What makes a good player a great player?

If you spend time looking at videos on YouTube of the young whiz kids who can play the most amazing solos, bass lines and drum solos you would be led to believe that the level of their technique is such that they are just about to take over.
The question I like to pose to my pupils is quite simply was Jimi Hendrix the best guitar player? Is Victor Wooten the best bass player? The answer is no if you are looking at technique, but what makes a great musician isn’t technique, it is all about having something to say. When Jimi Hendrix was on the scene, there were players such Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino Tal Farlow and many others including John McLaughlin who dwarfed him with their technique.
One thing that all great musicians have is a memorable way of playing, they are known for catchy and melodic ideas and that is the thing about wild technique it is often not tuneful or catchy. Like lots of jazz and lots of classical music it is not easily remembered, unless you’re a musician of course.
So get across to budding musicians the need for ideas to become melodically interesting not just to be like a jobbing musician’s way of playing, think of the bass line that would be played by someone like Paul McCartney or Sting. Because they are songwriters there is a tendency for them to play more melodically or for the bass line to support the chord sequences.
So try stripping an idea back to the basics and then make it sing a melody to you instead of playing by rote. Another idea is to ditch any idea that you play out of habit, really listen!
Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk learn to play in a band for three days

Food for thought

A few months ago we saw we saw an article about a café in Brighton which was using food due to be thrown away because it was after its best by date. The café takes the food makes it into meals which they then sell by donation. They were crowd funding to find a permanent residence for the café which currently is open one day a week at a church in the city. We pledged a small amount of money to help with the project.

Last week Sue and I went and paid a visit to the church to have a look at how the project was running we met with the organizer Adam who showed us some of the food that was being used and we stayed for lunch. There must have been two hundred  people come in for lunch when they opened the doors and it was all sorts from the homeless to  students and people like myself who realized that this was the best value for money café in the whole Brighton. Lunch was amazing, but what really stayed with me was the discussion that I had with Adam at the beginning when he was telling me how they get the food.

When they first started they would go through the bins of supermarkets collecting anything that had been thrown away but now they have established contacts with the supermarkets who now supply them. But what was truly shocking was the food banks, because of legislation were throwing away massive amounts of foodstuffs such as tinned food that was more than three months old obviously tinned food can last for years but such is the ridiculousness of the wastage due to the capitalist system and the law, where people are starving out on the streets, food is going to landfill.

This idea of wastage in the system is not confined to just the food industry, local councils waste extraordinary amounts of money because of ridiculous bureaucracy and National Health Service waste money because of ridiculous laws passed by governments who want to make their mark.

The Bluescamp project is supporting the café by putting on a concert at the church during March of next year, to us this is something that is an incredibly important aspect of community, where some people are so willing to help and donate their time to such a worthy cause adding a bit of music to their promoting may help in some small way to highlight the work. I have placed beneath the website please check it out.

http://www.realjunkfoodbrighton.co.uk/

Vic

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  Learn to play in a band over three days

 

For education creativity is a dark art.

The focus of today’s education seems to be to change one focus away from the arts and on to the sciences,  as a guitar teacher and educator in creative thinking this is become a concern to me.

Over the past few months it has become obvious that pupils and parents have changed their attitude. There has been a general fear of missing any time from academic lessons even for 20 minutes to half an hour a week in order to learn a musical instrument. If they only knew what goes on in the course of a day at school where there are obvious moments where the teaching day is disrupted because of illness and lessons being covered by other teachers or just down time because of some other event like children misbehaving.

I know through personal experience of the 40 years of teaching and playing the guitar, artistic subjects activate areas of the brain which are virtually untouched in academic learning. However the government guidelines to things such as not taking any time off for holidays during the term time has meant parents have become terrified of their children falling behind in academic lessons.

Also statements like ‘we should be like the Chinese, we should work much harder as do other countries children’ this is fine if you want to make them into a number of robots. I have no problem with somebody wanting to be a scientist or engineer if they want to, but trying to turn people who are artistically inclined that way seems to be quite ridiculous.

To me it looks like education targets are being set by the accountants of the world of education with their tick box mentality in order to the next stupid ideology in order to win an arms race of education against other countries.

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

learn to play in a band in three days