Is it a good idea to take guitar exams?

Over the years I have entered lots of people for guitar grades. I have worked with other musicians and music teachers, where we have used a variety of examination boards and syllabuses.

For me it’s always been about a motivator, I am not focused on the actual examination itself, as I always say to my pupils, the journey is more important than the arrival, a bit like life.

For some may need a certain grade level in order to get onto a music college course, but even that is something that we will need to review now we are in the days of Internet courses, many run by most of the major universities. So from the viewpoint of guitar, (but this is as relevant to other instruments I believe)you maybe able to find another way of focusing that will act as a goal.

I have been using predominantly and sometimes almost exclusively the RGT guitar exams run by the LCM, which is accredited by the University of West London, but I’ve also taught many pupils from other syllabuses. I’ve always found these to useful, but they do have drawbacks.

Their main competitors including The Rock School exams run by Trinity College, and the guitar exams run by the Guildhall.

The categories for the guitar examination fall into three main sections, the Electric guitar, the Rock guitar, and the Acoustic guitar. The Acoustic guitar exams are particularly good for younger players in the early grades, because they contain some very pleasant and relatively simple melodies.

You are also encouraged to learn a few scales and chords, but not as many as the Electric.

As the grades go up there as an accompaniment section starting from Grade 1, where the candidate accompanies using their own rhythm patterns, and a melody played by the examiner. This is often quite a challenging section of the exam as the chord progression is new to the candidate. This requires a thorough knowledge of the chords not only for that Grade, but any preceding Grades. The rest of the Acoustic guitar sections can be pretty much studied and learnt, as is typical for most music exams for other instruments.

The Electric guitar exams on the other hand is all about using information such as scales and chords, and being able to create an improvised solo or a rhythm pattern from a chart to your own rhythm ideas. As the grades progress they obviously become far more complex with different key changes at the high grades, and more Jazzy progressions using classic sort of Jazz 2-5-1 progressions, which is really good for the all-round guitarist.

The Rock guitar exams on the other hand were probably bought out in direct competition against the Rock School exams, and these involve playing pieces of music that all cut down versions of an original classic. Whereas with the Rock School exams the pieces are pastiches of famous songs with the riff turned upside down and inside out, and then given the name which hints at the original.

To be honest I think that it is better to play the original piece of music than somebody’s version of a song by Guns N’ Roses ,with a tribute band style song title. Now there are some very good pieces in the higher Rock Schools syllabus, but I do think that the RGT version has got the edge from the viewpoint of teaching and learning.

There are shortcomings to all of these exams because Contemporary guitar is such a varied style, for some people they will need to learn to read if they wanted to say for instance play in a pit orchestra, but for others they might not want to or need to read. Reading music is a requirement for the Rock School syllabus, but remember many of the famous guitar players could not read at all. Flamenco players and Acoustic players in the past did not know how to read music, but they did have exceptionally good ears which is something that I believe an electric player really needs in preference. However, a little bit of everything is always a good thing if you can manage it.

The music exams happen three times a year at around the same time as the classical music exams. They are held at various centres dotted around the country, and worldwide; since the Coronavirus there have been efforts to put many of these exams online, so that you can perform at home and be assessed by an examiner over the Internet. So, do have a look at the various prices of the exams.

They are all accredited by the examination boards, and they carry the same Ofqual ratings, the higher grades being the same as an A-Level.

Vic 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

I like a paradox, as they contain truth. Every light casts a shadow and we do not care too much for the darkness of things, but often the darkness gives us the true meaning of its essence. How true this is with music? How many great songs are written by people who are not particularly great on the instruments they play? In fact for many, being a great player is a draw back for a writer, with only a few exceptions, such as Hendrix and Clapton.  

To succeed, don’t try to succeed. When you give up measuring yourself by your markers of success it flows more freely. This is something sighted by entrepreneurs that money becomes a marker not the goal, often the goal will be something less obvious like the challenge of making something happen, or what success would enable you to do.

Better to focus the mind on things that success would afford you, instead of the success itself. So for the pupil and the teacher, do not focus on the grade, but what the grade will enable you to do. Seeing oneself playing in a band that performs a particular style of music that requires that level of knowledge, is a better motivator than the examination day and the piece of paper at the end of it.

The mind seems to have a way of flagging up possibilities of acquiring the ways and means of achieving that possibility. I often use the story of buying a new car, once you have made the decision on which model and which colour you are going to buy one starts to see that colour and that model everywhere. We are alert to the possibilities of acquiring that which we desire.

Thought Experiment

‘Once we have a belief system the unconscious will find evidence of the truth of that belief in the world around us’. Now if we take this as a fact for the time being, it means that the things that appear to be wholly true are maybe just a fabrication of how we think. So use this to believe something different, something better. See what happens, be observant to possibilities that come your way.

Now if you take those things as a flow of possibilities, don’t grasp at them but let them come to you. See if that changes your ‘normal’, often the desire for something shows its lack in your life, and that might be holding you back.

 So back to the happiness: by searching out the result of happiness such as being with friends, having connections with family, the feeling of support and assistance, this is where happiness can be found.

So success with music is giving success to others, happiness can be found by giving happiness to others ………………………

Playing the guitar is a beautiful thing

Playing the guitar is beautiful but there are some people who teach it making it boring or worse, a misery; that does take some doing.

I was contacted by an ex pupil of mine that had just received his music degree, but in his words ‘Uni was good apart from my guitar lessons. The man who “taught me” showed me how much a teacher can really affect your enjoyment of music! So If I didn’t seem grateful at the time I was having lessons with you... thank you, because, it probably got me through my performance module.’

I have always been aware of the teachers who have the unique gift of making the guitar boring. I think a lot of reasons for this is the assumption that the guitar should be taught in the same way as a classical instrument. No offense if you are learning classical guitar, that is a different matter altogether, but not if you are learning a contemporary form of guitar playing.

I see this type of thinking a lot among teachers, that there is a correct way to do something. This may be the case if you’re learning a strict discipline for a particular instrument and style , but as soon as you get outside the confines and strictures of a way of thinking, there cannot be an ordained way of playing. Guitar was always an instrument that thrived on that lack of structure.

Remember that all of the great contemporary players had some form of idiosyncratic way of delivering music, from a Hendrix playing with his teeth approach,  to the Jeff Healey ‘play the guitar on your lap’ or a Keith Richards ‘playing the different tuning,’ to Eric Clapton ‘play so loud that your amp is about to blow up’ sort of thing. None of these follow the ‘correct way of playing guitar’ with the thumb at the back of the neck , and the hand correctly placed over the guitar strings.

So what is it that we need to do? I would suggest that a good teacher is an alchemist, one who finds which ingredients are available within the pupil and by mixing these with the ingredients that the teacher has, can create something transformational. There is really no way that you can know what the pupil is capable of, and at a best guess  it is something that is completely beyond what you believe . That has often been my experience; if I allow them to push my ideas beyond my comfort zone amazing things start to happen. This however requires bravery from the teacher.

Education sadly has become very little about opening the mind, but very much about social management and ticking boxes. Lessons become asking questions about tempo and about technicality, when in actual fact these things are taken in the stride of the pupil if they are excited about discovering how brilliant they are.

Because education and higher education in particular, is all about the dollar, it has become an economic machine that needs to be fed, creating much in its likeness. It is very different from opening the mind like a parachute, exploring the creative landscape from a distance, but still infused with the excitement of the jump.

Think about what makes music exciting for you? Ditch all the stuff that you found boring and go for that. Technical material that is required in order to make stuff exciting should be expressed in such a way that people are desperate to learn it!

Grief and music

Grief and music

"The work now is the willingness to propose grief as a radical political alertness to life, that is not a drag, is not sad, that the power of grief deepens the capacity of being alive. It is the realisation that it is not going to last.”  Steven Jenkinson.
 

Steven Jenkinson is one of the most profound speakers that I have ever heard, and he is dealing with the idea of grief. He worked with hundreds of people in the last days of their life dealing with their fears and thoughts; I find something very powerful in his work.

Music is a way of exploring emotions that we would rather keep at a distance. However, keeping emotions unrealised can lead to problems. This is an area that for some of us can be a good way of developing your work; people exploring their own ideas musically with some prospect of self-healing. The idea of music therapy is not new , but I think that it is something worth considering even as a stress buster for professional people who would rather not go to a therapist.

I have always found music a potent force for dealing with life’s twists and turns. I know of a number of people who sight playing a musical instrument helps them not to have another breakdown (their words not mine).

The idea of exploring grief and maybe writing something of an experience, making something artistic and beautiful out of it is a positive way of transforming shadows into something very powerful. Think Leonard Cohen!

Throughout history we have always used music as a way of healing, from whaling to religious music such as the mass; music has been used to express grief whether personal or spiritual.

In our modern times we rarely meet death, in the past it would have been a very common occurrence. There would have been no covering over of the process of death. It would have been familiar to see the death of animals, and the death of members of your own family close at hand. In today’s society this has become sanitised, however while I’m writing this we are in the middle of the pandemic and societies response to this is death phobic. This is another term of Stephen Jenkinson’s which I think aptly describes the underlying attitude towards the covid virus.

Jenkinson’s point of view is that grief is a skill that needs to be cultivated for our own sanity. There is no logical way of dealing with a thing such as grief, but it has to be something that we court and get to know. It is also something that makes us deeply human, and that lack of being able to grieve shows how far we have lost that humanity.

And our way of dealing with grief would have involved music. Music was the technology to communicate with the world other than this, a world that we may understand as being part of our deep unconscious with the things that are unknown can in some form instruct us in life.

For me music has a deeply spiritual aspect, even something as banal as pop music has the ability to speak to people in a language that is universal. Music like all art does not have to be cerebral, in fact it is often more powerful the more basic it is. I have recordings of Amazonian shaman whistling, and the singing was being accompanied by the swishing of leaves made into a fan. These songs or Icaros are intoxicating, even though they are in a language that I do not understand. But it is a language that the medicine people say is the song of the plant.

These Amazonian plants have been found to have profound effect on the mental health of people who ingest them. People with schizophrenia, depression and many other physical ailments including cancer have been cured with their various brews.

There is now a line of thought which links the psychosomatic aspect of illness to the fight or flight mechanism, which we call stress, leading to many of the West’s ailments. When healing with these plants the shaman will sing their songs as they journey with those who need to be healed.

So when you are digging deep to find a song, your experience of life can produce a piece of art that can heal you and the person who listens, this is a gift and a blessing.

Magic has been drained out of history by the historians. Gordon White

There has been a fundamental omission in the telling of the past, not just our past history but also in the way that we understand music, and that is the role of magic. It is difficult for us to reconnect with the fundamental belief in magic that our predecessors had, it was infused in everything that they did , and by extension music and art was a magical connection with the other world.

Without reinserting that fundamental belief in magic and the supernatural back into history, it is impossible to fully understand why or how people thought. We also have to respect those people and not just remove ourselves from this colonial Western modern thinking and all its pomposity that we have the answers, because we obviously do not1 So, with a little bit of humility we can see that our ancestors’ belief and the use of magical ritual and spiritual practices, gave rise to incredible innovations in art and technology. For us our focus is what this type of thinking did regarding music.

Music and art were used to invoke and evoke states of consciousness and they knew that. Their definitions of how these things happened would be different from ours, as we will explain them using psychological terminology. But anybody who is a student of Carl Jung will understand that psychology is really only a cipher for magical thinking. As evidenced by the Red Book.

I would say that today music is disconnected from this otherness, it has little or no inner energy, this is why root styles of music frequently come back into the popular music arena and re-energise music. This can be disguised as rock and roll, punk or grunge and there is something innately visceral and otherworldly about those sorts of animals.

One thing that could be said about modern pop music is there is nothing really magical about it. It is so computerised and quantised that any essence of energy has been removed and replaced by something sterile. However, if the computer becomes the servant and not the master the essence of the DJ producer can be bound into the songs, dance is a good example of this. I think the deciding point here is, were any risks taken? Producing a song by a Rihanna or a Katy Perry maybe more a case of not getting it wrong than getting it right, because of the big budgets involved.

We find it very difficult to be able to think in a mediaeval style, because we have been told that many of the things they believed are rubbish, but obviously they did not think that. If however you ask yourself the question ‘why ritualistic behaviour and magic systems seem to have been unchanged over a period of 2000 years, why keep doing something that does not work? The logical answer to that is, it did. But it is only us that have rid ourselves of the magical tools from the toolbox.

I am suggesting that by looking back at styles that may influence us musically and getting to the root of what it is that drives it, we can reconnect with what the music is all about and derive something from it for ourselves; if only to reanimate the music that we play.

You do not have to believe in magic and the supernatural; only suspend your disbelief to unlock the unconscious. I would suggest listening to musical styles such as Blues or Flamenco , or the English folk music tradition and see what sort of weirdness you can find in there; Mojo’s, Dances of the spider, impossible tasks asked of ex-lovers etc. Pull on that thread a little and see where it takes you.

Then maybe off to the crossroads to talk to Old Nick

‘May my life be exalted

May my law be cherished

May my strength be increased

May my tomb not be readied

May I not die on my journey

May my return be ensured to me’

(Early Irish invocation for protection)

In myths about the origins of words and writing they often come from a god, a trickster or both. Language often troubles the gods, as in the case of the Greek Pantheon, or the humans are just too noisy, but words are never something humans have thought up themselves, but were gifted to them. Remember in the Judaeo-Christian book, ‘in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, (and more telling) the word was God’

Language is powerful and having language gives one power. Has language been debased in the modern world, where seemingly the only ones who know its true power are politicians and people in advertising? Words do create powerful images and they change people’s minds, but not by reasoned debate. This is the big mistake of the logical liberal academics that have taken the intellect to such a lofty place, that it is totally lost and disconnected from the way the human mind is influenced. Emotive words contain power that evokes responses that are not intellectual, the whole of creation seems to run on desire, but we have taken an idea that we through our intellect can control that world, well we cannot! The power of words lays in the emotional response, the way that words empower and raise the senses, both for good and ill is subliminal.

It is useful when pondering why some songs have great power , and often it is the lyrics that do this. Lyrics that are full of great imagery or a call to action, like the Beatles ‘All you need is love‘ where love is used as a mantra, are very powerful. There is no logical argument here, just by repetition you have to think of love. They are not saying why do you need love? Or you should love me.

Other examples such as ‘We will rock you’ and ‘Wild thing’ create and emotional effect by describing the feelings, not mentioning them, you can make people feel the emotions by describing. For example ‘Walking back from your house, walking on the moon’, relays the feeling of weightlessness that love can bring.

In Ireland and Wales the bards would not only be celebrated but also feared by what they could do with words. If words have power, then that is as true now as it was then, maybe that should be your aim as a musician, to be celebrated and feared in equal measure. In the 1960s governments were deeply worried by the power that young musicians such as John Lennon and Jim Morrison had. Maybe we should start aiming words at people who seem to rule our lives.

What would you do if you knew couldn’t fail, would you write about; if you knew that a song could create a reality?

The first part of this question is a premise from NLP, designed to focus the mind about change.

For change to happen we have to either believe that it can, or better still suspend our disbelief, because it is our belief systems that tend to hold us back, this is often enough. Taking this idea further if you are a musician what would you write about if your song could create a reality? Just for a moment allow the possibility of this being plausible, so that we can create!

My guess would be that the writing about lost love or how difficult life is would not only create a cliché, but it also might set the mind on the course to look for that situation to fulfil.  For a change to happen we must write something far more positive, for example about having money, health or happiness.

Interestingly successful artists do tend to write positive songs! The most obvious who spring to mind are The Beatles, who wrote about love and quoted the word more times than any other band in existence, and they seemed to do quite well in reflection! But along with those, are artists like Robbie Williams, Bob Marley, Abba, Queen, Neil Young and Michael Jackson.

Whether or not the Beatles were in the love zeitgeist of the time, or whether they actually helped to make that ‘Love Movement’ happen in the 60’s is obviously debatable, and of course they were not the only ones! But there is an interesting interaction between art and reality; as in the quote’ life mimicking art’, so it must happen enough times for that quotation to exist, that there is a certain amount of conjuring the future through art.

The unexpected outcome of this is that we end up with interesting pieces of music. I have been experimenting with this concept, with people at Bluescamp, and private pupils for couple of years. There is something in that creative process that is worth pursuing, and in some cases produces some weird results. It doesn’t have to be a song, it could be a poem; just create something that focuses the mind in a different direction than just rambling through some crude clichés!

Taking Guitar Exams - Do they help you?

Over the past twenty years of teaching guitar, preparing candidates for exams and working as an examiner for the RGT in the UK.  I have often pondered what impact taking guitar examinations has on someone's rate of learning, and can it in some way damage a player’s creative approach to playing?

I have become very sceptical in the past about examinations in other areas of education, especially when children are subject to the process of testing that the education system in this country uses.

The idea that all things should be measured is has been taken from the world of business and the time management philosophy of Denning to the classroom, as if everything is under scientific scrutiny. Well, from the world of the arts and music we have a message for you; not all things can be measured, welcome to the alternative world of the creative.

As musicians and artists we are only too aware of the small things that happen which have a profound influence on us; a small idea that literally transforms our lives and our playing. I am reminded of the pre-enlightenment age of revelation where something can just suddenly be known. Often in music you will simply ‘know’ what to do without knowing why or how. The education system that we have is very left brained, focusing on ‘facts’, but my lasting memories of education and the moments that had most impact were subtle things which were life changing for me.

So, back to the world of examinations and to the experience of the years of teaching, and what can be drawn from this. I recently looked at the pupils of mine that did well and in some way great or small became ‘successful’. I can safely say that all of these took the guitar grades, not all to Grade 8, but certainly to the upper grades, and the ones that never took a grade did not fare so well.

The first thing to consider is that to take the grades you need to have a mind-set that is organised, focused and dedicated to put in the practice to achieve the standards required. Of course these are also the requirements for you to achieve anything in the world of music.

Look deeper into the way that examinations affect pupils and you might see that a person is acquiring a particular way of thinking which is becoming prescribed. This is not in my opinion always for the better, and needs to be balanced with creative experimentation. However , the structure of examinations can give the pupil a goal, this is a practical nature of the discipline; preparation and organisation, but one needs to make the journey important and not its arrival.

So for my pupils the ‘journey’ remains the most important aspect, and grades seem to help with this.

When it comes to the diplomas then I am not so sure how valuable they are from a playing point of view.  At this point, the pupil is cutting their own way through the music jungle armed with the tools that they have picked up along the way.So if the higher exams help with them to become teachers then so be it;  but again I am not so sure. Creativity is often traded off against ideas that come in as training.

Make sure that if you or your pupils decide not to take examinations, then it is not because of laziness but you have something else that acts as a driver. There are lots of people out there playing, and you need to be in the top five per cent if you want to achieve something