Twenty years to reflect

Twenty years ago the band that I was working with changed. Life got in the way, the guitarist moved to Australia after getting married and the bass player and drummer who were involved in another band that had more gigs also moved on. So a small number of us continued with new players still under the name of Red Touch.

This month after two decades of not seeing one another we got back together again, playing the old material most of which were self-penned numbers which we had not revisited in any form in that time. On listening to the albums that we had released two things struck me, first of all we were good, better than I or any of us remembered and secondly the songs were really well written. Maybe it takes twenty years to have enough distance on your own writing to be able to see what you’ve managed to create.

Listening back to old CDs the songs sounded like they were written and played by other people I didn’t notice the type of errors that I used to imagine when I previously played the music but now I could hear a really solid level of musicianship and artistry in what we had created.

Meeting up and playing with the original members was such good fun, everyone being excited to meet after all these years. There was a definite feeling of love between the people and although we never left under a cloud of animosity I don’t remember us being so close maybe this is a good example of absence making the heart growing fonder.

This realisation fits the last blog post about beliefs and opinions and that they may not be reliable as they seem at the time and they are prone to change which highlights their unreliability. What do we do about this? Well maybe we should just do things and not think about it too much and then step aside and act as if it is not us to get some objectivity. The fact that our opinion of the work was so distorted at the time is of interest to me and although one could argue that our perceptions we be deluded now due to the excitement of playing again it has been verified by people outside of the band.

The gig itself was amazing and was the icing on the cake with the audience confirming what we had said about the quality of the band, but for me the strange and surreal feeling of playing that this event engendered is the most interesting all the members felt the same but expressing it in different ways, one saying it was a memory for end of life reflection, another saying it was a spiritual experience and others saying it was dreamlike and euphoric.

SO now it is time to ponder this and the coming year. 2016 was rather a shock to all I think and to think of all of the musicians who have moved on but it is time for us to look ahead at the coming year and what we are going to set as a vision for our creativity

So I would like to take this opportunity to wish you a very merry Christmas with health, wealth and happiness for the coming year.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Magic is Art

I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman. Alan Moore

In the last 40 years of teaching and playing I have experienced a number of extraordinary happenings where simple, ordinary people have become prolific artistic performers. I could say that in all that time I was unable to spot the ones that were going to become the great musicians. In hindsight it was obvious because they were the ones who put in the hours and their ability to play and create literally crept up on me.

I have mentioned before that success in the world of the arts is statistically neigh on  impossible and therefore having an unrealistic attitude to your ability is a great place to start. Another good place to start is with Alan Moore’s assertion that we can alter reality by the very things that we do by manipulating symbols, words, sounds and images to affect change in the minds of the people who listen.

I have long had an interest in NLP and I noticed that many successful songs are effective not because of the quality of the poetry but the command orientated lyrics that demand action on behalf of the listener. Songs such as ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘All Right Now’ and even ‘Wild Thing’ are in this vein. These lyrics have a downward command orientated inflection and therefore fall into this concept of Alan Moore’s spellcasting.

However ridiculous you might think these things are the very act of subverting reality and your belief in what is possible, seems to be an important ingredient required from a successful artist. Merely dealing with reality is not enough, distorting reality is just the beginning, making people act in the way that you have distorted reality is the aim.

We are definitely entering the world where facts and truth are being trumped literally and metaphorically by the emotional aspect of language, we see that all the time in politics, we definitely see this within the media. It is abundantly clear that emotional soundbites are far more effective than reasoned argument and longer lasting. Evoking the spirit of Englishness or Americanness is powerful but we have to be very careful to look after that evocation because even a cuddly cat if mistreated has a very dark side to it and so does Englishness.

Being optimistic about the above quotation means that we can do incredible things if we can picture them and then formulate sounds that bring the vision to life. Look at the successful music of the band such as Queen. Think of any of their famous songs and they truly seem to have a life of their own; being completely animated when we hear the music you see Freddie. Magical!

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of rock band magic

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence.

I deal with a lot of young people in my teaching of which many are teenagers. They are full of the unshakable belief that you know nothing and they know it all even if you have forty years of experience. I remember being like that; in fact the only thing that life experience gives you is that you know less and less as the years go by, so in a way they are right. The things that seemed certain when you were younger seem more uncertain as you age and then if you are lucky you get to an age when you realise that everything is open to the challenge of its unreality.  

So might it not be better to stand in a place of uncertainty, in the Chinese view you do not need to believe in something just suspended your disbelief to make things move and change.

What would happen if we changed our point of view? Maybe it would give us the possibility of seeing something different and new? From my own experience when I first became interested in playing the guitar I detested reggae and if someone had said to me that within five years I would be playing in a reggae band I would not have believed them, but I did, I then realised that reggae contained the essence of music that I also later found in other roots music such as the blues, it acted as a doorway to a new assessment of what music was. So look at the point of view that you currently hold and try out the opposite viewpoint for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Sometimes as you do you notice new things and start discovering ‘by accident’ things that confirm your new view.

What happens if we change what we believed we are? Now here is a good one, when we are younger we believe many things that as we age we realise were ridiculous, however as I have said before naivety is an important ingredient to success because if you were not naïve you would not even start because the odds are so impossible but ……

If you are old enough, look back and remember what you believed then and compare to what you believe now then think of what you might believe in ten or twenty years’ time. Then think of what you would need to believe to make the changes or achieve the things that you want and just do it. Because it is quite likely that the changes that you have already made in life are more radicle than the ones that you need to now make.

Ask yourself the question ‘what would I have done differently if I had changed my beliefs earlier’, remember that everything that ever existed started as an idea, so get the idea.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music heaven

Men honour what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.

We have unleashed some form of Demon with the new technology. What appears to be a blessing in that you can record easily and provide much of the written material that you require to teach and create. You are also able to research music in ways that we were never able to before. However the problems are numerous, if you are using the internet space as a marketing forum you are competing with a market that is infinitely bigger than anything pre-Internet.

There was a time you could just place an advert in the local press and you would reach all of the people that were likely to be interested in your message in your area. Now this is pretty much impossible and not only that your competition is the rest of the world.

This is a problem which could destroy the economy of countries and is probably doing so already with the coup de grace coming with the algorithms that will take away many jobs; hopefully not yours. If you are flexible in your thinking to see that music teaches skills that have no definable outcome something which a computer cannot deal with you have a distinct advantage.

Ironically this problem leads me to putting something on the Internet as a membership forum to link musicians and artists together and create a market and a creative space in which they can work and hopefully generate some form of income.

I cannot see a positive outcome from the way that children are being educated at the moment; they need something to make them creative for the world that we are entering where movement between jobs and the learning of new things or the development of new ideas is imperative. This is a very real problem which seems to be almost unnoticed by the idiotic politicians that we have in this country and the United States who are making more of a system that does not work in the life cycle of the human but works well for the ticking a box world of the accountant.

So what lies beyond your knowledge? The world of the impossible, the one of dreams, Lewis Carroll’s thinking of six impossible things before breakfast.  All artistic projects start as ridiculous ideas, the dreams of the teenage budding rock star start as pipe dreams but somehow for the intrepid and the stubborn they become real. It seems that the drive magically reduces the statistical inevitability of failure. What lies within your knowledge is the fact that you do not stand a cat’s chance in hell of making it but outside of that in the world of the black swans and komodo dragons is the way of realising your liberation from ‘knowledge’. Once you have drunk from that well you know where it is roughly, so you can stumble on it again because like any topography that is unmarked things seem to move but the essence lures you back like Parsifal looking for the Grail Castle.

So start with the dream and by having the dream percolate in your thinking see what ripples come back from the edges of your mind bouncing off the hills of the strange outer world of consciousness. The place where music is formed, the Kashmir of dreams as sung about by Led Zeppelin. Places that change, sometimes illusive, strangely familiar but unpredictable, like Alice’s Wonderland.  Imagine what you could achieve with either the Red or White Queen on your side?

I feel a song coming on.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of unleashing your inner rock god

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education. Chuang Tzu

Our education system is based on testing and exams with various forms of rewards given through certification etc. The punishment aspect of it is deeply psychological with people feeling that if they do not achieve they have by extension failed.

I have always found that the most effective use of gradings in teaching the guitar is to create a goal and the journey towards that goal; that is the objective not the arrival, a bit like life. Do we need all the rewards and punishments for developing musical skills or just our motivation to play?

When I started playing there was a lot of social unrest and maybe we are entering that situation again as people begin to notice how much they have been misled by the media and politicians. The idea of getting out and venting your emotional energy was a great motivator and we certainly need motivation but examinations are not generally anything other than a measurement guide for someone else. They are better being a guide for you as a motivator because walking out on a stage waving your grade eight certificate will not prove anything but playing will.

If you look at musical education as being a tool which we can use to realise our artistic goals then we can use the cheapest form of education which is now mostly online or we could also use friends and other artistic colleagues to develop our skills cheaply by watching them play and asking questions. The role of the teacher is to give a good route on the map towards technical and artist realisation, in other words getting people to think for themselves and I do not see much scope for outside reward or punishment but more self-determination and discipline.

The truest measure of your ability is made by you. Most artists find it really difficult to look or listen to their own work after they have completed it and within that we can see that we are greatest critic.

Maybe the time is right for some other counterculture thing to develop where art is being used to critique the establishment and society as has happened numerous times before and potentially can happen again as we are sitting on so many ticking bombs.

So for you as an artist anything less than world domination is not be enough.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of a music summer school to get you rocking

Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without; for much knowledge is a curse. Chuang Tzu

Somebody came to see me during the week for an informal chat about starting guitar lessons. I tend to do this now instead of having conversations on the phone or emails going backwards and forwards about rates and times of lessons etc. I just find it easier for them to meet me and for me to meet them so that I can understand where they are coming from in their playing and if they have played before and what standard have they reached.

This particular person was interested in classical guitar and he had been playing for about four years, he spends some of his time out of the country and he has a guitar teacher while he is away so he was looking for one here. He seemed a very nice guy and he turned up with his guitar and his music; we sat down and had a cup of tea and chatted about what he had done before.

He started to tell me how wonderful the guitar teacher was in America and every lesson was like a masterclass. I found this interesting and when I looked at his music that he had every single note had a pencil mark next to it. The notation was so extensive to include both his right and left-hand fingering and also the dynamics of the piece. I then started to wonder what this guy had actually learnt and what had he discovered about himself musically or was he just following instructions.

He played a little bit to me and it could certainly get all the notes down but there was something lacking. As we discussed things further I gave him some ideas about developing the musicality of what he was playing but I could feel some sort of reticence. The thing really got me was when he produced the music for the Recuerdos de la Alhambra which he said he wanted to play as his autumn project.

I suggested that he should start looking at the piece before I see him next and mentioned some ways of approaching it, he gave me a slightly puzzled look. At that moment it was clear all the lessons had been a firm form of spoon feeding when in reality we need to find the musicality in ourselves and this can be done by teachers showing the way. However the pupil needs to learn self- sufficiency if a teacher goes into great detail on every piece when will the pupil learn that. There is only so many fish that you can give someone it is much easier for them to learn to fish and feed themselves.

We need to nurture what is inside of us and to some extent we do need to be initiated in this by someone else but the constant journey that you make as a musician is yours and not the teachers and although it does mean that you get return business if you teach like this because of the dependence of the pupil that is not the role of the teacher. The aim should be to make the pupil your master.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of playing in a band and learning how to perform and to write songs like a rockstar.

Hammer to C8 Mate

For the open eyed, there is an opportunity here; when asked how he would prepare for a match against a computer, Dutch chess master Yann Hein Donner said; I would bring a hammer.

When faced with set patterns of behaviour in ourselves or in systems sometimes we have to do something radical to make a change. The way that things are now developing when there is less and less flexibility we need to do this.

There is a test which asks how many uses can you find for a paper clip? When children are asked this question they can come out with many more than an adult. I would postulate that education reduces the creative aspect of the mind because it becomes a paperclip and not just a piece of wire.

In music we can see this in the way that complexity will lessen possibility for example if I play one chord that chord can be in several keys but as soon as I play another the number of keys available will become fewer because we start to categorise the first chord.

Society has become the adult with reduced capacity to think and this in the words of my father talking about the highly educated, ‘needing a slide rule to cross the road’, today a satnav or an iPhone would be the instrument of choice. As a side effect of learning we discard the things that seem not to fit and therefore start to limit what is possible. What we discard may exist or be possible because we just have not seen it before like Taleb’s Black Swans.

Dealing with computers either overtly or not you can feel their presence in everything we do from the letter from the doctor, to the radio play list, to the way our lives are managed. So the limiting categorisation is happening to us by an algorithm.

For the musician we need to use computers but not be used by them, the world is full of lifeless stuff created by computers; we need to make sure that when we make a pact with the devil we have an exit strategy which keeps our soul intact. For that we need to rely on what is left of our humanness and I mean that in the very deepest and broadest of terms, that which engages us with our nature and by extension nature herself. So use ones passions from both ends of the spectrum to really charge up our creative juices because it is that that makes our creations interesting and compelling not some watered down sanitised version of what we have become.

Technology will destroy that which makes us what we are if we are not careful, we are already corralled by the technology and it is beginning to suck the creativity out of us. What we need is to be able to problem solve without the use of computers and then regain some form of control and then from that point we can engage with the technology on our terms. But faced with technology being used on us then I suggest we do what our ancestors would have done to the dominating force which was trying to take their souls beat the shit out of it with a hammer. All hail to Thor.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of unlimited musically creativity and happiness …