"There’s a plague of sameness that is killing human joy." Zita Cobb

I have been reading Marx recently, as you do, and I have found his ideas deeply interesting. Some aspects are deeply flawed but there are many ideas that we should be thankful for.

He was most definitely someone who lived what he believed and wrote about; spending most of his adult life in totally poverty and because of his writings he was exiled from Germany and France and ended up here.

He and Engels formulated a way of understanding capitalism and  proposed an answer to it which led us in many ways to the national health system, a shorter working day and all of the things that the unions fought for and won in the 60’s and 70’s and he should be applauded for this.

It is easy for commentators to ridicule Marxism but without his ideas many of the great musical ideas would not have happened. He was an important source of inspiration for artists here and America in the 50’s and 60’s and the Americans had to run the gauntlet of the McCarthy witch hunts for their beliefs.

I am always inspired by people who are passionate in what they believe, those who make their beliefs become their lives; something that sadly  the majority do not do anymore.

Marx was not cut from the same cloth as of those around him, he was truly different. The irony was that his ideas through Stalinism made people have to all become the same but that was not Marx’s intention, but the corrupting influence of Stalin and the Bolsheviks.

For us, both in art and the teaching of it, the worst thing is to be like everyone else, it is the kiss of death, you must be different, you must find something that you believe in and then live it. Maybe this is the lesson of someone like Karl Marx; make your life become what you believe. 

Vic

 

Enjoy life play in a rock band

 

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Zen and the art of cheese making

I learn to make cheese the other day. It is like alchemy, you take these ingredients and they become something else; true magic.

I do these things because I am always exploring the nature of creativity; it gives me insights into the magic of music and the human spirit. This I have always believed has given me a different perspective to the other teachers around me and when I watch some of my past pupils play, whether it is with local bands or famous artists I can see that they have found the magic, the holy grail of their creativity.

I cannot however  teach that stuff, they have to find it for themselves but I can help them to find where to look and that is something that all the crazy things that I have done has helped me to understand.

All of the things that we do as humans expresses what we are as beings and the Zen masters understood this hence you can as a spiritual practice sweep the floor, prepare food, do the washing, play a musical instrument or make cheese. 

So let me suggest that the next time that you teach someone to play the guitar you are setting them on a road to liberation. No pressure then.

Vic

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The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money. Karl Marx

Maybe this could be said of musicians because great music and art often comes from those that are hungry, angry and driven by a passionate belief. Very rarely does great art come from one looking to make lots of money.
I have been preparing for a couple of projects that are coming up, one of these is the course making money from music and the other is a gig that I am doing with two good friends and great musicians which is mostly improvised.
In the first of these I am looking to help those musicians to get the balance between the money making and the creating and making the crossover, the twilight zone where both can happen. For me it is all about the attitude that you need to make money, get the attitude right and it functions as a successful business and that puts food on the table, BUT to make great art and music you need to be driven by desire and passion and not by money therefore you also need projects that are not focused on the money but on the creativity. That is not to say that these projects will not eventually lead to financial reward but that is not the driver and I do have a couple of interesting techniques to make things happen (you will need to come along for those).
The second of these is playing with musicians who can read one another and that is pure magic but of course you need to sell tickets to pay everyone. The focus then is on the experience of the crowd, the fact that they will see something very special, people who will take a song and create something different and because the musicians are on the very edge and pushing that edge the members of the audience if they are learning music get the chance to study this and bring that into their own experience of playing. However the players are doing it for the fun of the playing and the danger of it all going wrong and going right!
Vic

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

I often get my pupils to sit and listen to Mannish Boy by Muddy Waters, and as the riff repeats and the crowd get whipped up into a frenzy I ask them one simple question ‘Why does something so simple work like this?’ if they can answer this question they have an insight to what makes music tick.

I think this is one of the truths of art that it is an emotive power and not an intellectual one. Yet we chew the cud over the scales,  chords and structure and all of that stuff, but at the end of the day a piece of music has to comes out and either grab you by the throat, heart or somewhere lower to have you in its power.

Teaching is more like taking people on a journey that enables them to discover this for themselves, when discovered you then realise it has been staring you in the face all of the time and now it seems so obvious but before it eluded you.

So have a listen to the music that really grabs you that is simple and feel why it works then use that information in your playing.

 

Vic

 

 

 

 

Make Money from Music course

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

Discovery using old technology

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

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

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

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


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