world.
Richard Bandler says that it is not a case of ‘can I be put into a trance but more a case of what trance am I in?’ We move from one trance state to another and the trick is to be able to choose your trance and it not to be dictated by someone else.
As an experiment I used a technique which I have used before, but speeded up, where my partner managed to make her memory of the colour of the front door of a previous home disappear, in fact the door in her memory vanished so as she thought of the house it had no front door. This took about three minutes to achieve.
Music is such a great way of exploring the unconscious and to be great artists we need to develop that muscle of creativity. One of the first things that we need is to get out of the straight jacket that society has put us in. Start by dreaming what you want and then present it as already happened, this puts it into our unconscious, and then let it fly. Strangely being detached from this emotionally at this point works a bit like buying something online, the emotion is there before the purchase, once you have confirmed the sale forget about it; it is going to be posted anyway.
What the unconscious does is spot opportunity, because you have not 'forgotten the colour of the front door' and therefore you can 'see' opportunity because you are empowered, remember the whole system of society is wrapped up in disempowerment; education, health, wealth creation, getting old, everything.
When you realise the doctors look sicker than you and the teachers who are teaching your children are not the sort of people that you would let plan your life based on their wisdom as many are fresh out of university so why are they the fonts of knowledge for you most precious thing, your child? And why are the politicians who make the decisions such bunch of self-opinionated ego obsessed twits? Because we supposedly are not clever enough to be in control ourselves so we have given it to some asshole from Eton. How did we get there? Well when we build people to be aware of their genius and use all the resources to honour that then we will build great societies of creative people, people who will make decisions about what they are good at not being manipulated into doing science because 'we need more scientists or engineers' who are the 'we' anyway?
Back to the creative musicians, put to one side the stuff that you have programmed that limits you and start with a new belief, not that you need to be saved by a beneficent god or saviour that is all part of the control. Ancient people did not believe this, they believed that they worked in harmony with their gods and in many cases their gods where fallible and had weakness like us in fact we could become gods in their eyes. That to me sounds a great idea and maybe for all of us to become rock gods, goddesses and guitar deities; sounds like a good place to start dreaming.
Vic


 Check out www.bluescampuk.co.uk for three days of being a Rock musician