Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify simplify - Henry David Thoreau

The quote was written back in the 1850's it is true today than ever. The level of detail is now absurd and makes anything that we do seem like an impossible task but misses the point of how things work. Just imagine you could not eat anything unless you knew the details of your digestive system. In many ways that is what we do with everything, most things need just to be attempted and basic modicum of knowing or even no knowledge to make it happen.

Cooking is a good example of this (as well as music) just follow the recipe without knowing why it works, just follow the information that is required and that is it. In many instances knowing why something works does not increase its effectiveness and maybe life is like that, creativity certainly is. 

I have been going over much of my old NLP material for a project that I am doing and the idea of modelling someone who is good at the task you want to improve points to this. Just do what they do, nothing else, keep it simple and follow the path. the whys and wherefores do not improve this, just keep to the simple plan and do what they do. 

We need  time to create and we need uncluttered thinking to do this creating, much of the information we are being fed confuses us. What I used to see in adults that was a form of uncreativeness caused by the need for permission to be given before they could even think about letting go I now see it in children; the situation has not been helped by computers but is being made worse. Again if we look at what children do, they just copy what they see and what they feel and what they hear, there is no analysis just copy and then play with it. 

So as we enter another year and we are released from 2018 and all the chaos that has resulted from our political thinkers maybe the only thing for us is to keep it simple.
If complexity is the way then we would have found it by now, the way for us to deal with the modernity is for there to be more simplicity in our individual dealings with the world.

Now there's a thought. 

Vic 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk 

play in a rock band .. it is simple

What is in an age?

What is in an age? Forty the time of the grandparent

Sometimes we need to think of what our biological clock is telling us physically and mentally. We think that we have progressed, evolved however physically that is not true we are still inhabiting the same bodies as our ancestors but we are not as fit and we are not strong as they were.

In the past people would have by the age of 20 been parents by the age of 40 being grandparents by the age of 60 great-grandparents. Even by the age of forty we would be relying more on our wisdom than on our physicality. does this mean that our learning of information and skills is better earlier and that age brings with it a depth of understanding not available to the young? maybe it does, maybe it means that the learning of something like a musical instrument and its physical skills happen easier then but that age brings with it the ability to speak something deep with it. 

If we take that idea and move it into the world of work and todays obsession with technology does that mean that someone of twenty can run rings around someone of forty in the world of technology? Yes it does and you can see it happen. The reason for saying this is that someone trained in a skill that is changing rapidly such as computing needs to update information may be on the scrapheap by the age of 35, but his wisdom and application may not be. So look at what is happening to everything going online and becoming more technical, the older ones in society are being left behind HOWEVER they have always been the holders of wisdom in human society apart from our youth addicted 'culture' and the ones who know things on a deeper level, so what does that say for the society that we are in? 

So to music, the physical learning is better early in life but the depth comes later, so if you want to learn a skill in music making it in the early years is when to do it, then stick with what you know going deeper with age, retraining may well be a mistake both in music and in life. 

Vic 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk 

Change? Burn your bridges and destroy all the things that were you Humpty.

This time extreme measures for change, lasting change.  

I have pondered over the years how some people go on and realise their goals and many do not. Some of the musicians tour the world, others set up in business as a player and teacher and become successful at that. I had seen it in the areas of health, people who make the transition from illnesses to health and others who do not. As seen the people who cannot change like the smokers who have cancer who cannot give up smoking even when it means the difference between life and death.

So what is it that makes change possible? Some people seem wired up so that they can change, you will know some people like that, they seem to embrace change but I think they are in the minority for most of us it takes something else. For many having nothing to go back to is something that causes movement towards difference and away from something old and familiar, remember the familiar can be abuse and unhappiness, look at the people who leave one abusive relationship only to find themselves in another. Sometimes amping up the pain helps to make the move away from it easier and then you need to burn the bridges that would take you back. So pack up the job with nowhere to go, buy a one-way ticket to somewhere else. The Exodus story is a good metaphor, the people of Israel escaping Egypt not being able to return over the sea as after getting through the parted waves the sea returns therefore destroying their way back.

Now for destroying the image of you.

Bowie gave up Ziggy Stardust when he was at the top of his game and created himself anew, so working on yourself; now you cannot go back to the person before, letting go of what you were. Destroying the photos, anything symbolic, get some new clothes, change what you are wearing, and throw away the old. Now aim in the direction that you expect to arrive at, allowing things to come in and help, chance happenings, chance meetings and strange coincidences. On my podcast I interview musicians and artists and the times that they say that their lives changed in this way is the norm not something that was planned but something that was acted on. So the unexpected invitation to join a band which was responded to straightaway ,the chance hearing of them playing in a little pub in an out of the way place, the overheard conversation that gave you an idea etc. If you think this is a little bit woo- woo, then it is, I would say that it does not interest me whether we validate that but does it work? The evidence points to it, the data says that it does and secondly dismissing this may reflect the trap of one’s own thinking, because it is that type of thinking that stops change because it is risk averse. For real change, lasting change we need the ‘triple whammy effect’ that breaks you in such a way that you cannot reconstitute the old you anymore. A little bit like Humpty Dumpty

Vic Hyland

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Now I have done the workshop, unleash me on the world.

Over the years of teaching and being involved in NLP I now see that I might be part of the problem, that of the weekend workshop. My fascination with the mind and consciousness has let me to explore many things, music, hypnosis, meditation and those things were fed into my work. However I have seen in my time the rise of the workshop seminar course on a level that certainly did not exist even a few years ago in this country. There are workshops for everything, hot yoga, raw food, Tantric techniques and all of this is driven by somebody selling something. 

Now as part of this problem I can see that the unintended consequence of this is someone goes to the weekend workshop and becomes a practitioner of it. Now I do not think that the university courses for things alternative are any better with herbalism courses that do not involve going out and finding the plants in the wild, and massage courses that don’t involve any physical contact, (I joke not) and music courses that do not teach how to make money, that has to be learnt by chance it seems. Obviously in the past if you wanted to use herbs you learnt literally in the field, the herbalist of old never learnt in a formal setting and therefore they never got caught into the intellectual way of exploring something: the way that involves the use of statistics and is data driven. Much of the data and statistics are at best misinterpretations and at worst are things that are pulled literally out of the air, I have seen data that supports something that later is refuted by other data, the thing that seems to be missing is personal experience.

So how does the teaching of music fit into this? Music once was the domain of the unprofessional, one would have learnt by watching and maybe being apprenticed to another musician. Once the church was involved then things got into a pattern so that musicians learnt to play to the script not only the written music but the essence of it and no funny stuff, (this is why improvisation fell out of favour). Contempory music in this country was until recently like the former description of learning on the job but now it is learning in a college setting and it has the hallmarks of what I was saying earlier something disjointed and removed from the root of the music. 

So what to do? Attending the workshop is okay however that is only the beginning of a long journey with the beginning point of ‘evangelising your enlightenment’ needs to be repressed and for the years to develop and mellow the fruit. That will eventually come along after the flowering of the seminar and college buds have fallen away and the developing fruit has withstood the rain, the pests, wind and all the interested birds of life looking to damage your ideas.

The resulting misshapen and damaged fruits no longer look like the pictures that the advertising gave you with their brilliance shown in the workshop but they will be nourishing and better than anything that a workshop picture will afford you. And how long does it take for the fruition?

10,000 hours………..

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

You know, people come to therapy really for blessing

You know, people come to therapy really for blessing. Not so much to fix what’s broken but to get what’s broken blessed. James Hillman

What is needed to effect change maybe a level of the uncomfortable or the disorientation that we try to avoid? The weekend workshop approach to learning means that change is unlikely.

Yes discomfort we do not like it whether is the fear of the dark or pain at any level but what have we done by avoiding discomfort but kicked a can down the road? Maybe we do not want to be fixed physically or in our head because change may be the most uncomfortable of things.

Something my wife noticed as a massage therapist was that people would go so far in their healing but then seemed unwilling to go that final bit that would have either finished the job or made the change. That was also something that I found was evident in NLP as well that you had to almost burn the bridges to stop people going back into old patterns. One way of making lasting change was to make the past and present so painful that the only way to relieve it was to change.

Could this be why the great success stories often involve 'rock bottom' or bankruptcy before the riches as if the reset button needs the pain, maybe as we are so resistant to that discomfort means we are also resistant to change.  So instead we want  in James Hillman's words  what is broken to be blessed like a badge of honour.

Think of what this means for your guitar teaching? Have you noticed that many pupils will get to a certain point and then plateau out? Maybe is when things get a little bit tough, the development of the technique stops, why is that? Maybe it’s because people then carry on playing the thing that they can already do, it is easier you see. Why struggle with things that are painful when you can just do something that you can chill out and repeat? That is okay if you just want play but if you truly want to develop one needs to do things that are going to hurt.

A number of guitar teachers have commented in the past about pupils who turn up doing very little practice. Now this is a complex problem because they may just want to come and give you money and spend some time twiddling around on the guitar and that may be okay but if they really want to learn which means they really want to change then you have to enable them to confront themselves and by extension suffer for their art.

I am not saying that this is what is required for everyone it may only be required for a few and those few will go on to become very good musicians, what I flagging up here is something about human consciousness and how the avoidance of discomfort stops us developing a skill.

So for those who want to continue doing the same broken recording you can bless them as they give you the money, and for the ones who want to change and develop and become artists allow them the opportunity and the space and your knowledge to suffer for their art.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of playing in a rock band, the transformative summer school

Keep it simple

It has become clear that choice is not what it is cracked up to be. Choice was always the flagship of marketing whether it is a number of TV channels, the treatment options for health or what we can buy in a supermarket, but in reality it has become a curse. We are drowning in choice and it leads to confusion and lack of decision and certainly contributes directly to a lack of staying power required to learn.

With regard to learning musical instruments such as the guitar there are so many lessons and technical videos out there anybody wanting to learn will literally drown in them. I am not sure that it works at all particularly if you are starting out. In the past there was a lack of information so if you got a scale, some chords or small solo from a recording you spent a lot of time on that small amount of information and really got into your fingers before moving on and that is what scarcity did, it made you a better player.

The people that are supplying this information free have contributed to its devaluation so unless one puts a value to something it is not taken seriously. This is a problem for people teaching where the value of information has been devalued by oversupply. The fact that there is more out there does not necessarily make it better, often information is directly related to the need someone has for it. Sometimes people just aren’t ready for certain things.

Before we can have complexity we must have the basics, something that we can build upon and make sense of. The information that follows builds on the basics which if learnt act as good foundations because without them whatever follows will not hold.

What is it that you need to know to play an instrument? It is now quite common to find somebody playing the electric guitar who have some complex technical skills but they don’t know the basic chords or the basic scales that are required to map out the fretboard. Joe Satriani tells the story of somebody who came for lessons who could play guitar solos by the band Anthrax but did not know any chords. I have experienced this as well with a new pupil playing fragments of Metallica solos and part of Eddie Van Halen’s Eruption solo but knowing no major or minor chords unless they are in a song that he was playing by rote.

How good were the old rock and roll and blues players and how much did they know? Probably the answer to this is that the old players didn’t know very much technically, probably not very much in terms of scales and chords and techniques but what they had they used well, and that is the point, we know too much and what we have is of little use or benefit.

So less is definitely more.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk learn to play in a band in 3 days

Wayfinding

According to Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, “Wayfinding is the ancient art of figuring out where you are going when you don’t know your destination. For wayfinding you need a compass and a direction. Not a map – a direction”. I have found this concept to be quite helpful ever since I more or less rejected the concept of final destinations materially or spiritually.

This is a useful concept when it comes to music as well because the song knows its own destination it comes without a map with its own directionality in form of feeling about what the song expresses. The map of the components of the song chords, melodies, words et cetera these are always unclear at least the beginning. It is very rare the song leaps fully formed from the mind. For me in the years that I have written songs it  has probably only happened about three or four times.

Much of this concept of wayfinding is being brave enough to wander off into the wilderness without a map and this is something that people who attend song writing classes find the most difficult. They are always trying to rationalise or make things rhyme or they try to edit when all that is required is for the raw data to erupt out of nothingness.

The concept of nothingness is difficult enough for the Western person to understand anyway so to allow that to knock down the house of cards which is our intellectual reasoning and the belief that we are rational is challenging.

Over the last few blogs I have spoken about in creating songs or inspiriting the work that you do in order to reduce the banality that the intellectual mind has when you’re trying to create. The intellect is great as an editor but crap as an artist, so rationality is a good servant but a terrible master and this is  what we have arrived at with three hundred years of The Enlightenment, which from a trades description point of view is the most misleading term which could have only come from colonial thinking. That idea infects most of what we do in the West; that we have the right idea that the planet needs saving by us when we are the ones that got us into this mess in the first place, it is like getting Goebbels to set up the state of Israel.

So let the music flow and the ideas develop when you feel you’ve arrived at the destination then it is time to do a little bit of mapmaking so that you can discover where you have arrived and then find out more about the final destination. In other words the editor needs to come in and tidy everything up if you want to present it to polite society. If you don’t want present it to polite society then leave it as it is so that people can make of it what they want.

So try this as an idea, start off with some random lyrics and some chords from somewhere, change them around and allow the song to be undirectional before you start to structure the ideas. If the song just wants to stay with a set of four chords than let it, if it wants to become more complicated, let it do that, in other words let the song do what ever it feels it wants to do. See how it changes your concept about writing. 
This is a great technique for teaching children as well as it demystifies the artistic process and makes it accessible to everybody.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk play in a rock band …………….

All of humanity is in peril of extinction

It is my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare now and henceforth always to tell only the truth and all the truth and do so promptly right now - Buckminster Fuller

This is a quote that is probably fifty years old but has more gravity today with the fake news banner.

There has always been fake news it was called history, which is written by the winners and only by digging into the archaeology and the looking at the losers story do we start to get the picture that may be nearer to the truth if there is such a thing.

For me the absence of features in British History that we never hear about but are very important in the history of other nations and peoples would paint a clearer and more uncomfortable picture of our history. So when I sit in a classroom listening to the latest document to protect the government and institutions from litigation (which is called Child Protection) and the term British values is slipped in I wonder what British values they mean.

The nature of the artist much like the job of the court Jester or fool is to talk truth to power otherwise what is the point of it all just to look pretty and have your voice be processed through a computer so it is pleasing to the ears or should it rattle cages and maybe unlock a few to let the skeletons fall out? Political sexual indiscretions anyone?

But here is the question that we need to ask, what is truth? There have been lots of experiments where people have been questioned directly after witnessing a scene and then the comparisons are made in the descriptions, and they often vary. When asked at a later date to recount the incident those descriptions become more diverse and therefore if all those people are thinking that they are telling the truth there  is something wrong with our understanding of it.

This postmodern aspect of the truth being unreal has led us to Trump and Brexit where the statistics that we used to back the campaigns were obviously open to interpretation as to their truthfulness.

So maybe truth lies within ourselves and what we see as the truth. What we remember of an event may  differ as much as our interpretation of the meanings. Maybe the times were simpler when Buckminster Fuller made his statement or maybe the narrative the governments were using were not being undermined as much. We know that many of these narratives in the 20^th century led to terrible things. Perhaps putting ourselves in the shoes of the people who are suffering may be still be the simplest way to find some sort of truth for ourselves otherwise we could all just end up being like the concentration camp guard who was just following orders.

I sometimes feel like that when I’m sitting listening to the latest pronouncements of the politicians about child protection. Much of child protection is common sense but I’m not sure what we are teaching our children by putting them into schools that resemble prisons in lock down, unconsciously we are telling that the world is a very dangerous place and the only people you can really trust are the ones that have been vetted by the government and that does not include your parents or anyone else’s. Let us wait and see what the next fifty years will bring I will not be here but some of you may be and let’s see how true all this stuff was.

I think it’s time for protest song about school and hospitals that resemble prisons and the creeping necessity for showing some form of ID for whatever you are going to do because they don’t trust you either and that’s the truth.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  play rock in a band

We learn the chords are living things- Jimmy Webb

Any good songwriter will tell you the chords have a natural gravity to them, some will say that they seem to hold a dialogue with you through the music. They tell you what is coming next and they also tell you what is not coming next, when we play a chord that is incorrect in the sequence it screams at us, in fact all music does this, melodies, voicings of chords, and harmonies if they are wrong. I have found it  easy to understand this in music by adopting a sort of pseudo-animist perspective believing the song lives, or for me to breathe some life into the song in order to animate it and therefore to give it some form agency in the world.

Think about the impact the great songs have had some of them have spanned generations, others burn brightly for a short period of time then disappear. Often there is no logical reason why a song should last for so long because on the face of it, it is not clear or deep enough but music and the arts are not intellectual reasoning, and the reality of art and music as Carl Jung would put it is in the imaginal.

It is becoming obvious to many thinkers that this subliminal or imaginal world is real. Carl Jung believed that if you didn’t listen to what your unconscious has to say to you then it would actually become manifest in the material world often as a problem, may be an illness or psychological disturbance.

There are very interesting comparisons between the Jungian active imagination exercises and processes that artists go through in order to create a piece of work, even down to the fact that they are taken over for the piece of work to find its own way into the world.

This way of thinking is sadly absent from the education system that teaches such things as song writing but if songs have real agency and may have a way of changing things than this is an extraordinary powerful doorway to influence and something that we should bear that in mind. Even if you don’t believe in the efficacy of what I am saying even the ability to write better songs with this way of thinking should be reason enough to adopt some of those ideas.

So I suggest we conduct a thought experiment, speak to the notes of chords and allow the songs to rise from our minds unhindered from the strictures of the intellectual process. For those interested in the Jungian active imagination exercises have a listen to this podcast http://www.thisjungianlife.com/heres-the-podcast/ episode 13.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk just imagine what you could do with music

Guard against being a slave to words – Carl Jung. The Red Book

Modern rational thinking has led us to believe that words are simply labels, but as soon as we detach ourselves from that type of belief words regain some of their magical potency of the past.

Many myths and religious texts refer to the potency of words, things being spoken into being, spells being cast by cosmic deities,’ In the beginning was the word’. The fact that we can actually label something with the sound gives us power over it, when something has a name we can express it. We can tell others about it, we can think about it and we can do something about it.

Without a word in a language that names or encapsulates something we cannot express it, we can trace unconscious meaning in a word by looking back into its etymology. It is as if the unconscious speaks through the history of the word even when a word seems to have changed its meaning over time, it can and does cast a shadow or a spell over our reality.

The problem with the rational understanding of words and language is that we have lost our control because we don’t feel there is anything that needs to be controlled but looking at it this way it is a genie that we let out the bottle that has deluded us and now controls us.

It is true that words are loaded and as people listen to a word they will load it with their own significant meanings if you understand what is going on in somebody’s mind you can make them feel those emotions by using the words that they have loaded with intention that is how neuro-linguistic programming works.

Rhetoric as an ancient form of using language to be persuasive and change minds it was the whole idea behind oratory and if we stand and look at that from our modern viewpoint we cannot explain how great orators such as Elizabeth I, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao managed to make people think differently. In the case of Elizabeth I her ability in rhetoric saved her neck, in the case of Winston Churchill he probably saved our necks.

So don’t be a slave to words otherwise you will be following those who have mastery of them but instead spend time using words thoughtfully in such a way that you get what you want by using them.

I would suggest that you get some books of NLP even the idiot’s guide would do (which of course is a terrible title, you will realise that by the time you get to the end of your NLP training) then start writing some songs that use crafted words which express the outcome you want, not what you have nightmares about.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk play music change your life

No explaining just an acceptance of unconscious understanding.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding – Nassim Taleb

I just finished the eleventh year of blues camp and as usual the playing and songwriting from the campers was amazing, each year seems to get better. All we do is let people create however that is easier said than done and it involves psychological trickery for people to be allowed to be open and creative. There are a number of times will we see them close down by reverting to the default rational thinking even though they have been told that is not where musical creativity comes from, if that was true they would already be creative.

It does not take long for the most learned amongst them to question the logic of what I am saying even though they are by their own admission stuck musically and creatively and that is why they are there.

I have learned over the years that people fear change and that is why someone will come for coaching but they will fight against the change that is happening within them. There is a strong element of realising deep down what they believe is not true this can be explained through maths and I will hand over to Lionel Snell to put it more eloquently.

‘The rational view of the world is ultimately a logical one, to admit one little miracle or inconsistency into a logical system is not as harmless as you might think. It causes complete disruption.

An example of such a logical system is arithmetic. If we obey all the rules of arithmetic but allow just one wrong result than any wrong result can be proved. Let us say that we allow 5+7 = 10 therefore 12 = 10 therefore 12-10 = 0 therefore 2 = 0. Divide both sides by 2, 1 = 0 this means that all numbers are now equal to 0 (e.g. multiply both sides by a hundred to get hundred equals zero) and therefore all equal to each other in other words the whole arithmetic collapses if we admit one single illogical result into the system.

So when something is a rational mind take such pains to avoid confrontation with the miraculous it’s not being awkward or deceptive and is defending the conscious form from total chaos.’

So my experience here is how things that just need to be understood in order for them to work end up being vigorously debated to how the rationale works. I would even go further to say that a pseudo-rational is used frequently in order to make sense of something. Often people will come up with the phrase ‘scientists have found’ or ‘it is been proven scientifically that’, frequently these claims are not true. Not only that science is a system, a tool, not a philosophy and therefore the tool is used to do a job which occasionally, and maybe not as occasional as we might realise, is the wrong tool for the job particularly when we come to the area of creative thought.  Creativity seems to be inhibited by the rational leading to situations such as writers block, stage fright et cetera. So give your rational thinking a break for a time and enter into some unfettered creative thinking, no explaining, no limits in fact endless possibilities that bend and warp reality and see what you come up with. No explaining just an acceptance of unconscious understanding.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  booking for next year both UK and France go to the site for details

Attention deficit disorder is the order of the day

Attention deficit disorder is the order of the day from many young people now. It is a fact of life in the educational system, the inability - or the unwillingness, or both - to focus for the sake of scholastic and social and personal success haunts the classroom. The young and the old are the canaries in the Anthropocene coal mine, our sentinel species.-  Stephen Jenkinson

I have noticed over the years the lack of concentration that people now have (and I include myself here), technology obviously has a role in this but I am interested in Jenkinson’s view on how memory is being lost. Not only in the individuals but also in society, as if it is not important and by extension technology is all we need. This is the drift towards AI however what happens to our humanness?

I also see that part of being human is our ability to be musical, be that singing or playing an instrument. Jenkinson’s view is that we are becoming increasingly sick in our minds, losing our memory and this is evident in both the young and the old thus showing a change in the ecosystem. Sentinel species in the world at large show environmental change, butterflies for instance will decline or increase with subtle changes in the ecosystem. For us the young and the old are the first to show signs of change. We have already travelled far down this road but things are accelerating now, we may have already reached and maybe even passed the tipping point.

Everything that has abundance devalues; information, music, and food have all become degraded, lacking in spirit and sustenance. It is the postmodern nightmare that all things are relative and there is no such thing as truth, just an abundance of information, this is given us Trump, Putin and Brexit.

We need to develop something that is old, an old skill an old technology, make music and make songs that tell stories, myths or epics that engage the mind and bring back memory remember the stories that our ancestors believed had to be told continuously otherwise the world would stop, may be it has, maybe we need to restart it.

Vic Hyland www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Intelligence is proportional to population but talent appears not to be

Intelligence is proportional to population but talent appears not to be related to population numbers. I am living in the city on the edge of the Rocky Mountains; the population is much greater than it was in Shakespearean London, and almost everyone here is literate, and has many thousands of dollars spent on his education. Where are the poets and playwrights and painters and composers? Remember that there are hundreds of thousands of literate people here while in Shakespeare’s London very few people could read. The great art of this part of the world was the art of the native people. The whites flounder about trying to be original and failing miserably. Keith Johnstone

The above quote is taken from Keith Johnstone’s excellent book called ‘Impro’ which is about improvisation and the theatre. Johnstone is a playwright and teaches improvisation in a number of places including the Royal Court Theatre. A lot of his work stemmed from his difficulty in the education system and then his experience whilst training as a teacher where he met the inspirational art teacher Alan Sterling. Sterling’s work seem to be primarily influenced by the Chinese classic the Tao De Ching.

What seems to be problematic with education is not the teaching of maths or the teaching of language or anything specific but the parameters that are set in order to teach in a school, such as the chosen period of history and the way that it is explained.

The contextual nature of education is the main problem, the fact that children have to sit on chairs and do their work at tables, the fact that they are not allowed to run around, the fact that they are not allowed to play around , and of course this is a kind of programming and conditioning which is dismissed as a form of lefty conspiracy theory but the fact is these things have extraordinary control over people in a form of hypnotic arrangement of the brain.

We have now arrived at the point where all of the schools resemble some form of detention centre with levels of security that one has to go through in order to get in but what does this actually do to the mind of a child in education? Does it not say to them that the world outside is so dangerous that you have to be protected from it? Does it not say that the authorities are the only ones who can be trusted not even your parents can be trusted that is why you have the ChildLine telephone number and your parents have not been checked by an agency.

On the face of it these ideas seem to be okay but they are not, maybe we need that sense of danger, a sense of risk instead of it being mitigated out of our lives because what actually happens when you really do meet the wild world outside? You do not have anything as a resource to fall back on.

My concern is in the area of musical and artistic creativity and there is no way that you can be truly creative without dealing with the real world, all I see in the world is a situation where no one is allowed to fail and in order to ‘pass’ you have to conform to the criteria however how many times in the history of the arts are things that were once considered as the bench mark superseded by something that was considered unartistic or even wrong? So is that an example of a system trying to perpetrate itself? I think it is but in the arts it has a problem whereas in other areas it is more resistant to change.  We have lost that creative pit unless there is social problems and one can see that in our own life times the blues and rock boom coming out of the 50’s austerity into the period of change in the 60’s and then the problems of the 70’s giving us rock styles and then punk etc.

So Shakespeare’s London,  a den of thieves and criminals a dangerous place to be, full of Catholic plotters hired assassins and great artists many of whom were also spies, mostly for the Queen. Within that colourful world were a set of geniuses that set the Tudor world alight, Shakespeare, Marlow, Francis Bacon, John Dee, Walsingham, Sir Walter Raleigh to name a few.

Maybe this is something that Brexit may do again to England (because in a few years it may only be England) things might be so shit that it will act as a good fertiliser to the arts.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of playing music in a band

We do not stop playing because we grow old.

We do not stop playing because we grow old, but rather we grow old because we stop playing. Karl Groos ‘The Play of Animals’

It is often said that adults find it harder to learn new things than children because a child’s mind is more flexible and the adult has lost that ability and in a way that is true but not because we have grown out of it.

Interestingly it is the most educated of the adults that I meet, it is the doctors and the professional people who are the most affected.  I have written about this before, this time I am writing about how we might start to fix it.

The type play we are talking about is the childlike imaginary play, for those of you who are parents will know how difficult this is when playing with young children to get back to the imaginary which you found so easy to do as a child. You have to lose yourself in the imaginary and allow that to take you on a journey without trying to rationalise or bring yourself back. 

This imaginary childlike play is fantastic for writing songs; you can start the idea in some sort of random fashion and then improvise your way into the story, it might be best to use a recording device so you can capture the story without losing the trance, otherwise you could 'automatically' write your experience as you go along.

This is a similar idea to some of the techniques used by comic strip writers such as Grant Morrison who does it from more of an 'invocation' but looking through artistic eyes this could be considered as childlike play but through the eyes of something like Grant Morrison would be viewed as some form of wizardry.

This ability to play like a child, immersing yourself in a dreamlike world which draws upon more of a phenomenological perspective is a key aspect to using the mind in a creative way and it is a key aspect to staying young mentally hence the quote at the top. Our rational thinking (which is given us modern technologies) has actually stopped us being able to think in the fullness that our ancestors probably had. Remember if you go back far enough all problem solving involved doing everything, no experts, no shops suppling a remedy, you did it all.

So be irrational, dream like everything is possible and ready for you to use, see the opposite in things just for the hell of it and see how that changes your perspective. Give objects that you see a different name and see how that sharpens your senses like seeing everything new.

Remember that most of the creation myths involve some form of dreaming whether that is in Hinduism or some other native aboriginal storytelling, certainly in the world of shamanism there is a belief of the world being as you dream it, and in many forms of ancient culture there is a  belief that  the stories need to be told for the universe to continue.

So this time let us praise the daydreamer, the one who stares out of the window, who is not paying attention but is drifting along on a flight of fancy, maybe that flight of fancy has more power and more beauty than the lesson that they are sitting in.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  learn to play like a rock hero

Wisdom in music

Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, make me beautiful within, and grant that what-ever happens outside of me will help my soul to grow. May I always be aware that true wealth lies in wisdom, and may my “gold” be so abundant that only a wise man can lift and carry it away. For me that is prayer enough.

– Socrates

For a number of years now I have wrestled with the question,’ what direction should my work in music take?’ The Internet is absolutely awash with people showing you every conceivable guitar solo, song or technique and the idea of adding more to this maelstrom in that way is rather a waste of time.

Nowadays there are more guitar teachers than people wanting to learn or certainly seems like that! One thing that keeps me interested in the subject of teaching music is the step beyond the technical, song; the stuff that people normally get hooked up on, in other words it is the wisdom behind it all. What is it that pervades the mind of a great musician? Whether that is a Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Andre Segovia, Paganini, JS Bach, Art Tatum or Duke Ellington, really all the stuff that they did is not significant to us unless we can unpack it, not the knowledge but of the wisdom of what they do. The wisdom can manifest in many ways beyond the song, whereas concentrating on the knowledge does not, which is what I see mostly, it seems to confine us.

Now this is not a criticism of people that are already out there but more a critique in the way we think, that we learn in a system which has been foisted on us by the education system and society at large. We cannot possibly learn greatness in that way just filling one’s head with stuff because it does not answer the question of how do we arrive at the genius level which often happens at a very young age. Notwithstanding the 10,000 hour rule, wisdom is the thing that creates something exciting and something new that expresses something deep down and that can often very early in an artist’s career.

At this point if you are finding it difficult to draw the comparison between knowledge and wisdom think it is simply expressed that knowledge tells us that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom tells us not to put in a fruit salad.  Learning music from that perspective gives us great insight into the musicians and the art form and the knowledge and the technique is purely a toolkit to express that and that is where the practice comes in developing the toolkit.

Socrates states another good point here when he refers to wanting to be beautiful within and for the gods to grant whatever happens outside to help that interiority to grow, that interiority is where the wisdom resides.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk the music summer school in Kent UK

Set point theory

In the 1980’s some scientists came up with the idea of an equilibrium point to explain how people who dieted returned to their original weight after finishing their regime, they coined the term Set Point Theory. The body seemed to have a memory of its weight and would return to it after the diet. This idea then was then taken up by others who saw similar things in other areas such as self-improvement, sports training, and health.

Set Point Theory is something I would like to suggest is a natural phenomenon.  A guitar string that is too tight when you de-tune it will sharpened up again as if trying to return to its sharp status, a slack string will do the opposite, going flat after being tuned.

I can see these points in one’s ability to play music, to practice, to become effective as a professional, to focus on something, to read music, to be creative etc. we can look at these ideas as a comfort zone but I think the idea of a Set Point is more organic and not just a state of laziness.

So how do we move the Set Point? Let us return to the guitar string. Putting on a set of nylon classical strings and getting them to settle in tune will take a long time unless you overtighten the string and let it naturally flatten into tune and if you do this a few times it will have changed its equilibrium point. Maybe this is the thing that is needed for weight loss, go beyond the level that you are aiming for and then naturally put weight on to reach your desired goal.  

So for improved practicing maybe a week or two of extreme practice, so when you get back to normal patterns of life you will have increased your capacity to find time and the inclination to learn.

Can breaking one Set Point affect another? Can fasting change one’s ability to play music? On the face of it this is crazy however I am not so sure, if you look at it the mind is causing the patterns in all areas so changing something radically in one area can alter other areas, of that I am pretty confident.

This might explain the effectiveness of ritualistic behaviour, around initiations in particular, for instance rituals change your mind space, that is evident and if you think this is not the case then you have not been through an initiation. Not only do they affect you but also they can affect other aspects of your life, love, family, jobs et cetera you could do something like fasting as well as extreme practicing to break the blocks that control your set point so that it can be reset. Maybe that helps to overwhelm the mind to make changes, this is certainly a technique from hypnosis where sensory overload is used to induce trance.

I know this seems a bit out there but in these days of caution and caveats we need to do something to break the iron cage.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk music summer school for rock blues soul funk reggae ….

You Want It Darker? – Leonard Cohen

Okay let’s go darker from the last article, let us plumb the depths, we had dancing with your shadow, feeding the demons, let us go and feast with them and invite them for a holiday let us look at how music is used for stirring up the aspects of the human condition which is the right of Genghis Khan, and the Marquis De Sade would find embarrassing.

Invoking ideas of as medieval people might have said spirits demons may be a way of changing ones reference point or set point.

There is much to be said that there is an equilibrium or set point in our health, wealth and wellbeing whether it is social or financial situation that we find ourselves returning to. It is often similar to our parents income their health and weight and luck (yes that has been researched). So how do we change that equilibrium point?  The answer might be found in a guitar string.

If you have a new set of strings on a guitar they will need to be retuned to get them up to pitch especially the nylon strings and one thing you can do is to over tighten them so that they settle back down into tune. In the same way we may need to go further than we want to settle into maybe break what you are before remaking, leave the job, the marriage, leave your old self, maybe going to India is not so much are finding yourself and more leaving yourself behind.

So here is where darkness comes in. Take to yourself to a place that frightens you, saddens you, do a survival course that pushes you to the edge, do a marathon. Maybe the Christian idea of giving everything away is more to do with this than charity.

Now what has this got to music? Well everything from music that you use ritualistically if that is your jam, write a song about your intention that you find challenging to put out there. Such as your greatest fears, anger, greed, loss and get them into a song.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk Music summer school for rock and blues

Dancing with your shadow and feeding your demons.

Dancing in the light, the search for perfection and technical brilliance?

Why is it that the greatest artists are flawed? Jonny Cash, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin to name just a few. The performances from these where far from perfect in fact they teetered on the edge of disaster for most of the time, concerts of Amy Winehouse for instance.

What is it that we seem to miss here intellectually? We have a concept which makes us aim for perfection yet obviously realise the reverse unconsciously otherwise we would not be captivated by the failings of these masters.

Are these personal demons of the above artists the things that drove them and made them so captivating? Let us as a thought experiment imagine that they were and take our psychological shadows and let them in for a while.

There is a Buddhist concept which I think comes from Tibetan Buddhism of feeding your demons by invoking them, getting to know them and then 'feeding them' sometimes literally. They need feeding anyway and if ignored will disrupt your life as well as feeding off you, so bring them in! I look at it like the builders and labourers that are doing stuff for you, make sure that you pay them and treat them with respect and do not ignore their requests for payment.

The shadow side of our nature contains most of the juice that we need for artistic expression, if you do not believe me sit through a modern church service and listen to the music. If you are not part of the reverie then the music will make you feel like you are being beaten to death by soft furnishings.

There is something important in our failings and inadequacies that can be recognised and used. Hendrix was not the best guitarist technically for his time, not by a long shot, but he touched more people than any other guitarist and his performances although flawed were entrancing.

Instead of looking for perfection and dancing in the light step into the shadows and dance with the shade. Invite the parts of you that you do not like, be it your character flaws- anger, jealousy, greed or your ability flaws- lack of patience, heavy handed,  inaccurate playing and let them join the feast see what they bring to the party. Stop pretending to be someone else. Stop being the shop front that you show the world and bring the workers from the back room out. Do what Freddie Mercury did, lay it out for all to see but in your way and see what happens.

Your demons may have some cool tricks up their sleeves. Let’s face it they have had to put up with you all these years.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Music summer school for rock blues reggae soul jazz ….

The world is made of words

The world is made of words, and if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish. Terence McKenna

In the beginning was the word in fact it is possible as the myths say that life only continues because we still tell the story of life. It is certainly true that once we have a name for something we have some way of controlling it. Like with music if we know what key it is in, what the chords are, how the rhythm is constructed and we have labelled those with words we have a way of manipulating information and we can transfer the ideas to something else or to replicate it.

We need to give voice and name to the things that we want but we are encouraged in this society to contemplate the things that we do not want in our lives such as illnesses, depression, lack of money,  all because someone is making money out of your fear.

Think about the words that you use maybe this could be within your work or just your day-to-day life. Be aware of the power of words being used on you, this is not a new thing of course it was done through religion being told from the pulpit, what to believe and how to be. Now is done through the media. I am sure that when we look back will see how ridiculous this is just in the same way 1940’s and 50’s Pathe News Reels set the tone of the messages which were condescending and aimed at the naïve.

 We need to speak in a commanding way using words that create desired outcomes we need to see and hear and recognise words that are being used on us to control our lives so that we take back control from the media and society in general.

It is now time to wake up and build a new a new life with new words. Consider why songs are powerful. Listen to the following songs in the days to come

We will Rock You, Wild Thing, Riders on the Storm, All Right Now, Moondance, and The Boys Are Back in Town.

You can add many to this list, they all command driven lyrics telling you something not asking you, telling you with authority.

So go and change things

 Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  summer school, learn to rock  

Something Wrong With You

There is one ‘right’, ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ way for human brains and human minds to be configured and to function (or one relative narrow ‘normal’ range into which the configurational functioning of the human brains and minds ought to fall). If your neurological configuration and functioning (and as a result your ways of thinking and behaving) diverged substantially from the dominant standard of ‘normal’ then there is something wrong with you. – Nick Walker.

When you first read the above you would agree, however this was written by someone who has autism and the article it was taken from demolishes the idea that there is something ‘wrong’ and replaces it with something ‘different’. The power of words is such that we agree to many things without a challenge because we are told them as a fact and therefore what to believe.

With that in mind listen to the news and be aware how much you are being told. See how that resonates with you then challenge it by thinking, ‘why this why now’ and then see what happens to the BBC spell. This process goes on all the time I see it in schools with the idea that a child who thinks differently has a ‘labelled’ condition, the path to hell is paved with good intent and it is easy to say that the child has a problem but the awareness of difference is important here as it might suggest that the context needs looking at.

Anyone who has had lessons with me in the past who were dyslexic would attest that when you approach things from a different angle will see skills and strategies that the quote ‘normal’ do not have. I make a point when being told that somebody is dyslexic or has some other condition that that may benefit certain aspects of playing music. This is often greeted with surprise by the parent but it is true that these people are far more sensitive musically than the people who are the norm.

Now I am not saying that these people will not find life in this society difficult because there is a problem with society and that is the issue. I also do not have an answer because there isn’t one, in actual fact this is born from the same thought structure as the problem itself. However embracing difference is something that we need to do and need to be aware of. Being able to spot dualism in language patterns and why it happens in the way that it does goes some way to expose how language is used ‘on you’.

So how does that feedback into music and the arts? The last thing you want as an artist is to be normal; to embrace difference and find its beauty and its skills whether that is yourself or in others and work with it creating new possibilities. Someone who is autistic will have strategies in order to fit in and these are resources that we often ignore because they come from someone who has ‘something wrong with them’ however in another point in the timeline these people would have been the seers, navigators and healers in the community, but not now. I guess that is the price progress.

as things move in cycles it is possible that we could return to a point in time when things we consider as a medical condition now will be viewed more optimistically but I cannot see that in the foreseeable future. We can make a start by realising that the benchmarks of normality that we had set for ourselves are not real and to some extent they have been put there by people who wish to control aspects of society. So be troublesome! The pointers for this are the artists and musicians of the 1960s who obviously had some form of ‘labelled condition’ in retrospect such as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and at least to some extent John Lennon (addictive personalities, compulsive behaviours and all on the spectrum) and they all had a massive CIA and FBI file on each of them, I think that says it all.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three day music summer school for rock

Set Fire to the world

What is needed to start a fire? Dry kindling and then dry wood of suitable size for certain levels of burning, starting small at first and then gradually getting bigger, up to the big logs and something to create a spark. Once alight the fire needs to be feed and watched over.

There is most definitely a sequence that happens when lighting a fire, plenty of preparation and some level of ability to light it which includes positive action. Something else worth considering is what is the fire to do? Is it to keep you warm? To cook with or something else?  This will affect the way that the fire is built and where. So let as use the metaphor and ‘set fire to the world’ or let us consider ‘Fire in the head’ which is the old term for inspiration.

What I find interesting here is that these terms actually explained very well what is required to be successful with things artistic. If the ground is not ready for the fire to be lit then you are not going to be successful. If the territory is not ready for the type of music you have then your fire will not start, there has got to be enough tinder to get started and then you need enough fuel to build the fire.

The world might be ready for you but if you do not create the spark then nothing will happen either, interestingly enough many fire lighting skills require you to blow and breathe at various stages to feed the fire which is very similar to marketing and speaking about your product and being interviewed on radio, TV and the Internet maybe you need to say something that is incendiary.

I think this is something that we miss in the way that we have been prepared by music courses and the general sort of fantasia of programs like The Voice and The X Factor that we can just go on and play or perform in some form of circus. Now for some people, in fact very few people, that might be way of succeeding but I find it interesting that the biggest artists like Adele, Ed Sheeran and Amy Winehouse did not take this pat. Adele began on the road to her success by doing Myspace then small gigs, radio and TV sometimes going out with just herself and a guitarist to do some of the early shows.

We can continue the fire metaphor as far as we want because it can also lead to burnout and most fires do need to burnout and to be rebuilt and to some extent that is exactly what Adele did in between the various albums. Maybe thinking about strategies for success in this way is better for artistic people because there is a feeling to it that makes sense. Many marketing strategies are so much ‘in your head’ being dry and expressionless that they are difficult to feel your way through where something that uses an element such a fire is much easier to envisage and taps into an intuitive level of expression.

This it does not to be world domination, it could be something simple like developing the level of teaching that you have at the moment, or moving into a new area of work or just building up the numbers of people having lessons just try it out and see how you get on. I will watch out for smoke on the horizon.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of playing in a music summer school.

We have always been clever we should just stop acting dumb

 A few years ago I spent time working on some skills like flint knapping and what became clear was how clever our ancestors were. Not only could they hunt but they had the make everything required for hunting, the arrow heads, the arrow shaft, fletching, the bow, the cordage, everything; and if it did not work they starved.

It must have been the same for the musicians, same with everything, clothing, housing and fishing. We look at people in the past as superstitious and stupid, the fact is we do not have anything like the practical skills of our ancestors. Even going back to the Edwardians or the Victorians it has been estimated that the average person was far more intelligent and practical than we are, however that is not the story that we get at all.

The point here is that we are not tested by the life that we live like our forbears and therefore we get lazy when it comes to the way that we think and problem solve this leads to stress and the usual problems with the lifestyle that we have, including increased rates of depression.

For the artist and the musician we really need to break away from the formulaic approach that we are given by school, college and university. The problem is the context of compliance, in fact that word is used in everything from child protection to health care etc. now in essence that is very laudable but it has the effect of strangling the life out of things because no one wants to take risks. The risks that I am talking about are just the risk of non-conformity where you are just doing something different, as a teacher that might be not having a lesson plan that Ofsted can look at. The path to hell is paved with good intent and that is the problem here, because we are slowly destroying ourselves by making life a form of personal slavery.

I see this a lot with players who end up as machines of technique and not true artists. Think about it, none of the famous musicians were technically the best, far from it, that would have been the bedroom guitarist, who have always been there; the guy that was so screwed up he never left his bedroom but now because of YouTube he does not need to leave his bedroom to get online.

The great artists have something to say with their music and that means that they need to break rules, break the taboos, the buzz words of Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll the life style of the Dionysian cult approach to life to embrace the divine needed taboo breaking as a prerequisite.

So what is the solution for this? First of all and this is only opinion as is everything I write is, we need to realise that people had solutions for things that we do not use anymore, a form of mythic thinking which is great for creative thinking a case for revelation where you know the answer without justification. Also the understanding that we are not that clever if we are only using logic because we only need to enter a form of quantum theory to realise that form is difficult to justify and maybe nothing is real let alone an idea maybe all these things create some form of agency that makes things happen but they are not in essence real they only manifest the illusion of the real.

So do not be dumb, dream big and make something happen just like the weirdos from the past.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.ukthree days of playing in a band