A half heard thing George?

Nearly thirty years ago I was involved in a project with the son of Roger Moore, Geoffrey Moore. My band, Red Touch, were secconded into the project, with a few people being replaced mainly for political reasons. The band was very good but rather at odds with the zeitgeist of the moment which was two guys with funny hairdos playing keyboards.

It was here that I really honed my writing skills and a handful of numbers that I created at the time I still play, and were really pretty reasonable. This was due to the focus of a project backed by a management with record company interest, being paid to write songs is a good motivator.

I really got on well Geoff and he used to come over to my little cottage in Kent for tea with his then girlfriend, my girls were very young then and I think it was all a bit beyond them but they loved to see him along with Marie Chantelle (who is now married to the Prince of Greece, yes there is a prince of Greece). Geoff knew all of the celebrities from Sinatra to Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine to Jack Nicholson and he also knew George Michael.

The experience was rather bizarre of how the other half lived jetting about the world et cetera one of the strange events was after Geoff took some of our recordings to a party were George Michael was in attendance, the songs included one entitled Everyone Loves a Fool a jazzy ballad that I wrote for Geoff which really showed off his vocal skills as a crooner.

The band ran into a problem when Geoff was taken ill after the Christmas period and ended up in hospital in Beverly Hills. It all came crashing down over the next few months including an interview with his dad stating that Geoff had a drugs problem because of the band he was in which was rather sad because none of us had the money for any drugs even if we wanted to have a problem!

However the point of this is what happened about a year later when George Michael released Kissing a Fool it was so similar to my number, a jazz ballad in a similar tempo, similar groove and virtually the same title but what interested me was an interview that he did about the song and how it came about. The song apparently popped into his head while he was on a flight to America, of course those of you who do NLP will know that half heard things have real power to manifest as your idea as they pop out of your unconscious and I think this is what happened. I did not press the copyright issue for various reasons and I took it as a form of a compliment that one of my songs could do that. I would not say that they were exactly the same and I do not for one minute say that it was done deliberately but many of the recent copyright issues including Sam Smith’s copying of the Tom Petty song would classify in the same bracket of a half heard thing.

I am sorry to hear that George Michael has died during 2016 to add to the very long list of musicians and artists who have died this year, all I hope is that the Grim Reaper may now turn his attention to politicians, maybe that will be picked up as a half heard thing.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.ukmake it a resolution that you are going rock

Twenty years to reflect

Twenty years ago the band that I was working with changed. Life got in the way, the guitarist moved to Australia after getting married and the bass player and drummer who were involved in another band that had more gigs also moved on. So a small number of us continued with new players still under the name of Red Touch.

This month after two decades of not seeing one another we got back together again, playing the old material most of which were self-penned numbers which we had not revisited in any form in that time. On listening to the albums that we had released two things struck me, first of all we were good, better than I or any of us remembered and secondly the songs were really well written. Maybe it takes twenty years to have enough distance on your own writing to be able to see what you’ve managed to create.

Listening back to old CDs the songs sounded like they were written and played by other people I didn’t notice the type of errors that I used to imagine when I previously played the music but now I could hear a really solid level of musicianship and artistry in what we had created.

Meeting up and playing with the original members was such good fun, everyone being excited to meet after all these years. There was a definite feeling of love between the people and although we never left under a cloud of animosity I don’t remember us being so close maybe this is a good example of absence making the heart growing fonder.

This realisation fits the last blog post about beliefs and opinions and that they may not be reliable as they seem at the time and they are prone to change which highlights their unreliability. What do we do about this? Well maybe we should just do things and not think about it too much and then step aside and act as if it is not us to get some objectivity. The fact that our opinion of the work was so distorted at the time is of interest to me and although one could argue that our perceptions we be deluded now due to the excitement of playing again it has been verified by people outside of the band.

The gig itself was amazing and was the icing on the cake with the audience confirming what we had said about the quality of the band, but for me the strange and surreal feeling of playing that this event engendered is the most interesting all the members felt the same but expressing it in different ways, one saying it was a memory for end of life reflection, another saying it was a spiritual experience and others saying it was dreamlike and euphoric.

SO now it is time to ponder this and the coming year. 2016 was rather a shock to all I think and to think of all of the musicians who have moved on but it is time for us to look ahead at the coming year and what we are going to set as a vision for our creativity

So I would like to take this opportunity to wish you a very merry Christmas with health, wealth and happiness for the coming year.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Magic is Art

I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman. Alan Moore

In the last 40 years of teaching and playing I have experienced a number of extraordinary happenings where simple, ordinary people have become prolific artistic performers. I could say that in all that time I was unable to spot the ones that were going to become the great musicians. In hindsight it was obvious because they were the ones who put in the hours and their ability to play and create literally crept up on me.

I have mentioned before that success in the world of the arts is statistically neigh on  impossible and therefore having an unrealistic attitude to your ability is a great place to start. Another good place to start is with Alan Moore’s assertion that we can alter reality by the very things that we do by manipulating symbols, words, sounds and images to affect change in the minds of the people who listen.

I have long had an interest in NLP and I noticed that many successful songs are effective not because of the quality of the poetry but the command orientated lyrics that demand action on behalf of the listener. Songs such as ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘All Right Now’ and even ‘Wild Thing’ are in this vein. These lyrics have a downward command orientated inflection and therefore fall into this concept of Alan Moore’s spellcasting.

However ridiculous you might think these things are the very act of subverting reality and your belief in what is possible, seems to be an important ingredient required from a successful artist. Merely dealing with reality is not enough, distorting reality is just the beginning, making people act in the way that you have distorted reality is the aim.

We are definitely entering the world where facts and truth are being trumped literally and metaphorically by the emotional aspect of language, we see that all the time in politics, we definitely see this within the media. It is abundantly clear that emotional soundbites are far more effective than reasoned argument and longer lasting. Evoking the spirit of Englishness or Americanness is powerful but we have to be very careful to look after that evocation because even a cuddly cat if mistreated has a very dark side to it and so does Englishness.

Being optimistic about the above quotation means that we can do incredible things if we can picture them and then formulate sounds that bring the vision to life. Look at the successful music of the band such as Queen. Think of any of their famous songs and they truly seem to have a life of their own; being completely animated when we hear the music you see Freddie. Magical!

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of rock band magic

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence.

I deal with a lot of young people in my teaching of which many are teenagers. They are full of the unshakable belief that you know nothing and they know it all even if you have forty years of experience. I remember being like that; in fact the only thing that life experience gives you is that you know less and less as the years go by, so in a way they are right. The things that seemed certain when you were younger seem more uncertain as you age and then if you are lucky you get to an age when you realise that everything is open to the challenge of its unreality.  

So might it not be better to stand in a place of uncertainty, in the Chinese view you do not need to believe in something just suspended your disbelief to make things move and change.

What would happen if we changed our point of view? Maybe it would give us the possibility of seeing something different and new? From my own experience when I first became interested in playing the guitar I detested reggae and if someone had said to me that within five years I would be playing in a reggae band I would not have believed them, but I did, I then realised that reggae contained the essence of music that I also later found in other roots music such as the blues, it acted as a doorway to a new assessment of what music was. So look at the point of view that you currently hold and try out the opposite viewpoint for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Sometimes as you do you notice new things and start discovering ‘by accident’ things that confirm your new view.

What happens if we change what we believed we are? Now here is a good one, when we are younger we believe many things that as we age we realise were ridiculous, however as I have said before naivety is an important ingredient to success because if you were not naïve you would not even start because the odds are so impossible but ……

If you are old enough, look back and remember what you believed then and compare to what you believe now then think of what you might believe in ten or twenty years’ time. Then think of what you would need to believe to make the changes or achieve the things that you want and just do it. Because it is quite likely that the changes that you have already made in life are more radicle than the ones that you need to now make.

Ask yourself the question ‘what would I have done differently if I had changed my beliefs earlier’, remember that everything that ever existed started as an idea, so get the idea.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music heaven

Men honour what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.

We have unleashed some form of Demon with the new technology. What appears to be a blessing in that you can record easily and provide much of the written material that you require to teach and create. You are also able to research music in ways that we were never able to before. However the problems are numerous, if you are using the internet space as a marketing forum you are competing with a market that is infinitely bigger than anything pre-Internet.

There was a time you could just place an advert in the local press and you would reach all of the people that were likely to be interested in your message in your area. Now this is pretty much impossible and not only that your competition is the rest of the world.

This is a problem which could destroy the economy of countries and is probably doing so already with the coup de grace coming with the algorithms that will take away many jobs; hopefully not yours. If you are flexible in your thinking to see that music teaches skills that have no definable outcome something which a computer cannot deal with you have a distinct advantage.

Ironically this problem leads me to putting something on the Internet as a membership forum to link musicians and artists together and create a market and a creative space in which they can work and hopefully generate some form of income.

I cannot see a positive outcome from the way that children are being educated at the moment; they need something to make them creative for the world that we are entering where movement between jobs and the learning of new things or the development of new ideas is imperative. This is a very real problem which seems to be almost unnoticed by the idiotic politicians that we have in this country and the United States who are making more of a system that does not work in the life cycle of the human but works well for the ticking a box world of the accountant.

So what lies beyond your knowledge? The world of the impossible, the one of dreams, Lewis Carroll’s thinking of six impossible things before breakfast.  All artistic projects start as ridiculous ideas, the dreams of the teenage budding rock star start as pipe dreams but somehow for the intrepid and the stubborn they become real. It seems that the drive magically reduces the statistical inevitability of failure. What lies within your knowledge is the fact that you do not stand a cat’s chance in hell of making it but outside of that in the world of the black swans and komodo dragons is the way of realising your liberation from ‘knowledge’. Once you have drunk from that well you know where it is roughly, so you can stumble on it again because like any topography that is unmarked things seem to move but the essence lures you back like Parsifal looking for the Grail Castle.

So start with the dream and by having the dream percolate in your thinking see what ripples come back from the edges of your mind bouncing off the hills of the strange outer world of consciousness. The place where music is formed, the Kashmir of dreams as sung about by Led Zeppelin. Places that change, sometimes illusive, strangely familiar but unpredictable, like Alice’s Wonderland.  Imagine what you could achieve with either the Red or White Queen on your side?

I feel a song coming on.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of unleashing your inner rock god

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education. Chuang Tzu

Our education system is based on testing and exams with various forms of rewards given through certification etc. The punishment aspect of it is deeply psychological with people feeling that if they do not achieve they have by extension failed.

I have always found that the most effective use of gradings in teaching the guitar is to create a goal and the journey towards that goal; that is the objective not the arrival, a bit like life. Do we need all the rewards and punishments for developing musical skills or just our motivation to play?

When I started playing there was a lot of social unrest and maybe we are entering that situation again as people begin to notice how much they have been misled by the media and politicians. The idea of getting out and venting your emotional energy was a great motivator and we certainly need motivation but examinations are not generally anything other than a measurement guide for someone else. They are better being a guide for you as a motivator because walking out on a stage waving your grade eight certificate will not prove anything but playing will.

If you look at musical education as being a tool which we can use to realise our artistic goals then we can use the cheapest form of education which is now mostly online or we could also use friends and other artistic colleagues to develop our skills cheaply by watching them play and asking questions. The role of the teacher is to give a good route on the map towards technical and artist realisation, in other words getting people to think for themselves and I do not see much scope for outside reward or punishment but more self-determination and discipline.

The truest measure of your ability is made by you. Most artists find it really difficult to look or listen to their own work after they have completed it and within that we can see that we are greatest critic.

Maybe the time is right for some other counterculture thing to develop where art is being used to critique the establishment and society as has happened numerous times before and potentially can happen again as we are sitting on so many ticking bombs.

So for you as an artist anything less than world domination is not be enough.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of a music summer school to get you rocking

Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without; for much knowledge is a curse. Chuang Tzu

Somebody came to see me during the week for an informal chat about starting guitar lessons. I tend to do this now instead of having conversations on the phone or emails going backwards and forwards about rates and times of lessons etc. I just find it easier for them to meet me and for me to meet them so that I can understand where they are coming from in their playing and if they have played before and what standard have they reached.

This particular person was interested in classical guitar and he had been playing for about four years, he spends some of his time out of the country and he has a guitar teacher while he is away so he was looking for one here. He seemed a very nice guy and he turned up with his guitar and his music; we sat down and had a cup of tea and chatted about what he had done before.

He started to tell me how wonderful the guitar teacher was in America and every lesson was like a masterclass. I found this interesting and when I looked at his music that he had every single note had a pencil mark next to it. The notation was so extensive to include both his right and left-hand fingering and also the dynamics of the piece. I then started to wonder what this guy had actually learnt and what had he discovered about himself musically or was he just following instructions.

He played a little bit to me and it could certainly get all the notes down but there was something lacking. As we discussed things further I gave him some ideas about developing the musicality of what he was playing but I could feel some sort of reticence. The thing really got me was when he produced the music for the Recuerdos de la Alhambra which he said he wanted to play as his autumn project.

I suggested that he should start looking at the piece before I see him next and mentioned some ways of approaching it, he gave me a slightly puzzled look. At that moment it was clear all the lessons had been a firm form of spoon feeding when in reality we need to find the musicality in ourselves and this can be done by teachers showing the way. However the pupil needs to learn self- sufficiency if a teacher goes into great detail on every piece when will the pupil learn that. There is only so many fish that you can give someone it is much easier for them to learn to fish and feed themselves.

We need to nurture what is inside of us and to some extent we do need to be initiated in this by someone else but the constant journey that you make as a musician is yours and not the teachers and although it does mean that you get return business if you teach like this because of the dependence of the pupil that is not the role of the teacher. The aim should be to make the pupil your master.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of playing in a band and learning how to perform and to write songs like a rockstar.

Hammer to C8 Mate

For the open eyed, there is an opportunity here; when asked how he would prepare for a match against a computer, Dutch chess master Yann Hein Donner said; I would bring a hammer.

When faced with set patterns of behaviour in ourselves or in systems sometimes we have to do something radical to make a change. The way that things are now developing when there is less and less flexibility we need to do this.

There is a test which asks how many uses can you find for a paper clip? When children are asked this question they can come out with many more than an adult. I would postulate that education reduces the creative aspect of the mind because it becomes a paperclip and not just a piece of wire.

In music we can see this in the way that complexity will lessen possibility for example if I play one chord that chord can be in several keys but as soon as I play another the number of keys available will become fewer because we start to categorise the first chord.

Society has become the adult with reduced capacity to think and this in the words of my father talking about the highly educated, ‘needing a slide rule to cross the road’, today a satnav or an iPhone would be the instrument of choice. As a side effect of learning we discard the things that seem not to fit and therefore start to limit what is possible. What we discard may exist or be possible because we just have not seen it before like Taleb’s Black Swans.

Dealing with computers either overtly or not you can feel their presence in everything we do from the letter from the doctor, to the radio play list, to the way our lives are managed. So the limiting categorisation is happening to us by an algorithm.

For the musician we need to use computers but not be used by them, the world is full of lifeless stuff created by computers; we need to make sure that when we make a pact with the devil we have an exit strategy which keeps our soul intact. For that we need to rely on what is left of our humanness and I mean that in the very deepest and broadest of terms, that which engages us with our nature and by extension nature herself. So use ones passions from both ends of the spectrum to really charge up our creative juices because it is that that makes our creations interesting and compelling not some watered down sanitised version of what we have become.

Technology will destroy that which makes us what we are if we are not careful, we are already corralled by the technology and it is beginning to suck the creativity out of us. What we need is to be able to problem solve without the use of computers and then regain some form of control and then from that point we can engage with the technology on our terms. But faced with technology being used on us then I suggest we do what our ancestors would have done to the dominating force which was trying to take their souls beat the shit out of it with a hammer. All hail to Thor.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of unlimited musically creativity and happiness …

Huge structural changes are looming for the education sector

 Huge structural changes are looming for the education sector. Think of how angry you would be if you were one of the last students to get so deeply into debt before everything changes. - Gordon White

The changes are a coming and the last people that will see it are the ones with the vested interest in the established ways of doing things, the very things that are going to be changed. What happened to the infrastructure of the horse drawn carriage and vehicle market as the internal combustion engine arrived; they saw it but did they respond to it?

Maybe having a vested interest makes change difficult or maybe they do not have a way of changing. One thing that appears clear to me as I get older is how difficult it would be for me to do something different than being musician. Fortunately being an music gives some flexibility but if I was somebody trained in a skill for which there is no more demand without an aspect of being able to step sideways and use my skills somewhere else then it would be so difficult for me to do something else. Of course for people who made wheels for carts or tack for horses the arrival of the motor car must have been a disaster, and in those days there was no such thing as retraining.

I see dangerous parallels with the past with the added necessity for retraining being part of the landscape of future employment on top of all debt that a young student will accumulate from university and of course retraining will not be free either. It looks like a good strategy to keep the wheels of academia oiled following the principle of medicine that it is more profitable to treat chronical sick than to cure as you have returning business.

Over the last few weeks I have been pondering the way that art and music can help people become more flexible in the way that they think and also looking at the possibility of what you do as an artist to make money. The principles that people want to be educated and be entertained still holds  Many people want to become rock stars in their dreams particularly when a young. Performance skills being used in the world of business for public speaking is a good example of how artistic skills can be turned to a profitable skill.

Extra to the opening quotation is the idea that much of today’s education can be established virtually for free online and this is an advantage that we should use to subvert the system but we should also see its failings that we will end up with many people doing the same thing because the reference points are the same so again the world of the arts and the ability to re-design and re-engineer yourself in a sort of Bowie-esque way is something that you need to work on.

But remember the Nobel laureate’s quote from the 1960s that ‘the times they are a changing’.

Vic

www.bluescampUK.co.uk three days of rocking out and learning the tricks of the trade from professional musicians and teachers with years of experience but hurry spaces are limited and next year’s allocation is already three-quarter sold-out.

There is an old saying that men plan and God laughs.

The plans of mice and men….. we obviously do need a plan just like making a plan for sailing a boat but as soon as you set sail the wind will change you then have to adapt your plan to fit the circumstances of the environment that you are in.

However when we make a plan with a business we often expect there to be no change of wind or adverse weather conditions et cetera et cetera, but of course as soon as you adopt a plan it needs to change. Maybe in this way any plan is a good plan however crazy, however optimistic, because it sets the ball rolling, the secret is to keep adapting the plan.

There is a saying in the British Army that as soon as the enemy moves you have to change your plans so therefore forget about what is taught in business studies at school or college or university and adopt a more artistic creative outlook and think that the plan is a dream, direction and objective and therefore will need to change as soon as is it is implemented.

So let’s look at this from the perspective of organising a concert, you may have the date in mind, support bands required the type merchandise required etc., as soon as you roll out these ideas there will be a problem maybe with the merchandise arriving on time or the support band that you had down not being able to make it. Now much of what you do by planning can be secured by some form of commitment normally financial from the participants for instance getting a support act to give you some money for the tickets which they then have to sell to recoup and make a profit. I’ve always found this a very successful way of developing a support act that can actually make money and bring in a crowd otherwise why would you have support act in the first place.

So in a nutshell make your plans exciting and creative but most of all flexible and with due diligence you should be able to adapt to circumstances as they arise being  prepared to trim your sales as long as you know what the basic requirements are stick to them.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of playing in rock band learning the tricks of the trade from professional players.

The Grammar School Effect

Within the schools there is something that I call the ‘grammar school effect’ because it is more prevalent there, that children who are being educated seem to lose the ability to dream, having their heads crammed with facts and figures. The one thing that you need to do as an artist is to be able to dream and imagine the impossible. The grammar school system does not lend itself to that.
I was talking to a drummer friend of mine who teaches at a grammar school in Kent and he was saying that when you ask a pupil what their dream is they don’t seem to have one they just lost the capacity to have a fantasy or dream that drives them to doing something musical. He cited the pressure that they are under academically for the problem and I agree that the children in the grammar school education are so pressurised academically that learning a musical instrument is so far down the ladder of needs.
What is so incredible is that we know the value of music, singing and the arts and yet even with all the scientific psychological research it is being ignored in education and the arts are being pushed outside the curriculum.
It seems to be almost the kiss of death for children to pass the 11+ when it comes to something like music or art even politicians comment that people need to spend more time on their science and maths we will look back on this and realise that it is a disaster to think like that.
What needs to happen for us as teachers is to promote the beneficial effects of music to the well-being of people I would add to this that the ability of people to think is broadened with the aspect of music and art and this is something we need in the economy in the years to come.
It is not even that we do not have great success with arts in this country because we do. British artistic establishments and the music industry are a very bankable asset and they add to the country’s soft power however for music and arts to be undervalued in the society is a scandal but again it is another example of the pathetic nature of politics and its involvement in education.
As always the politicians will never be held responsible for this like many other things that they have done over the last few years. It is your job to do something about it in whatever way you can.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk  join the fun, music, song writing and meeting other musicians

Getting involved

Probably the best way of getting involved in music is by jamming with other people and although practice at home is good being a bedroom guitar player is not the best way to learn.

The old jazz musicians learnt their trade by hanging out with other players learning the standards and learning the types of phrases that their idols would play. Some great stories of people hanging out with musicians like Art Tatum and just watching close at hand what the maestro do and then going away and emulating it somewhere else.

Certainly the old blues and rock players did the same thing as well as working things out from recordings, and virtually all of the rock and roll guitarists got involved playing standards of the day at dances or at the numerous hops around America.

However what happens today is not so much of this thing going out and gigging but sitting in front of a computer screen watching people on YouTube. This does not teach you the inner language and dialogue that happens between musicians in the band. The only way to learn this is to go out and play and you should do this anywhere you can.

I started playing just before the advent of punk, there were plenty of places to play, village halls pubs etc. and we put on our own gigs they were not particularly good but they were great fun because we were young we had an audience of our peers.

What has taken over from this grassroots practical way of becoming a jobbing musician is this idea of going to college to learn the trade. Do not go to college and get yourself into debt to become a rock musician! That is quite frankly now ridiculous because of the cost. For the sort of money you are putting out you could launch a tour with the rock band and although I am not suggesting you do this you can see how far a debt of £30,000 could go.

If your university or college training is being paid by somebody else then all well and good but if it is actually going to be your debt learn what you can as cheaply as you can and build your contacts from the grassroots up.

So if you are starting out make sure you got time to practice at home but most of all play and have fun with others and be encouraged by the fact that the greatest bands of all time from the Beatles to the stones to Led Zeppelin to the Foo Fighters and Nirvana all did what you are about to do jam with their mates and got out playing.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music which is nearly sold out for next year

Intolerant minorities drive change

The above quote comes from Nasim Teleb and something that he noticed in America regarding food and labelling. His observation was that although the Jewish population was only a small percentage it was actually more cost efficient to make something accessible to a small minority than not.

He went on to state that this might be a recurring theme historically, this would explain the rise religions such as Christianity even within something as powerful as the Roman Empire. He postulates that the intolerant minority make it difficult for people to ignore them and therefore it would be easier to include these people than not. Obviously he goes into great detail historically to back this claim.

This could explain several interesting revolutions that occur in history including Bolshevism in Russian and Maoist China which was accomplished by very few people against vast odds. When we look at various structures within society we can see these minorities affect the way we do things take for instance flying. Because of a very small number of potential terrorists we all have to subject ourselves to the rigours of the suspects in order for us to catch a flight.

Education works in very similar way often regarding the to the ideas of a few people who  have influenced and directed education  for the last hundred to 200 years and possibly even earlier. In America the core idea of education emanates from one man.

As artists, teachers and performers we need to look at this as a possible way of influencing the direction of music and anything else that you try using music as a tool. Just being bloody-minded about what you’re doing can actually reap rewards well above the norm.

You might like to try some ideas if you work within an education establishment, try doing things your way in such a way that it would be easier for you to be left alone to get on with it than you to conform to the patterns laid down by others.

Think what this could mean in your musical life, be different ……………

Worth a try

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  rock out for three days, booking for next years summer camp.

The West has immersed itself in technique and the mechanics of things in nearly every area of art and learning and lost something very precious in the process.  Our lives are now surrounded by that mechanicalism. Our houses, our clothes, our art and our science all reflect it, more so every year and the need for Prozac increases right along with it. People just don’t feel well anymore.  – Stephen Harrod Buhner

Music is in the feeling of things and in the abstractness of the unconscious. We have confused the theory and the technique for the art itself.

Did you know that the number of mental illnesses that are listed have increased massively in the last 50 years along with treatments for them?  Weird eh?  Someone is making money straight away from the new diagnosis and listing, we rarely have a mental illness with no treatment. The linking of money with illness is one of the worse ideas that we have created in a capitalist society, great for business, bad for cure. The problem is the catch 22 syndrome that happens, take this pill and then you need this to stop the nausea and this one to protect the liver and so on.

The something that is precious is that art is flawed it goes wrong but in that something is created that has a life of its own. You did not create it, it created itself and therefore the work is art it has life and it came through you, you as a channel and conduit for the manifestation of the work.

With this in mind can we claim royalties for this? Or maybe we can do something different and make the creation of the song free but let the song do something for us in return for its birth. I am very serious about this because in the book by Charles Eisenstein. Sacred Economics the idea of protecting copyright and the charging for interest on loans are some of the reasons why we are in such a mess. I suggest you read the book as it is a very compelling argument and I think that free music could make amazing things happen but more of that another time.

For now create something and let it be its own boss, it maybe your baby but it is its own life but make it work for you and let something develop using that piece of music maybe let others contribute to it, use it and pass the word around about it.

This could be massively powerful form of publicity worth more than you would make from it by conventional means.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk Rock Summer school … check it out for next year

Between Tigers

Hanging onto a cliff a cliff face, a tiger above him and more tigers below, the man feels the vine that he is holding onto begin to give way, its roots pulling out of the cliff. There is nothing he can do, but then he notices a beautiful ripe strawberry growing to the side. He reaches over and plucks it. And it is delicious. – The Buddha

Have you ever sabotaged your own success? Maybe you didn’t take the risk that would have given you the opportunity to do something different because it was too frightening or just too uncomfortable? It is only when we get into a situation which is so difficult that we actually value what is presented in that moment. I know from my own life I have turned down the possibility of doing something extraordinary. In one of those instances I went against my better judgement because somebody who I thought would know better told me it wouldn’t work.

At the time I was in a band the son of Roger Moore, Geoffrey had a good voice and the band was really good but this was in the time when the record companies were looking for duos similar to the Pet Shop Boys and not a nine piece rock band.

I thought that we should have taken the band out and gigged, pulling in all the advertising that we could muster which would have been easy because of the celebrity cache of our lead singer. By creating a momentum which could have built upon we could have bootstrapped our way up but I was persuaded that it would not work. Looking back at it I missed a great opportunity.

Take the approach that life is like being sandwiched between two sets of tigers and when it presents you with the beautiful ripe strawberry you need to grasp it and savour it. These events will not change the inevitable but it will make life more wonderful. This brings me to another possibility of this story that any opportunity to live needs to be grasped and sometimes this will mean ignoring the calamity of life in order to  spend  time doing things that are seemingly trivial but nevertheless beautiful like playing a musical instrument.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days at the amazing rock summer school; bookings for next year now being taken

BB King taught me to play the guitar

When the hugely influential guitarist BB King died, there passed an era that will never return in our memory or that of our children or grandchildren.

So many of the events in music are unique such as the arrival of the blues boom in England bands such as the Stones, Animals and the Beatles re exporting the music back to the USA, the uniqueness was not the music but the environment that fostered it coming out of segregation in America the declining British Empire and the aftershocks of war and then the children of the war casting something different in the world.

These events will only happen when comparable scenarios happen in the world. It seems that the context required for new musical innovation has to come out some form of poverty whether that is financial or cultural or even political. The fact many of the innovators in British music came from places that will close to ports is no coincidence. In my conversation with Chas Hodges (of Chas and Dave) on my YouTube site Chas explains how you needed to know someone who was in the merchant navy to be able to get access to recordings from America.

I was lucky because my brother was in the merchant navy and that gave me access to music from America which influenced my musical tastes as a very young boy, however I was lucky that when I was learning to play it was possible to have those albums on import by visiting record shops such as Dobells London to get jazz and blues recordings.

It still meant we had to learn off the record either because the music books did not exist or in the case of the Beatles Complete were completely inaccurate or just misleading. In fact the book should have been renamed the Beatles Complete Rubbish.

Chas also made the comment that on tour with Jerry Lee Lewis as his bass player he learnt to play the piano by watching Jerry Lee each night. I could say exactly the same about working note for note through the guitar solos of BB King, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Rory Gallagher.

I believe that working through the recordings puts the music into the context that the solos are set and therefore we get closer to the original magic of a great guitar player than by staring at a book.

Choose your favourite guitar player and let them teach you how to play.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music magic, booking now for next year

Mentoring

For me mentoring is one of the most effective ways of creating a change in a pupil particularly when they have got to the point of having some grasp of the scales and chords and basic theory: maybe at around grade four.

I have always started from the premise that you need to find out from the pupil what their dreams are and where they currently are in their ability to play. That journey always has to be taken from where they are and not from where you are. I find a lot of teachers spend a lot of time trying to make pupils do what they can do, I personally find this inefficient and the best results from my experience comes from igniting the pupils imagination. This can be rather troublesome and challenging for you as a teacher because there are things that you are less than adequate in, which you have to really brush up on in order to help but I found in the past it enables a pupil to develop very quickly  on their chosen path.

I’ve had great successes with bass players, song writers, singers, virtuoso rock players, classical players, jazz musicians and what we could loosely term as musical artists. This stuff isn’t really coming from me it’s coming from them and for me the thing that tips the balance is their personal motivation to achieve what it is that they really like.

Many of my pupils do gradings and the grades are only a target and an objective on the path to their personal aspirations. Once you have them motivated and they have a goal to work towards then you have to let them get on with it. It is them who climb the mountain, not you. You may have the map but they have got to do the hard work and therefore if they do not achieve what they set out to achieve that is down to them.

One last thing to consider is that your aim is to make them better than you, do not get into the old British management style of employing somebody is not as good as you. You really want them to be the thing that you aspire to.

Most often the pupils will have enough skills of their own that will develop over time, occasionally you will need to instil some new tools to assist them. Apart from musical skills these may be personal skills such as goalsetting time management etc. This is where I use NLP as I find this to be the most effective way of achieving change.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk check out the dates for next year on the website we are currently half full within two weeks of launching the new dates to hurry this is too good to miss.

Creation and destruction, I am dancing for them both.’ Rumi

One of the problems that we experience in today’s society is the mental attitude that anything can be got and anything can be fixed and straight away. When you apply this attitude to something like learning a musical instrument the immediacy that we are used to today does not apply. The idea that constant practice is required to achieve anything of any value is an anathema.

In the area of song writing you are going to produce a lot of frogs before you produce a prince I liken this to sifting through the attic; a lot of the stuff that you will come to first of all will be junk until underneath you will find a lost gem.

I am currently in the middle of producing a new album, which is a collaboration between professional musicians and complete amateurs. The idea of this recording is to put me on my back foot so that I actually create something different from the sort of habitual music making that I would otherwise do. So far the songs have taken interesting forms from the obvious Rock to the not so obvious Ska and Reggae mixed with strange Jazz and Oriental flavours.

Once you embrace the expected and the unexpected the good and the bad the easy and the complicated without making any judgements there is a uniqueness to the creative process because you are not falling into the type of habitual pattern that your practice has taken you to. In other words you have to hear in your head before you play or write.

We have just finished our ninth Bluescamp summer school which was an amazing success. Each year improves on the last however I always caution team members and other campers who regularly visit that we cannot always get better and sometimes we have to face something that really didn’t work. Otherwise you become a slave to chasing your own tail, chasing the elusive butterfly of success to mix metaphors and this actually doesn’t help because it lessens the risk taking that I believe that you have to have in order to continue creative situations.

One other aspect of the above is that sometimes we have to destroy the thing that seems to be part of us and part of what we do. I had a friend who was a writer and deep thinker and he would run very successful groups and meetings and then every now and again when they were really going well he would stop doing them. This used to shock and upset people but I understand what he was up to that sometimes you just can’t get any better and sometimes you need to change otherwise it just becomes a habit and you’re going through the motions.

So maybe it’s time to write a song for Rumi’s dance in one or two areas of your life.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  or visit https://www.facebook.com/BluCampUK/ and check out what people are saying …………

Sea of Tears

Science has liberated us ‘cogs’ from the religious machine and revealed our complexity. We are now shiny drops reflecting the world around us in all our individual glory. But science, with its acceleration of communication, has also brought us to the ocean. I see myself as a drop-an individual with a vital message to give to the world-but when I tried to express it I am brought face-to-face with the fact that I am one of millions of unwanted writers clogging up the in trays of thousands of unwanted publishers when all that the world really needs is a steady flow of bestsellers from leading celebrities published by a couple of top publishers. The same is true for everyone -hopeful pop stars, bright-eyed school leavers, revolutionaries, inventors…. We all feel our enormous value as shining drops, but when we approach the ocean we just melt into insignificance. Science has given us a cruelly indifferent universe……….  Ramsey Dukes

As a musician and teacher I am constantly aware of the problem of the rationalist aspect of education and the general media babble. Much of this, from the media especially, is loosely scientific and maybe best put as pseudoscientific. Stories that knock unscientific thought abound in the media and particularly in the hallowed halls of the BBC where they will quite happily knock alternative thought but quite happily embrace some religious programme in the guise of free speech.

What I would like to do is to look at this from the point of view of the artist and musician and that scientific thinking is not conducive to creativity. The above quote by Ramsey Dukes is a good example of this because anybody who wanted to start a band only has to look at the statistical possibility of having any form of success is so remote you may as well become a professional lottery player.

However because people are irrational and illogical we have art and we have music with new musical bands and solo artists of which the United Kingdom is truly blessed. So being naïve is probably a gift for the young, for the irrational, no rules, and no holds barred sensibility of the artist.

The scientific viewpoint as pictured in the above quote is intriguingly homeopathic, where a small droplet in the ocean can make the significant difference in somebody’s health. This is of course poo-pooed by science but strangely seems to work for people since the time of Hahnemann back in the 18^th century and intriguingly also works for animals. Hey but according to science doesn’t work.

If we look at the world of computer programming we find no problem with a small program acting as a virus that can destroy complex computers and this is the attitude that we need to adopt as an artist that something that we do which in the scheme things will be incredibly small will have a vast impact in the sea of human consciousness.

So be brave and irrational adopt a state of mind this is egotistical and naïve and create something beautiful. Remember small is beautiful.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  musical magic, book for next year

No boundaries on your knowledge increase the size of your map; make things less defined.

Dark light, good bad, happy sad, right wrong we have a world of opposites and this in its way causes boundaries to our knowing and ability to learn new things. They do create the topography of the maps that we create in our minds but they do also in turn stop us learning new things and there are moments when we need to turn them off in order to redesign the map and introduce new things that transcend the limits of what we currently know.

A good example of this is playing ‘outside’, in the jazz context being outside the scale or key and much of our perception of right and wrong are the boundaries that we create due to the presence of scales and chords.

Spend time doing the chromatic notes against a backing that is sitting on one or two chords and become family with all of the notes and how they sound, turn off the boundaries and hear the note as part of the chord and the chord as being part of the note and make the sound familiar in the way it is either relaxed or tense.

Listen to the possibilities of different pieces of music happening at once and allow them to co-exist. When they do how about making that happen in your playing? You can try this by playing two or three songs simultaneously on radios and computers etc.and become familiar with the feeling.

Other boundaries may include musical genres and by mixing these structures and patterns seeing what you get. Many different musical styles started like this from The Beatles to Led Zeppelin so see what you can find.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk next year’s dates are available, make sure that you book in

Once you have your first few pupils then ask them for referrals and PAY THEM

Have you had people ask you for favours and then never do anything in return? How does that make you feel? If you do something for them uninvited you do not expect anything in return but of you are asked there seems to be a transaction under way.

Often businesses will ask for referrals but they either offer nothing or something that is unwanted (think about this when you offer a teenager a free guitar lesson that means nothing if the parents are paying so that needs to be offered to the parents. What you offer MUST have perceived value to the person who is receiving it that will make all the difference when it comes to referring other people to you.

How many bands do this when people get them gigs? Not many; getting a booking referral fee out of the blue of £100 could be a very powerful incentive for them to get you more.

I have a friend who comes to see me ONLY when he needs help getting work and although I am happy to help him he never returns my calls at other times when I leave messages about things that I am doing, only if it means he can get work out of it. Shame really because there is only so much that people will take, so be careful to make sure that you are not doing this.

For all the problems that money causes and I am the first the use other forms of transaction than money, trading time for time etc. money is a powerful transactional force which needs to be fully understood.

Remember that money as such is just an idea which we all agree on but as such it is imaginary especially now as it does not relate to the Gold Standard and numbers are just created by banks. However the idea is VERY powerful and that is what you are using, the idea of the transaction. If you are paying a lot for the referral you must value that transaction. If you offer £5 for every new referred pupil that will work against you but £25 to £50, that is substantial and it means that the referrer could earn a lot of money from those transactions if they get motivated.

Now if you think that is a lot of money stop for a moment and ask yourself how much money does a new client bring you over the lifetime of lessons, gigs etc.? Then think again about how much you are willing to pay!

So giving someone a book that they do not want to say ‘Thank You’ for a referral which could make you £400 to £1000 a year is an insult, and not offering anything but just asking is a travesty to any good will that you have with someone.

Be generous and it will be returned.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk check out the video

It’s all about communication, if you are good with people skills, teaching is made a lot easier and so is being a good front man/woman for a band.

I had a comment left recently on a YouTube video that I did about developing a teaching practice. This person said that he would really like to get into teaching but ‘hated’ young children and the thought of teaching, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to young kids who didn’t care and weren’t interested would be a problem for him however he really thought that teaching teenagers in a secondary school would be okay. In my experience the ones who are disinterested and really don’t care tend to be teenagers not young children who are the ones often flushed with enthusiasm of doing something amazing but by the time they reach thirteen or fourteen years of age all of that disappears into the stupor of the teenage brain.

I am not suggesting that it’s impossible to teach teenagers because it is not but it takes a certain amount of patience to do that and the ability to create goals and things for them to aspire to, because you are not only dealing with the teenager but also the environment that they find themselves in, the pressures of school, academic life and what is expected of them from their parents either implicitly or explicitly.

My take on this is that you build a good friendship with people that you teach and in that way you can encourage them to learn and also understand where they are coming from and if you do this well you can encourage them to pass your name around to their friends and thereby develop the work that you do.

All of the above applies to performance as well, the most dedicated followers of a band or personality often resides within the young person’s age group. This is proven by the extraordinary numbers of people who follow bloggers and vloggers. Some of the video bloggers have numbers of followers that a successful band would kill for and they have an intimate knowledge of what goes on in the life of the blogger that used to happen when I was younger regarding pop bands. Magazines such as Smash Hits used to do features that were a day in the life of whoever was famous at the time such as the Bay City Rollers, Showaddywaddy, Slade, or Marc Bolan.

So friendship is the key to developing a business and in the world of business this would be termed as goodwill, which is something that you could put on the balance sheet but it is very much a guesstimate.

So the first area for developing a client base is speak to your friends and get their friends on board and you would be amazed how many people that could potentially be.

Vic

Www.bluescampUK.co.uk for three days of music magic, learn to play in a rock band learning the tricks of the trade.

Business Model

I was in Amsterdam for a seminar with a well known writer.I had never been to Amsterdam before and it certainly lived up to its reputation of the beautiful laid back city.

I found the roads so confusing with bikes and cars coming at you from almost every possible direction that to be safe I looked in every direction when crossing the road including up.

What I did find fascinating was the red light district and that rather sordid and tacky are side by side with the beautiful and picturesque and numbers of people on bicycles going about their business.

The ladies in the windows plying their trade made me reflect on the statement that most business plans that we adopt are the same business plans of the prostitute.

Prostitution is rightly regarded by some as the oldest profession and I think we should look at it from that perspective for the moment whether you agree with it or not, that it also  follows it must have the oldest business plan as well.

I know I have made mention of this before but I am fascinated by the echoes of processes like this.

So for the ladies in the windows in Amsterdam they are using the business model adopted by most small businesses around the world and through time which is ‘ I have something that you want and if you want it enough you will pay for it’ also the basics of the marketing work on this principle.

Make it look appealing and make it accessible and to some extent exclusive. There are many cases with prostitution that women will have regular clients sometimes over many years as an exclusive deal.

So what can we learn from this? Well maybe that the fantasy of the experience, being a rock star. the dream needs fulfilling and that is why they come to us to spend their we need to recognise that.

I think the most telling aspect is that to make money we do need to be ‘client led’ which is very P.C. is it not? However it comes directly from the most un P.C. and the most ancient of all of our trading practices.

So to wrap up there is much to learn here from the ladies who want you to pay for plucking their instrument; see we are even closer than you think! 

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk   three days of learning to be in a band

Are you listening?

The other day while I was reading and I came across a quotation from the famous American medical hypnotist Milton Erickson concerning the difference between ordinary waking states and trance states especially deep trance.

.. The subject in a deep trance functions in accordance with the unconscious understandings independently of the forces to which his conscious mind ordinarily responds; he behaves in accordance with the reality which exists in the given hypnotic situation for his unconscious mind. Conceptions memories and the ideas constitute his reality world; he is in a deep trance. The actual external environment reality with which he is surrounded is relevant only insofar as it is utilized in the hypnotic situation. (Erikson Deep Trance and its induction)

I thought that this perfectly summed up the state of mind that a musician in full flow of playing finds himself and this is why it is so difficult at times to truly intellectualise what makes a musician give a great performance because the performing musician will often not be able to tell you what it is that is happening.

I have often found that some pupils who are highly intellectual find learning music at very challenging. Many things that they aspire to seem to not make sense and they seem to get to this point after exploring all the chords and scales and techniques and still they find the holy grail of the great performance evades them.

Yet when you tell them that they need to get in touch with their feelings and to listen to the music inside them (because the unconscious processes many, many times more data than the intellect) they try to rationalise what I say and think about it when they really just need to listen.

I think that if you want to be like a great talent you need to travel a similar path to them. So if your heroes worked things out by ear so should you, if your hero became a great sight reader, so should you, because what is going on in the unconscious of the artist is what makes the difference and although we can discover where that person has travelled to by our intellect we cannot visit that land unless we walk their path. The reason for this is, as Erickson says, is that the reality of someone in a deep trance (which is where any performer is) is in the world of the unconscious.

Over the last few weeks Keith Richards has been on the radio and TV a number of times being interviewed. Now if there is someone who plays from the heart and not the head it is his ‘Keithness’ bless him!  Not only does he confound the medical profession that he is still with us physically but he will continue to confound the music intellectuals on how to play the perfect rock groove even with his extreme arthritis that he has in his hands.

I am sure that his answer is not to think about it just plug in and play.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of rock fun in a band