If you spend time looking at videos on YouTube of the young whiz kids who can play the most amazing solos, bass lines and drum solos you would be led to believe that the level of their technique is such that they are just about to take over.
The question I like to pose to my pupils is quite simply was Jimi Hendrix the best guitar player? Is Victor Wooten the best bass player? The answer is no if you are looking at technique, but what makes a great musician isn’t technique, it is all about having something to say. When Jimi Hendrix was on the scene, there were players such Wes Montgomery, Pat Martino Tal Farlow and many others including John McLaughlin who dwarfed him with their technique.
One thing that all great musicians have is a memorable way of playing, they are known for catchy and melodic ideas and that is the thing about wild technique it is often not tuneful or catchy. Like lots of jazz and lots of classical music it is not easily remembered, unless you’re a musician of course.
So get across to budding musicians the need for ideas to become melodically interesting not just to be like a jobbing musician’s way of playing, think of the bass line that would be played by someone like Paul McCartney or Sting. Because they are songwriters there is a tendency for them to play more melodically or for the bass line to support the chord sequences.
So try stripping an idea back to the basics and then make it sing a melody to you instead of playing by rote. Another idea is to ditch any idea that you play out of habit, really listen!
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk learn to play in a band for three days
Saturday, 31 October 2015
Sunday, 25 October 2015
Food for thought
A few months ago we saw we saw an article about a café in
Brighton which was using food due to be thrown away because it was after its
best by date. The café takes the food makes it into meals which they then sell
by donation. They were crowd funding to find a permanent residence for the café
which currently is open one day a week at a church in the city. We pledged a
small amount of money to help with the project.
Last week Sue and I went and paid a visit to the church to
have a look at how the project was running we met with the organizer Adam who
showed us some of the food that was being used and we stayed for lunch. There
must have been two hundred people come
in for lunch when they opened the doors and it was all sorts from the homeless
to students and people like myself who
realized that this was the best value for money café in the whole Brighton. Lunch
was amazing, but what really stayed with me was the discussion that I had with
Adam at the beginning when he was telling me how they get the food.
When they first started they would go through the bins of
supermarkets collecting anything that had been thrown away but now they have
established contacts with the supermarkets who now supply them. But what was
truly shocking was the food banks, because of legislation were throwing away massive
amounts of foodstuffs such as tinned food that was more than three months old
obviously tinned food can last for years but such is the ridiculousness of the
wastage due to the capitalist system and the law, where people are starving out
on the streets, food is going to landfill.
This idea of wastage in the system is not confined to just
the food industry, local councils waste extraordinary amounts of money because
of ridiculous bureaucracy and National Health Service waste money because of
ridiculous laws passed by governments who want to make their mark.
The Bluescamp project is supporting the café by putting on a
concert at the church during March of next year, to us this is something that
is an incredibly important aspect of community, where some people are so
willing to help and donate their time to such a worthy cause adding a bit of
music to their promoting may help in some small way to highlight the work. I
have placed beneath the website please check it out.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk Learn to play in a band over three days
Wednesday, 21 October 2015
For education creativity is a dark art.
The focus of today’s education seems to be to change one
focus away from the arts and on to the sciences, as a guitar teacher and educator in creative
thinking this is become a concern to me.
Over the past few months it has become obvious that pupils
and parents have changed their attitude. There has been a general fear of
missing any time from academic lessons even for 20 minutes to half an hour a week
in order to learn a musical instrument. If they only knew what goes on in the
course of a day at school where there are obvious moments where the teaching
day is disrupted because of illness and lessons being covered by other teachers
or just down time because of some other event like children misbehaving.
I know through personal experience of the 40 years of
teaching and playing the guitar, artistic subjects activate areas of the brain
which are virtually untouched in academic learning. However the government
guidelines to things such as not taking any time off for holidays during the
term time has meant parents have become terrified of their children falling
behind in academic lessons.
Also statements like ‘we should be like the Chinese, we
should work much harder as do other countries children’ this is fine if you
want to make them into a number of robots. I have no problem with somebody
wanting to be a scientist or engineer if they want to, but trying to turn
people who are artistically inclined that way seems to be quite ridiculous.
To me it looks like education targets are being set by the
accountants of the world of education with their tick box mentality in order to
the next stupid ideology in order to win an arms race of education against
other countries.
learn to play in a band in three days
Tuesday, 8 September 2015
Grief Molting.
If you’re a singer and need to make songs, make a different song energized by your being alive again after your grief molting. If you’re a painter, paint, if you’re a dancer, dance if you are a farmer, plant. Just don’t assume you can use what you sincerely sent to the sea, for that is sending it all to the market.
Grief is a form of generosity; which praises life and the people and situations which we have lost. – Martin Prechtel.
The act of making music is a deep movement in the ocean of our consciousness or at least it should be. Music expressed by the great artists is exactly that this is the thing that marks out the musician from the technician.
The colleges are turning out lots of technicians and now the Chinese are getting in on Western music (at the moment Classical) we can multiply one hundred fold the numbers of great technicians.
The true artist is the one that expresses grief and as Martin Prechtel says it is a generosity and a praise of life. Now listen to the songs of Amy Winehouse, Billy Holiday, Bessie Smith and the bluesmen and feel the power; that is what we need to aspire to not just the development of technique that does not give us our true voice, technique is just mimicry.
Technique is nothing but a toolkit and a great carpenter is not great because of his tools it just makes it easier for them to be great. So be very careful to keep connected to the emotional power that drives you and always make the tools be your servant not your master.
Now listen to the latest pop music and decide who the master is.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music, discover what you can do.
Thursday, 14 May 2015
A person suffers if they are constantly being forced into a statistical mentality and away from the road of feeling – Robert Bly
The road of feeling is something that is difficult to show
someone who is learning to play an instrument. It can be alluded to, hinted at,
demonstrated but not given as a defined map reference for someone to find. The
road is unique to everyone; the elements required are the same for all but
ordnance reference will be different, because we all have differing maps.
The problem with something that lies in the unconscious world of feeling, emotion and imagination is that being hard to
teach we reach for the things that are easy, statistical, measureable and mark
able and that is sadly not helping people grow either musically or emotionally.
The statistical world helps only the accountants and leads
to people to suffering emotionally. Imagine that you are told by a doctor that
you have a 50% chance of survival from a prognosis, that is cold and unemotional
and you might say good that the facts are delivered in this way but wait until
you are in that position then you will feel that icy touch of statistics from
the learned professionals and experts in their field. We are not Vulcans and Mr
Spock may have been able to deal with that statement but humans do not deal
well with this because it is devoid of feeling. In Garner Thompson’s excellent
book ‘Magic in Practice’ which is about the use of language in health care the importance
of choice of words that engages the patient in their healing is very important
but is sadly lacking today. The old idea of ‘bedside manor’ has been lost in
the pursuit of targets and the magic bullet of Big Pharma. The evidence is that
in a world where we are being told that things are better than ever, there are
increased rates of mental illness and not just in the elderly but increasingly
in the young. The word disease shows us in its epistemology exactly what we
experience, dis- ease.
This is just part of the picture it is also true of arts and
music, sound devoid of feeling is just sound not music at all however it has
been processed through Pro Tools. So in playing or teaching we need to connect
to the feeling that is the music, make the sounds connect to your emotions let
it mean something and allow the music to set you free.
Vic
Thursday, 7 May 2015
The Golden Rule- Those who have the gold make the rules.
This is a rule that applies to music as much as it does for politics and business.
For a moment cast all of one’s ideas of music to one side and think back to a past that had no Christian Church and no written notation of music, but had the story tellers and music makers, some of whom roamed and others who held sacred positions within the social group such as a village.
Music might have been learnt as sacred songs that expressed something ceremonial within the time of year and the society that it was set. This music may have been learnt from others who held the songs or direct from the source itself as in the South American shamans who would have learn ‘from the plant’ the sacred song.
With the advent of Christianity this all changed and over the years, music become more and more formalised with the idea of improvisation banned in preference of something that had been censored by the church; hence writing music and replaying the music of the masters note for note.
This in turn becomes the bench mark of being a real musician; that you can read and that you can play as a regurgitation of the music written thus taking away a musician’s ability to express their creativity.
We know this is the case because it has been documented again and again, most recently with the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia (the latter not even being regarded as ‘citizens’ of the country that was originally theirs). The music and the instruments of the indigenous people were ridiculed or banned from use and the Western instruments brought in to replace them.
In a short period of time something that is instigated as a change in the way that music is produced or performed becomes the norm in a society where we forget the past so easily.
A light in the tunnel is the possibility of crowd funding music and arts projects through the likes of Kickstarter and Pledge. May this be the way of change to something more rooted in human experience, long forgotten in a distant past but like all true music is still echoing in the deepest recesses of our consciousness.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk
For a moment cast all of one’s ideas of music to one side and think back to a past that had no Christian Church and no written notation of music, but had the story tellers and music makers, some of whom roamed and others who held sacred positions within the social group such as a village.
Music might have been learnt as sacred songs that expressed something ceremonial within the time of year and the society that it was set. This music may have been learnt from others who held the songs or direct from the source itself as in the South American shamans who would have learn ‘from the plant’ the sacred song.
With the advent of Christianity this all changed and over the years, music become more and more formalised with the idea of improvisation banned in preference of something that had been censored by the church; hence writing music and replaying the music of the masters note for note.
This in turn becomes the bench mark of being a real musician; that you can read and that you can play as a regurgitation of the music written thus taking away a musician’s ability to express their creativity.
We know this is the case because it has been documented again and again, most recently with the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia (the latter not even being regarded as ‘citizens’ of the country that was originally theirs). The music and the instruments of the indigenous people were ridiculed or banned from use and the Western instruments brought in to replace them.
In a short period of time something that is instigated as a change in the way that music is produced or performed becomes the norm in a society where we forget the past so easily.
A light in the tunnel is the possibility of crowd funding music and arts projects through the likes of Kickstarter and Pledge. May this be the way of change to something more rooted in human experience, long forgotten in a distant past but like all true music is still echoing in the deepest recesses of our consciousness.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk
Tuesday, 28 April 2015
The Master of Demon Valley
The mouth is the door of the mind; the mind is the host of the spirit. Will, intention, joy, desire, thought, worry, knowledge and planning all go in and out through the door. - The Master of Demon Valley.
This is an ancient Taoist text which was translated by Thomas Cleary some twenty years ago and it tells of how Taoist thought and philosophy of ‘the way’ could be used to influence and control the population.
The premise is that all things move from masculine active to feminine receptive or as they express it as Yin and Yang the Yang being the masculine. Language is used to develop that depending on where you are in that arc and not so much about the reality of language expressing truth as we think of it; more in a way of language as a form of magic and spell casting.
The similarities with NLP are interesting with the language being seen as fluid and influential to the mind of the listener.
So if you want to write a rousing song use rousing words, something about love keep saying love, a song about anger, use words that express anger even if they do not make sense in a literal way use language’s power of poetry.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk
This is an ancient Taoist text which was translated by Thomas Cleary some twenty years ago and it tells of how Taoist thought and philosophy of ‘the way’ could be used to influence and control the population.
The premise is that all things move from masculine active to feminine receptive or as they express it as Yin and Yang the Yang being the masculine. Language is used to develop that depending on where you are in that arc and not so much about the reality of language expressing truth as we think of it; more in a way of language as a form of magic and spell casting.
The similarities with NLP are interesting with the language being seen as fluid and influential to the mind of the listener.
So if you want to write a rousing song use rousing words, something about love keep saying love, a song about anger, use words that express anger even if they do not make sense in a literal way use language’s power of poetry.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk
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