Make Money, take the chance

If you want to be able to make money from music like any form of art you will have to look at the opportunities as they present themselves.

It is so easy to get trapped in a form of thinking that is restrictive and this becomes the norm, so for instance if you were thinking about a lessons  just a half an hour of passing on facts then you are missing an opportunity to expand their experience. For the pupil to go without you offering anything else that lays beyond the standard music format then you are going to be caught in an economic trap that you set for yourself.

You really need to be able to offer something different for instance, sound engineering or guitar maintenance and repair, song writing, performance skills etc.  If you have a studio create experiences that excite pupils to be more involved.

Artists often forget that the general public are willing to pay a lot for interesting experiences such as training programs workshops etc. which could be in or out of the country for themselves or their children. Parents will pay a lot of money for their children’s education which they may not for themselves.

It is my belief that the teaching of music and the arts will become increasingly more important as education moves along in this very uncertain world that we are now entering.   Future generations will require lots of creative thinking and not so much of the factual education style that has been used up to now; the world is moving is so fast into the unknown.

Vic

check out video setting up as a teacher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtSQpny2D8

I want to be free……………

I noticed an interesting debate / argument develop on the internet the other day about whether or not to offer a free introductory lesson to prospective pupils. Both sides stated their case before becoming rattled at the other, trading a few masked insults. My thoughts on this were not whether it was right or not because of the professionalism of the musician but whether in the process of business it works to do that.

So let us step aside for a moment from the trade aspect of the job and look at the business looking at it from the point of another profession offing a service, say a phone contract or credit card. Do they offer a free introductory period? In many cases yes they do and contained in it is the hook to get you in. How about gym membership do they make offers like this such as a reduced price for new clients? Yes they do.

There is a classic story about the pet shop owner who when a family came in looking for a pet he offers a puppy for the weekend with no obligation to buy, as you can imagine after the weekend they do not want to give the dog back; this in the business is called ‘The puppy dog close’ and is a classic business strategy.

Now does this seem to diminish the professionalism of a teacher that they offer a free lesson maybe it could. Would someone who has a good reputation with lots of referrals need to offer this kind of inducement? No probably not.

So it is horses for courses, if you do not need to then don’t. If it works for you to do that, then do it BUT do not confuse business with the trade. What functions for business does not necessarily have anything to do with your skill, it is like saying that your improvisational skills will benefit from better book keeping.

What I think it does do however is make others feel threatened that the playing field is uneven but hey that is business. The battlefield of trade is all about topography so choose the high ground.

Vic

 www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Three days of learning how to be a rock icon  

The inner sky of the mind fills with images...

The inner sky of the mind fills with images, ideas and concepts on a continuous basis. Some of these ideas seem so real and so powerful they become apparently autonomous.

Yet the Gods and Goddesses are creations of our own minds. They stud the starry universe that wheels within and only within our eyes. They provide a way for consciousness to think about the whole with all its ambivalent and changing parts. They provide a functional cosmology based upon real observable polarity of male and female, which tells the whole story of creation. Consciousness flourishes in the mythic cycle that includes every aspect and symbol of the divine. Nicholas Mann

The rich and open canvas of the mind is the powerhouse of our consciousness it is our best ally and also our greatest enemy and to understand it is to be able to use that tool that is also fundamental to what makes us who we are.

I have always been interested in meeting new people, especially creative people; I am very interested to learn from them. Often these people become friends and one such person was Stuart Wilde.

Stuart was an incredible writer and thinker; he was a writer for music projects such as ‘Heartland’ and ‘Greenwood’ and his own metaphysical books and recordings. He was a lecturer on the occult and mystical and he was a natural comedian and bon viveur.

Some of Stuart’s ideas were so left field, but as you got to know him you could really grasp what he was getting and he had an amazing line of prediction which included the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the World Financial Crash (which no one else seemed to see coming) and the child abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church.

But what I liked about him was his generous spirit and how he wore his heart on his sleeve and his ability to move his mind into areas like music that even in his own opinion had no obvious skill. We did a recording a few years back and when I said he should sing on it he said he had a voice like ‘a frog in a bag’, I thought he could do a Lee Marvin but I could not sway him on this.

For people like Stuart opening the mind and ‘seeing’ the inner world and then creating from it was the magic that we as artists need to engage with. Too much of musical teaching is wrapped up in the theory and not in the expansiveness of the unconscious and we can benefit greatly from the pantheon of mind’s symbology and iconography so imagine what you want and start to manifest it through your work.

Vic

 Expand your mind and your ability to play www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Concerning the Way

Concerning the Way - Confucianists, Buddhists, tea masters, masters of ceremonial practices, Noh dramatists and such – none of these are within the Way of the Warrior. Even though their Ways are not ours, if you know the Way broadly, not one of them will be misunderstood. It is essential that each person polish his own Way well – Miyamoto Musashi

One thing about music that I love is that by learning its Way you learn so much about yourself and the world around you. I teach this dealing directly with the functioning of our mind and that to learn efficiently you will need to have an understanding of how the brain works, and then you will be able to learn the technique of playing with great ease.

Due to my interest and maybe my addiction to music I have begun to understand how music changes the state of consciousness of the listener and the player and how our ancient forebears used it for ceremonial use. This really came home to me when I was in South America listening to the icaros of the shaman and how it ramped up their work; this introduced me to the notion that great musicians particularly from roots styles of music have that ability to change states of mind.

I was playing through some old blues numbers by Muddy Waters and you can see that this man who Eric Clapton called ‘Buddha’ could play one riff for several minutes and sing a song that would drive an audience into a frenzy (Mannish Boy) or sing a song about the magical charms that he had and how he was destined to be a great man (Hoochie Coochie Man). This is easily found in all other musical forms, Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer in Reggae, Jimi Hendrix in rock music, Elvis Presley in Rock and Roll and John Lennon in Pop music, where the musician would take you on a journey to a different place which you could say was 'otherworldly'.

What is interesting for me is that when you see what really works on a deep level in one sort of music you will recognise it in other forms of music and then in other places, such as sport, business, human relationships because music is a reflection of human consciousness.

As Musashi says if you polish your Way, you will understand all others; not one of them will be misunderstood.

Vic

 Play in a rock band for three days learn it's secrets

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Every part mixes with the whole.

‘Every part mixes to the whole, remove the lungs, liver and pancreas, whether or not you have a brain becomes irrelevant, remove the plants, the forests, the waters, whether or not you have scientists or opposable thumbs becomes irrelevant.’ Stephen Harrod Buhner

I find this quote just as relevant to do with music, education or music performance, the fact that the arts are crucial to the well-being of the society seems obvious to an artist however I do not think it is obvious in this society as a whole.

Societies driven by the greed of a few people within and the idea that business and the academic pursuit of knowledge in order to create wealth beyond everything else to the exclusion of the arts does very little to benefit society in the long term; it is killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

As musicians we need to tell a story instead of just looking at music as some sort of industrial process, we need to get to the heart and soul of what music really is, we should be telling the story of people-kind in such a way that integrates music back into its landscape.

We cannot operate in a vacuum whether we are teaching or playing as it does not give what we do any meaning and then it just becomes another job which kills the very reason why we became involved in the first place.

Make your music and the music of those that you inspire to have meaning and let the surroundings in which the music is set feed what you do first then let the money come from that, it is more rewarding and sustainable in the long term.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of learning the art of playing in a band.

Gentrification of Lewes East Sussex

The artists residents and workers at the Phoenix Industrial estate have been battling to keep the development somewhere that the community could remain as the creative hub of the community of Lewes unfortunately the area will be gentrified so that a few people can get their hands on the money.. They put it better than me so for this week’s article I will pass over to Lewes Phoenix Rising ……..

Bitterly disappointing decision from the South Downs National Park Authority yesterday - which was more focused on recording the activity on the Phoenix for posterity than trying to nurture it for the future. Faced with a planning committee that was highly uncritical of the proposed plan and spent more time worrying about giving Willey's Bridge (which isn't even in the application area!) a lick of paint than the loss of facilities used by 1,000s of young people - and was more concerned with saving two windows from the Ironworks than the businesses within them.

Committee members repeatedly voiced "sympathy" for the livelihoods that will be displaced and admiration for the many activities that go on at the Phoenix and hope that businesses can find space "elsewhere".

We call on the SDNP and LDC to make sure that ACTION IS TAKEN to keep creative and manufacturing businesses and social enterprises within and thriving in Lewes - recognising that an industrial park on the outskirts of town with large corporate rents isn't the answer.

Offering makers and artists an opportunity to paint heritage murals in the underground carpark or contribute to the manufacture of street furniture of the new development (especially when they no longer have anywhere to make it!) - is at best crass - and at worst indicative of a National Park hell bent on turning Lewes from a working town into a museum town.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

The language of the notes

Many of the great musicians of the past were illiterate and obviously not being able to the read and write they were not going to be reading music either therefore their musical learning came from listening to other people play and working things from recording. They also didn’t really have any significant understanding of scales and chords for the most part sand therefore understood music as if they were phrases spoken by famous musician so for instance a line that Louis Armstrong played would have been referred to as something that Louis said.

I once heard the quote by Albert King referring to Jimi Hendrix in which Albert said, ‘Jimi Hendrix plays my blues and he should go and play his own’, at the time I found this a rather ridiculous remark but in hindsight he was referring to something from a completely different paradigm of musical thinking than my with a different understanding of how music was formed. Indeed as Albert King was one of the great sources of inspiration to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and many others it was quite true that these people were playing his blues as saying it with his ‘words’.

What is significant here is that we understand these great players were so driven by what they heard and not what they intellectualised; they understood music as a language form which if we can get back to that way of thinking would help our playing to be more musical and not so scale orientated.

  Just express words and rhythms through the notes that you play and by developing ideas of others remembering that these are truly phrases of a language; this is a great way for children to learn to play.

www.bluescampuk.co.uk    Three days of learning to play music in a band. The music summer school