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

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

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

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

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

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

Vic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be generous and it will be returned.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk check out the video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vic

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

Business Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vic

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

Are you listening?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vic

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

Setting up as a teacher, What Why and How...

What?

We are in very strange times, good for opportunity and change but also for uncertainty about where the economy is going and jobs.

If you have a skill in this case music and if you are looking to earn more than the first place to look is at what you can do with it.

Also it is advisable to list all the other skills that you have either soft or hard.

Why?

 I believe that the world of employment will change to be unrecognisable in the next few years because of disruptive technologies and this will affect the middle class professionals in ways that were not foreseeable a short while ago and we need to be able to use the creative aspect of music because this will be an area that will be required.

There is a lateral shift here but in a nut shell we need people who can think the impossible because that is where technology will take us and I am saying that because that is what it has already done so more of the same really.

And the way to learn this lateral ability is through the arts and music is the easiest way into this for the mind in my opinion and for the purposes of this blog.

How?

Just start networking and maybe start teaching, song writing, and playing small gigs in people’s houses, in restaurants at parties, clubs or festivals. Do not wait until you are perfect there is no such thing just start and develop. Get things on the YouTube, remember that your recorded music may not make any money but it might get you work.

The set of videos are about getting started as a guitar teacher, however the same applies to any teaching so have a listen if you want to make some money and make a start.

The set of videos are here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtSQpny2D8

Happiness is playing music; with others.

It seems that whenever I meet new people and they asked me what I do, they then tell me that they have a guitar or they used to play guitar but had to stop because they had a family and life got in the way, now they wished that they could start again.

Some of them romanticise about the times that they played in a band or they think about the guitar that they sold and all of them lament the fact that if they had carried on playing they would be really good by now.

One of the sad things in today’s world is that people spend many years training to do a job, going to university getting into debt only to find the job that they have secured through all their hard work they hate.

It does not bring them any happiness, the money might be useful but with the increase of the money coming in there is also an increase of the money going out.

I teach in a number of public schools and when you add up the cost of the two expensive cars the school fees for the children and the expensive house and the expensive holidays which they need in order to deal with the stress of the job that they do not like, they could easily afford to have a happier life by cutting back and focusing on the things that truly give them happiness.

The problem is that once you get used to a lifestyle and the rest of the family get used to your income then it is very difficult to extricate yourself from it. Sometimes your body does it for you by making you ill if you don’t heed those warnings the illness gets more serious.

So let’s do something about it, find some time to jam and have fun meeting other people, this could be an open mike night or could just be getting together with a few friends and making a bit of a noise. Think yourself back a little bit to when music really gave you happiness, invoke those memories and get some joy back into your life.

You begin to realise that many things that were told throughout your life were lies, like how important science and maths were to the detriment of the arts. You were taught that many things were so important but your life experience has told you otherwise because after learning them you never used again; like finding the area of rhombus or calculating the value of X and Y.

So use social media if you haven’t got enough friends who play, make new contacts by asking around and start a ban, book a gig and have some fun.

Vic

You can find information about blues camp by going to www.Bluescampuk.co.uk