Its a pentatonic scale Jim, but not as we know it.

A few years ago I was at a guitar show in London doing a number of sessions for the RGT about the guitar exams and in one of the breaks I was hanging around the stalls looking at the guitars. The noise at these shows is incredible with hundreds of people playing on the instruments and what you hear is a sort of pentatonic hell where the twiddling fingers of young males are shredding their way to some chaotic frenzy.

I reflected that they were using the same scale as used by Hendrix, Clapton and just about every other rock guitarist yet none of them sounded that good because quite simply just as the meaning of language is more than just the words the meaning of music is more than just the notes.

The great blues players were able to get great music from one chord and a few notes and we miss that in the race to complexity and therefore going back to the roots players for any form of music be it the roots of gospel, soul, reggae, African township or folk will give you an insight into what really works in the musical form.

I have four years of guitar magazines that are unread sitting in the teaching room with loads of technical stuff in them, however  going back to simple songs and solos has given me fresh insights into the things that got me interested in the first place and helped to add something to the music that I do now.

I think it is a very valuable life lesson.

Vic

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In the house of lovers, the music never stops, the walls are made of songs and the floor dances.- Rumi

That is a great house to live in!

We create our immediate world by how we think. This became very clear to me over the years because one’s mind set filters and creates the choices that we make.  If we are full of unhappiness our minds find those things for us as the genie says,’ yes master your wish is my command’ and we conjure something to fulfil our wishes of despair.

I believe it is about choices that we make based on our programming and that is why I think we need to be careful not to just go with the status quo. History proves that the status quo is often seriously lacking in common sense for one thing.

I have lived long enough to have lost a number of significant people in my life and I have realised that when you look back there are many things that were unsaid that should have been and if I had been truly in the moment I would have said how I happy I was to those close to me. Now I make a point of saying it because in my experience people are often taken by surprise and it makes their day better.

One of my joys is playing music with others and I often say how much I enjoy their playing and again they are often surprised because they do not hear that.

The secret of music is that it travels with you in your body and therefore even if you are alone it is your companion, the Greeks were right to say that the Muses brought music to you and that you could call on them to create and share your energy with them as long as you were generous in spirit to others. I do not share the modern idea that music is a set of rules; it is like saying that someone is a good carpenter because he has good tools, the tools help him but they are not the reason that he is a good carpenter. The rules of music help us but what is important is the love you put into it and it is a great way to build a house, with or without a carpenter.

Vic

 

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Music is a language that expresses emotion and transfers that feeling to the listener.

When we listen to language we hear the words and then express those words in ways that we are personally programmed to understand them. This is fraught with problems, when we say something the meaning that we connect to the words can often be lost in translation with the words meaning something else to the listener. Take for instance a word like ‘dog’ this will mean something to a dog lover and something emotionally different to someone with a fear of dogs.

Words take on different meanings with the introduction of tonality and emphasis. Language is unreliable just listen to a politician and notice how they ‘answer’ a question. When we think of the word myth we often interpret that word as lie or fairy tale but myth was something much deeper than that.

Myth contains within the story truths hidden in the text using deep structure and metaphor therefore within the tale there is a truth that connects with the unconscious. It is possible to view many ancient stories in this way bringing new meaning to them such as the Arabian Nights and the stories of the Genie being an instruction manual of the mind and how to reprogram your thoughts. It is the same with language, that much is going on in the deep structure of the communication which the great orators in the past understood.  

Music has the same aspect of carrying emotional messages through the song both in the sound and the lyric much of this is locked into your memories of when you heard that music originally but much of this is about deeper things in the sound.

There seems very little of this being passed on to pupils when they learn, particularly in classical music. Only much later does the idea of the musical energy seem to be introduced, if at all, shame it seems to be what music is all about.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk 

 

 

 

 

Smell the Music

Playing on a Saturday night in a small bar in Chelmsford in Essex, no rehearsal just a bunch of numbers on a sheet, great stuff!  Some of these songs I have not played for thirty years and what is amazing is how easily they come back.

Memory is incredible; you just need to hit the right buttons and then out it comes. There are certain triggers that work amazingly well for creating memory recall, one of these is smell. Have you ever had a time that you smelt something and it took you to a memory that was so real that it felt like time travel?  I have, it was the smell of Bunsen burners and it took me back to the chemistry room at school to the point that I was standing in the school science room, quite extraordinary.

When learning music the more that you layer memory with sensory information the better, this may explain why the great players always look like they are totally involved  in the music; maybe that is their secret .

When learning or teaching have an internal film of the song that locks to the music and make it so real that you are standing in it and you can feel the atmosphere and the smells of the landscape make it more than real, this will help with the dynamics and deals with performance nerves. Just think of what the music makes you visualise and then use the pictures to relate to the music.

One of the problems that people often experience in playing is that they never play out as well as they do at home a bit like public speaking, we speak all the time but for some reason when we get up to speak in public we find it difficult, why? because we think about it and then all our programming goes out the window, but picturing and adding other senses to the music takes you to the same place wherever you are.

 

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk   play like a pro in three days..............

 

 

 

‘Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I'll meet you there.’ Rumi

Rumi’s quote is the idea of being in a neutral space, a disassociated state which is a powerful place to create.

Every neutral space leads us to opportunity some good, some bad and even within that space there is a neutral space like a dream within a dream. The interesting aspect is that as soon as we ‘think’ we can polarise that space.

Rumi the great poet and the mystic was one of the minds able to transcend time and humanness to reach the depth of consciousness and paradoxically the heights of expression open to all but only found by a few. He was able to express in a few words deep meaning in the areas of thought and reality of mind.

Exploring this in teaching and music we need to look at what we think of as right or wrong and suspend judgement. If someone comes to you with dyslexia realise that this is an advantage to them becoming a great musician, also expressing that to them and their parents if they are children will create a positive vibe which will aide their learning. I have often found guitarists with dyslexia are great improvisers.

If someone comes to you as a bright intellectual person suspend judgement and it will help you to discover the things that hold them back from learning how to express themselves. This is the problem for many adults.

True learning is so deep that it often does not make sense on the surface just as the surface of the sea creates an illusion hiding the life forms living beneath it.

Vic

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‘Let us not look back in anger, not forward in fear, but around in awareness.’ James Thurber.

This quote could have easily been written by the great samurai warrior Musashi whose teaching was that the mind and the eyes should always stay the same; eyes open to all things and the mind relaxed but alert even in the heat of a battle.

For us many have never had to deal with life threatening situations but we are still wired up in the same way as our ancestors and therefore when small events happen we tend to over compensate for them.

The levels of stress that people experience not only cause problems with their health but also on a social front. In the past we would have experienced something very physical such as fight or flight that would have dissipated that stress, now we have to put up with Ofsted and other small problems without the ability to burn off the stress. (Maybe there is a business idea here of the ‘Ofsted inspector punch bag’ that could be a good seller).

I have looked at using aspects of human emotional energy in performance techniques such as using memories of sadness, anger and happiness and it is very powerful; it is often the missing ingredient that makes a reasonable performance outstanding. However to be the master of this one needs to be aware of what you are doing and although to take people into a trance one needs to go there first you need also to be aware and in control of that power by being disassociated from it rather like an actor.

Anger is like fire and it will burn out of control if not dealt with fully and fear stops all forward movement in life. So if you feared standing up in public maybe you should get out and visit an open mic event and step up to the microphone.

Vic

 www.bluescampuk.co.uk for three days of playing in a band and learning rock tricks.

 

 

 

The miracle is not to fly in the air or walk on water, but to walk on earth.

When working through ideas for music we often become drawn to the amazing and fantastical and maybe this is something that we tend to do in life generally. But looking deeper into the world of music we actually respond to those who connect with us in an emotional and not a cerebral way.

The great blues players, the great reggae musicians, the flamenco players and the world musicians know this deeply and when I say ‘know this’ I mean ‘know’ on an intuitive level. Because of our education system we are trained that everything should be in your ‘head’ and you have to be thinking, thinking and then thinking which stops us using the greatest gift that we have, the unconscious, and this operates at its best when we are in the flow or in the zone and strangely this happens when we are grounded.
I heard a quote once from a saxophone teacher from the US that said when you are improvising you should ‘think about the soles of your feet’ in other words stop the chatter in your head of which notes to play and focus your thoughts somewhere else.
What better way to put it that getting to the basics of being human may hold the answer to the questions of life which philosophers have pondered for ages but ironically the answer maybe not to think about it but feel it through your feet.
Vic