(Or establishing a reasonable measure for progress in auto-didactic settings)

Hi everyone,

I have some long posts in the pipeline but I though I’d try to get a quick one out that may be useful to some of you.  I’m going to start talking about observations for beginners, but intermediate and advanced students might gain something from this as well.

One challenge beginner students in any area face is that they don’t know what they don’t know.  By that I mean there are often many hidden elements to a good performance that are so far beyond the skill set of the amateur practitioner that it’s impossible for them to gauge whether what they’re playing is right or not.

Case in point – When I first started playing I think it took about 2-3 years to get my bends in tune.  It wasn’t a purely mechanical issue with my hands, the problem was that I hadn’t developed my ears enough to hear issues with intonation to be able to execute it properly.  Since I thought I had the concept down, I didn’t work on it I just bent notes to some variation of the actual pitch.  Instead of a quick realization of, “Oh I need to work on this (and here’s what I can do to fix it).”, it just became a gradual process of my ear getting better and starting to hear that the bends didn’t sound like other people’s bends.

(** Important qualifier – many professional guitarists still work on their bends even after they “have it down” as it’s such a critical element of the expressive nature of guitar.)

“Hey Teacher Teacher”*

This is one of the reasons that it’s highly advisable that beginning students find a good teacher as a good teacher can not only help a student recognize what skills they need to develop, but how to do them in a efficient way.

Good teachers save you a lot of time.

Bad teachers will cost you untold hours, months, days, years of setbacks.

What if you don’t have a good teacher?

It is easy to come to the conclusion that just as “The man who represents himself has a fool for a client” – the person who teaches him or herself is getting a poor education but it doesn’t have to be that way.

One thing you CAN do is record yourself as much as possible and try to get (and give effective feedback) on what you’re playing.  People often think this means getting elaborate equipment and trying to make professional quality full tunes.  You don’t have to do that (although if you try to do that consistently for several years – you’ll probably find the quality of your playing and recording / mixing skills getting MUCH better).  You can do this by simply getting in the habit of looping sections of what you do and playing over the top of it.  It does several things:

• It works on your timing.  Oh boy does it ever!  You’ll start to hear when things are out of time with each other.  Working consistently with a looper will eventually do wonders for getting you to set loop points accurately and be able to play a loop in time.  (As you get better with looping, you’ll probably want to make the loops longer to be able to do more over them and this will increase your ability to play in time over longer 8, 16, 32 or 64 bar forms).

• It develops your ear.  Vinny Golia once said to me that the difference between improvisation and composition is time.  In improvisation you only have 5 minutes to make 5 minutes of music where in composition you have much longer – but they’re often both rooted in the same process.  A process of exploration.  Of setting limitations and working within and around those limitation to create something.  Looping something and creating parts to go over the top of it develops multiple aspects of your musical personality.  It develops how you hear musical components interacting.  It helps you build words, phrases and sentences to add to your musical vocabulary.  It is play and work at the same time if you’re doing it right and can lead you to new and exciting things.

Other lessons from looping

I typically like stand alone loopers for live use (although if I’m doing soundscapes I typically use SooperLooper as the multi track loop changing capacity makes it easier or me to create something unique) and recently I picked up a Electro-Harmonix 720 for live use with my solo acoustic shows.  There were two main decisions for this.

•  I wanted something that was small and battery operated so I could fit everything I needed in a gig bag.

•  I wanted something where I could utilize reverse and 1/2 speed functions.

Every looper has it’s own quirks, and this one is no different.  I found that the first note in the loop would sometimes glitch a bit with the acoustic electric.  I noticed it a lot with the ZT and tried putting it in the effects loop – which was better but didn’t play nice with my LR Baggs.  Moving to the Yamaha THR5a largely fixed it (as I suspect putting at after something like an AG-Stomp would as well.)

While working out some sketches for ideas for some solo shows I have coming up, I decided to put the looper through the paces and loop some backing KoriSoron parts through it to work on some soloing approaches for some of the KoriSoron tunes we’d be playing in the weeks ahead (and for the 2nd EP we’re recording this Spring).  While doing this I realized that some of the solo lines I had weren’t getting articulated the way I wanted them to.  So I isolated the problem areas and went back.

This is a big time saver for me, as I can practice ad infinitum in a room and develop ideas but not all of them are going to work in a live context.

For several years now, I’ve gotten away from the idea of turning up when playing.  The reason for this is that it starts a volume war where everyone is a looser.  So, for example in KoriSoron if Farzad is playing much louder than me – I have two options:

Option #1:  Turn up my volume. This will cause Farzad to turn up his volume and then I will need to turn up again.  Eventually this gets to the point where it’s too loud and then it starts all over again.

Option #2:  Turn my volume down. I’ll play softer so that he has to play softer to hear me.  This means that the set volume ebbs and flows but stays consistent.

Playing my soloing ideas against a loop gives me a benchmark to help me determine what will work in a live context.

If you don’t have a teacher handy, you’re going to have to come up with your own curriculum to move forward.  Don’t make it boring!

I’d recommend creating your own loops, but also experiment with looping unfamiliar things and trying to work your way over them.  In home use, I’ll loop things like West African drum circles and see what I can make that works with (and against it), the same thing with vocal lines, chord changes etc.

There are plenty of free loopers for your laptop / iphone / android online – and you can probably pick up a used looper in your local area for very little money.

More than anything!  Get cracking!  There are always lessons to learn if you’re engaged in doing something.  (And it’s hard to do that on guitar if you’re reading this!)

As always, I hope this helps and thanks for reading.

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*(give yourself bonus points if you recognize the Class of 1984 reference)

Extra credit – check out some of the work of artists like Andre LaFosse or David Torn who do REALLY creative things with loopers far beyond the sound on sound basic techniques I’ve outlined above.

The KoriSoron EP

is done.  Farzad is working on the cover art /  layout and then we’ll submit it for online sales and press some cds for sales at shows (yep physical compact discs – people still listen to things on them amazingly enough!) .  There are a couple of things about the release that readers of this blog might find interesting.

1.  It’s an EP (and not a full release).   I think that there are certain genres where people still buy and listen to fill releases (metal comes to mind, as does jazz and word music), but for the most part people just look for singles and whatever you have that’s new.  It’s much better for you to have multiple releases in the same year than putting all your energy into a full-length and then promoting that just to have people ask if you have a newer release.  So the goal is to get this out in the next few weeks online (and a few weeks longer for physical copies), promote it and then work on another ep in March/April.  And then another one in August.  We have something like 15 songs in repertoire so the goal is to write more material, get the best songs recorded and keep aiming higher.

2.  It’s a live recording.  We really wanted to approach this like a Jazz or classical recording and just get what happens when we play live as that is the real sound of the ensemble.  We don’t play to a click live so we didn’t on the recording either.  That means that it is not a quantized metronomic recording, but it IS a realistic documentation of what we do.

3.  The fact that it’s a live recording means that the guitar tones are a hybrid acoustic / electric tone.  We play with amps live, so having a recording where the acoustic guitars were close miked and we didn’t use any amps, wasn’t going to get what we sound like live.  We didn’t go for a pure acoustic tone and even though we bill ourselves as an acoustic act (because we play acoustic instruments) we are very much an acoustic electric ensemble.

4.  The solos are what we improvised on the take.  For me, that was the hardest thing to sit with because the internal editor in my head made me want to get a “perfect” take and as I started going down the rabbit hole of, “Well what would other guitarists think of this?” I watched the latest Ronda Rousey match and fall out play out.

Ronda Rousey

For those of you who don’t follow MMA, Ronda Rousey is the first female champion in the UFC and one of the most dominant fighters (if not the most dominant fighter) in the history of MMA.  Her autobiography, My Fight / Your Fight is well worth reading as it details the years of struggle and self doubt that go into being a champion.  As a guitarist, I often get comments from people about some aspect of what I’m doing on stage – but they don’t understand the (seemingly endless amounts of) practice that goes into developing that skill set.

There’s a reason I can play at the velocities that I do and if you sat down with a metronome for as long as I did, you could reach those velocities as well.

There’s a reason that Ronda Rousey could finish the bulk of her fights in under 30 seconds, and it all came down to training and preparation.

When Rousey was finishing those fights in record time, she had a lot of people saying great things about her.

But then she fought Holly Holm.

Holly Holm is an experienced boxer.  And Holm set up a game plan for Rousey that Rousey wasn’t prepared for.   Rousey got caught with a kick and KO’d in the second round.

And the anti-Rousey backlash came.  And it was brutal.

Suddenly everyone wanted to take a potshot at her.  They called her cocky and a paper champion and reveled in her defeat.  They said she was washed up and over.

She had a bad night.  It happens to every professional.  It would be like going to see John McLaughlin in concert, him having an off night and then saying, “Oh my god that guy sucks.  It’s over for him.”

If you were dumb enough to step on a stage with him, John McLaughlin would destroy you in a concert.  Don’t confuse a bad moment with a lack of skill set.  I’d like to see any detractor get in a ring with Ronda Rousey and last 5 minutes.  She’ll put you in an armbar and break your arm.

I thought of all of this as I listened back to the KoriSoron EP because musicians, and many guitarists, are the some of the most vindictive people on the planet.  They take absolute glee in finding fault and trashing other players.  Read any comment line on a YouTube video or visit a forum anywhere and you’ll see what I mean.   I had to quit some of the groups I was in on Facebook because it was just too much bashing of things.

I used to be one of those people.  Man, when I was at Berklee I was opinionated and, in retrospect, on some topics I was just an asshole.  I had a lot of company in that area.  We were all opinionated and we were all assholes towards other players.

Then something happened.  I got more confident in who I was as a  player. What drives that rancor is insecurity and the belief that things aren’t fair.  People would look at a player like CC Deville of Poison and get angry that he had fame but what they were REALLY angry about was the perception that they put a lot more work into playing guitar than he did and they felt that they were more deserving of attention.

As you get further into the industry you start seeing more of the factors that go into something like that and, trust me, the man put time in to put himself in a position where he got attention.  No one is found randomly.  If they get to a place where they get attention it’s because A LOT of work went into it behind the scenes.

So as I thought about the recording, I heard the words of my potential detractors in my head, and then ignored them.  The work is what it is and has to stand on its own merits and each release will be better than the last.

Some people love to build people up and then, when they get too big, try to tear them down.  Ronda Rousey is a champion.  She will regroup, build her skill set up and become a better fighter after this set back.

Don’t get too caught up in the scaffolding people put around you (or try to remove from you), instead concentrate on your foundation.  Make your core identity as strong as you can and root deep so that no matter what others do or say, you remain upright in who you are and what you do.

I hope this helps!

As always, thanks for reading.

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I’ve talked before the amateur mindset and embracing lessons from temporary setbacks in earlier posts, but there’s nothing like taking a (figurative) punch to the face at a gig to see how much you get rattled.

Last Friday evening, I played the kickoff event for the BuckMoon Arts Festival at Fulton-Montgomery Community College with KoriSoron.  We were experimenting with a new live set up and performing in a theatre we’d never played in as a group before.

The day itself was warm and humid and I was sweating as I loaded things in.  The theatre itself was relatively cool.  We got everything set up and soundcheck went okay, but people were coming in and sitting down during soundcheck to watch us play which is always a little challenging.  Not wanting them to leave, I said that I just needed to take care of a few things and that I’d play a couple of solo pieces before the set.

The reality of the situation was that my hands felt sticky and were sticking a little bit to the back of the glossy neck of the guitar.  This was not a huge problem but was enough of an issue to be disconcerting.  I made my way to the bathroom, washed and dried my hands and came back to give it a go.

The first two solo pieces went off fairly smoothly.  It was still a bit before the set was supposed to begin so I had to pull another piece out of the hat and start playing that.  The spotlights were on and the stickiness got worse.  Having been in compromised performance situations before, I went into “grin and bear it” mode and did my best to get through the piece.  A lot of notes (and a few clams) later the piece ended and I wiped down the neck of my guitar.

One of the other things I experimented with at this show was a longer explanation about the songs we were playing.  In previous shows, I’d just make a song introduction and crack a joke but I realized it was hard for the audience to engage in tunes that they had never heard before and didn’t have a context for.    So I added the context.

As I was talking about the first tune, in the most non-nonchalant way I could imagine I tried wiping down the back of the neck furiously to remove any dried sweat or anything else that would keep my hands feeling sticky on the neck.  I called out the next tune and within the first two bars my hand was sticking again.

There were four things I could have done:

1.  Since I didn’t have the foresight to bring any talc on my own, I could have reached over into Dean’s stash of talcum powder for his tabla and put a squirt into the palm of my hand.  Problem solved.  Unfortunately, I didn’t think of this solution until 2 days after the gig.

2.  I could have adjusted my playing.  I could have recognized that instead of fighting the situation that I could work with it and just slowed WAY DOWN and played as simply as possible.  Unfortunately, I didn’t think of this solution until the drive home from the gig.

3.  I could have had a complete meltdown.  Fortunately, this is not a option for me but I’ve been on several gigs where other players have addressed things in this manner and…well…I guess the kindest thing I can say is that once you’ve seen that you’ll never forget it.

4.  I could decide to suck it up.  Grin and bear it.  Refuse to adjust my playing to the situation at hand and then get frustrated that I didn’t play as well as I thought you ought to.

Option 4 meant that we made it through the gig without any train wrecks (we even got compliments on the show) but that it did not go as smoothly as hoped (I have yet to crack open the recorder and see what we have recorded (that’ll happen later!).

The practice room is a critical stage in getting any material ready for prime time, but there’s nothing like a live gig to take you out of your comfort zone and learn where things are really at in your playing.  Every fighter has a plan when they step into the ring, but the ones who typically do well are the ones who can take a punch to the face and adjust appropriately to what’s going on.

Sometimes you NEED to stick to the plan and sometimes you need to adapt to the situation you find yourself in.  That presence of mind comes with experience and even experienced performers will sometimes drop the ball on this.  Hopefully if you find yourself in a difficult situation at your next gig, you’ll remember this tale of woe and be able to adapt and adjust (or just bring baby powder!) and not just swing for the fences!

As always, I hope this helps!

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been delayed in posting for a while as I’ve been knee deep practicing material for some upcoming Korisoron shows and recording later this summer.

(If you happen to be in upstate New York, we’ll be playing July 10th as part of the kick off event for the BuckMoon arts festival – https://www.facebook.com/events/792648237521231/)

Some video of one of the songs we’ll be playing is here:

I’ve talked before about some aspects of practicing on an acoustic guitar, but performing with KoriSoron has taught me a lot about what a different animal acoustic electric really is.

The biggest thing has been how radically different the experience of a mic’d acoustic versus a piezo-equipped acoustic really is.  With an unplugged acoustic, what you hear is what you get – but unless you’re actually recording it with a microphone – what you hear – particularly for lead playing – is not what comes across in a live room.  This is an even bigger chasm of experience when dealing with a piezo pickup.  This wasn’t a huge difference when playing with my ZT amp but going into a pre-amp pedal and out to a PA (or recording direct) became a head scratching experience.  Now that we’re looking at recording some demo material from live performances (and getting the tablas and percussion a little more front and center) – I’ve been researching  how to get a simple system that amplifies sound and records what were doing.  We’ll do our first live run at Buckmoon this Friday – but I’m feeling pretty good about the initial options here.

For the mixing desk – we’re using a TASCAM DP32-SD.  It’s a standalone recorder kind of like an updated version of the 4 track cassette version some of you remember from your own early forays into recording.  It seems like an odd choice – but here’s why I liked it.

1. My laptop is a little too unstable for live use.  I tried running some signals from a previous show to the laptop and it look close to an hour to set up and a 1/2 hour to tear down, and I wasn’t psyched with the end result.
2. Increasingly, I like the idea of a limited function machine.  It doesn’t check email or make videos it just processes audio.
3. The Tascam does what it does well.  It records 8 tracks simultaneously (more than enough for a trio) to an SD card is is DEAD quiet.  The faders are non automated and old school but useful for my application and it features lots of routing options, some onboard digital effects (compression, EQ and verb are useful for monitoring – in this case going out to the house) and a pretty straight forward interface.  I like the fact that I can set it up and just move on.
4. The Faders and monitor out allow me to run a signal to a powered speaker and act as a gentle push for live sound.  The ZT amps work great for live use – but sometimes we need to get the tabla and other percussion out in front a bit more.

With that in mind, we’re trying to run the least amount of mics on stage as possible, so we’re currently using some Yamaha gear to help with that.  I’ve been using a Yamaha THR5a in lieu of my AG Stomp and I have to say that I dig the amp as a practice model.  You can tweak the sounds with a computer interface to a much greater degree than just the amp controls – but it sounds quite good for what it does.   I wish they got rid of the battery compartment and added some XLR outs (the only out options are USB and headphone out – the biggest drawback to the amp) but I really cant complain about it as a live interface.

Practicing acoustic plugged in to get ready for the show has really been a revelation.  It’s forced me to make major adjustments in my left hand and focusing on it like a classical player and pay deep attention to the nuances of tone.  Again, playing it acoustic it sounded one way, but practicing it plugged in gave me a much more realistic impression of what the audience was hearing – and that’s making me dig deeper and really tear apart all of my 2-string building block shapes and work on getting them to sound clear with the piezo.  It’s a bear, but that work really pays off and has made a difference in the overall tone of the acoustic playing as well.  It’s the exact opposite of my advice to play electric guitar unplugged to make sure that you could make out every articulation – but both roads lead to the same conclusion.

As before, I need to give a lot a credit here to Miroslav Tadic and Jack Sanders who really did a lot to open that perception for me and make it something I could develop!  I just wish I pieced it together earlier – but better late than never.

So we’ll see how all of this goes on Friday and we’ll see if I’m still chipper about this next week. I guess the lesson here is – don’t be afraid to challenge assumptions – often.  Very often I teach lessons with students who say, “Oh I know that” and when we go deep into it they start to realize just how little they know.  The teacher is also the life long student – so even when confronting something and saying, “Oh – I know that” it’s amusing to see the beginner belt come out and realize that all roads lead to Kata – the basics – the fundamentals – and you can never know them as deeply as you think you do.

I hope this helps!

If you’re in the area, I’ll be playing with KoriSoron at the FM Theatre at Fulton-Montgomery Community College at 8pm on Friday, July 10th.  The event is free and open to the public.

Thanks!

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Saving Pretty Polly from the train tracks

I left my last post with a little cliff hanger:

Next time, I’ll talk about ear training, the one music book I would tell every musician interested in improvising to buy (no it’s not the Real Book) and how to save yourself tens of thousands of dollars in tuition by doing so.

I’ve talked a lot about the pluses and minuses of going to music school and some of the pitfalls in being an autodidact, so while I’m not going to talk about the big issues behind both of those approaches I do want to briefly outline what the great self taught players and great formally trained players have in common.

Ability to analyze.

Here’s a quote from my interview with Miroslav Tadic that bears repeating:

Understanding what you are playing while you are playing it puts you into a whole different place. This is extremely rare with classical players and this is what marks a great classical player and sets them apart from the other players. You have a player like Glenn Gould who had everything memorized and knew what was going on in every note that he was playing. After he stopped playing concerts he would go to the studio and everything that he recorded (and he recorded a vast amount of music) was all played from memory. The reason why you can have that kind of memory is because you understand what’s going on in the music. It’s not just having photographic memory or sitting there and having a technique for memorization it’s having the understanding of music. Even if you’re only going to play classical music, if you sit down and as you’re playing, go through the piece and ask yourself – what am I playing or what is this?

….You can really make it much more enjoyable and can really help you eliminate the dreaded memory lapses because you know what you’re playing. It’s not just this part that’s abstract to you. If you blank out all of the sudden and you have no idea of where you are. But you can always remember, oh that’s the F major part, before the cadence that takes us back to D minor or whatever. It’s not the theoretical knowledge of someone who’s a music student but the connection between theoretical knowledge and the actual living knowledge of music. The sonic knowledge. This is a really important thing. For example, you can know what a Neapolitan chord is – but you’ve also got to be able to spot it every time you hear it. Those guys who wrote that music – you can bet they knew what it sounded like. It’s not an issue of them sitting there and making calculations or something. It’s a flavor – like hearing a pentatonic scale. If you hear Pentatonic Minor riff, is there any question about what someone is playing? No. You can hear it and recognize it for what it is because it’s the music of our times. The same way, if you’re playing music from some other time well you should know it like the music of your own time.

This doesn’t mean that great musicians are in a perpetual state of constant analysis of everything, but if you have a deeper understanding of what is going on around you, you have a higher likelihood of being able to interact with it on a deeper level.   Some players have an intellectual knowledge of this, “There’s a minor vi to I in this part of the tune.”  some have a sonic knowledge of this (i.e. they hear the chord progression and know what’s going on in a deeper level.)

And here lies the other big similarity between the aforementioned players,

the ability to hear and listen

And, in my mind, there’s a big difference between the two.

Hearing is reactive – (“someone’s playing something”)

Listening is proactive (“the soloist is playing a line based in 4ths, I’m going to play something complimentary under that.”)

I may be in the minority for making that distinction but I think it’s an important one.

At Berklee, the classes that caused everyone to groan were the Ear Training (“Ear Straining”) classes.  The reason for this is because the classes focused on intervallic drills, the ability to hear chord qualities (major, minor, 7th chords in inversions) and transcribe melodies from ear.

In other words, all things that you need to be able to do in the real world – but a lot of the material was not something that would inspire you.

When I went to CalArts for my grad studies the only other school that I looked at was New England Conservatory and their Contemporary Improvisation program.  Ran Blake (the former chair of the program back when it was called Third Stream and a current faculty member there) has just released a book on the methods that he uses to teach there, called Primacy of the Ear.  It’s a thin book, approximately 125 pages of with 30 pages of indexes, sells for $30 and it’s a bargain.  It’s entirely possible that I never would have gone to grad school if I had this book back in 2005  (which would have been a huge mistake for me).

Having met Ran, I can guess that the book is a number of lessons, conversations and observations (you can read a very early pdf regarding this topic back in the third stream days that was substantially revised and expounded upon here) that co-credited author Jason Rogers edited together into a coherent guide-book for those people who want to truly own their music.  What’s interesting about the entire approach is how one he relates this process to creating an original style.

For those of you who don’t want to get the book, I’ll illustrate a process that Ran outlines in much greater detail that will help you with your hearing, phrasing and overall improvisation (I know I’ve done this before).

Step 1.  Pick a tune and a performance of that tune that inspires you.  Don’t pick something you want to learn because you think you should learn it.  You’re going to spend a lot of time with this process, so make it something that you REALLY want to learn.

Step 2.  Passive listening.  Play a recording of the tune throughout the day.  The goal is to start getting the song form in your ears.  This is like when you hear a commercial over and over again and find yourself able to sing back the melody away from the commercial later.

Step 3.  Active listening.  Now you’re only listening to the tune in short intense stints.  This is sitting down at a desk with no other distractions and really listening to what’s going on.  Noticing nuances, inflections, that type of thing.

Step 4.  This is the actual bear.  You start learning the components AWAY from the instrument.  So you learn the melody by ear.  You learn each phrase away from the instrument and get to the point that you can string it all together.  You want to be able to pre-hear the melody in the song.  Once you have this material mastered (i.e. can sign any part of the melody from any point in the tune), then learn it on the guitar using your inner hearing to guide the process.

Step 5.  Repeat with the bass line of the song.

Step 6.  Repeat with the chord progression of the song.  LEARNING EACH INDIVIDUAL VOICING of the chords one at a time melodically.

I’m sure that some of you at this point are thinking, “this is insane.”  If you’re thinking, “Oh I could do that.”  it’s very likely that an attempt to do this at this level will have you also come to the conclusion that it’s an act of insanity.

But it’s not insane.

This is a DEEP methodology to get into what is really happening in a song.

This process basically ensure that you know the song at the microscopic level and have a much deeper likelihood to engage with it at a core level.

This process has been adapted to all kinds of music.  In this video, Ran combines the music and biography of Mahler with film Noir to create a performance that is a true synthesis of styles.

This is only possible with an intimate understanding of Mahler and film Noir music.  That comes from deep engagement and deep listening.

How would you do it now?

Coming back to the original cliff hanger:

Next time, I’ll talk about ear training, the one music book I would tell every musician interested in improvising to buy (no it’s not the Real Book) and how to save yourself tens of thousands of dollars in tuition by doing so.

Knowing what I know now – if I didn’t go to undergrad –  here’s how I’d do this from scratch.

1. Get great teachers.  Yes plural – Teachers.  I’d take some classical lessons to get proper technique.  I’d take some lessons on theory to augment my own study.  I’d take lessons on any specific style I was interested in for as long as it made sense.  If I was interested in rock playing, I’d get some rock approaches down and if that got me what I wanted I’d move on from there.

2.  Take some classes at a community college.  College really isn’t for everyone at every time of their life.  There are people at 18 who are just not in the headspace to commit to full-time enrollment in college.  But try some courses in music theory or liberal arts to expand your horizons.   IN GENERAL – try a number of different approaches to learning and LEARN WHAT WORKS FOR YOU.  For me, being at a college surrounded me with other people and that immersive process was really important for me at that time in my life.  Now that I know how to teach myself, I can learn things on my own time and it’s more efficient.

3.  Get good materials to study on your own  I’d look on Amazon for the best reviewed books and order them through inter-library loan.  The ones that resonated with me I’d buy.

4.  Listen to as much different music as possible (preferably live music) and go out of your comfort zone whenever possible.  Expose yourself to things and find out what resonates with you – and more importantly WHY it resonates with you.  This is also where teachers/mentors/peers are critical because they can help articulate things going on in the music that will help you determine why something is cool.

5.  Perform in low risk setting at first to get your footing and play with people better than you.  As much as possible.  Determine from those experiences what you need to work on and work on them in a focused, deliberate way.  It’s a “7 times down 8 times up thing.”  Great teachers will help you here too.

6.  I’d learn as much music as I could by ear.  I’d transcribe anything that interested me.

7.  I’d continue to try to find favorite authors and artists and engage in their work in a deeper level.  Go deep with what you know and keep your eyes open for new things.

8.  Since this is about what I would do rather than spending 60k at a private undrgrad college – I’d go to a community college and get at least an associates degree in business and/or communication.  I would do this with the filter of learning anything that would help me become an independent musician.  I’d augment this with interning at a PR company or something similar to gain any insight on monetizing what I did, promoting it or drawing customers to whatever services (like lessons) or products (like mp3s, cds or dvds) I’d be providing.

9.  I’d make connections with other people and connect with existing community or create new communities.  Find like minded people and develop an inclusive scene.  There’s nothing wrong with online groups, but if they don’t have a component (or at least the potential component) of engaging face to face it’s not going to help you in the long run.

10.  Don’t lose the forest in the tree.

There’s a teacher at CalArts that had my favorite quote about the biggest potential pitfall that students can engage in.

“CalArts….come here as a decent reed player and leave as a mediocre tabla player.”

The biggest challenge with self-study is that you need 3 things to ask a question:

1.  You need to know that something exists to ask about it.

2.  You need to know that asking a question is an option.

3.  You need to have someone to answer the question in an intelligent way.

When you self study, you’re often missing most (if not all) of these factors.  It’s the “You don’t know what you don’t know” paradox.  The last thing that I would do all over again if I could instruct an 18 year old version of myself, would be to tell them that learning is a process not a destination.  You will always encounter things that, at the time, will seem like things you should have already known.  Don’t get hung up on should.  Realize that you are on a spinning ball, spinning around another spinning ball that’s spinning around an infinitely deeper structure.  Where one is physically appears to be the same place but is always changing.  Understanding where you are in music or life is the same thing.  I’m always surprised at how different perceived knowledge is from real knowledge is.  Don’t let it beat you up.  Just re-assess, adjust and keep moving forward.

Now back to that ear training.

As always, I hope this helps!

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As musicians, we spend a lot of time practicing things but a lot of us don’t ask WHY we’re practicing.  We have vague notions of things like, “to get better” but nothing concrete.

This leads to things like shred guitar groups on Facebook where it’s a constant one-upsmanship of technical skill.  And while that’s a natural phase of skill development, it often doesn’t have a whole lot to do with making music or being musical in a band context.  Paul Gilbert once talked about how he had to completely change the way he soloed when he toured with Mr. Big because the highly technical things that blew people’s socks off in 500 person clubs in LA were completely lost in arenas with cavernous reverbs washing everything out.

Why we do something can inform both what we’re doing and how we’re doing it as well.

Last night, I played a gig with KoriSoron, the band I play in with guitarist Farzad Golpayegani and percussionist Dean Mirabito.  The money was negligible and the audience was small but that gig was more informative that a month in the practice room because I had real time analysis of what worked and what didn’t work in a live setting.  Furthermore, when I looked back at my improvisations I could determine what I thought I was playing versus what I was really playing.

If you want to play live music, you should play live shows as often as possible and see live music as often as possible to see what works.  I’ll add much better clarification of this idea with a quote from what I would say is a must-read  interview I did with Miroslav Tadic:

Performing has both a physical and the mental aspect to it. They’re connected but people have different levels of reactivity to each of them that can only be tested in performance. The good news is, you don’t need to be in a club or a concert hall with a bunch of people who have paid for tickets to see you to develop that skill. All you need is for a couple of people to actually sit down, listen and pay attention to what you do.

Most people, including myself, have found that there is really no difference in playing for ten people in your living room or playing for 2,000 people in a concert hall you’ve never played before. Mentally it’s the same thing and in both situations you go through the same kind of reactions. Once you learn those reactions and observe yourself in that situation, those reactions are not going to surprise you when you’re on stage and this is the most important thing.

For example, lets say the physical reaction is that your hands are sweating, shaking or cold. These are all physical reactions to this mental state of performing for people. You don’t experience that in the practice room, but if you go in front of people and all the sudden your hands are sweaty and you’ve never played with sweaty hands, it’s a terrifying experience. But if you know that your hands sweat when you go in front of people and you know how that feels you will know that you’ll still be able to play. It’s not going to be as enjoyable as when your hands aren’t sweating, but you’re not going to be completely thrown off by that because you’ll have already had experience with that. Eventually they’re not going to sweat, because what’s making them sweat is going to go away. That terror of being in front of people will turn into inspiration.

Next time, I’ll talk about ear training, the one music book I would tell every musician interested in improvising to buy (no it’s not the Real Book) and how to save yourself tens of thousands of dollars in tuition by doing so.

As always, thanks for reading!

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Getting Past “Jazz”

A friend of mine posted something about working on the changes to “Giant Steps” the other day, and all I could think of was, “man better him than me…”

There was a long time that I lived under this weird misconception that I had to like jazz. That if I just listened a little deeper and learned a little bit more that there would come a moment that “stella by starlight” was going to speak to me.

And so I listened to a lot of jazz and spent some time on II V’s and other related jazz theory items and I came to some realizations.

• Informed Aesthetics are defined Aesthetics.  I credit Susan Allen at CalArts for really making me think about my aesthetics in a deeper way.  It’s not enough to simply be dismissive about things.  When students tell me that something “sucks”, I force them to explain to me 1.  What sucks means and how this sucks and 2.  what about it they don’t like 3.  what about it could be better?  Sometimes they can really articulate something substantial, but a lot of times it’s a knee jerk reaction and diving into what is aesthetically displeasing about that yields some deeper insights.

• Related to that examination, I tend to follow musicians more than genres.  I don’t like a lot of shred guitar but I’ll stand behind Yngwie’s work with Alactrazz (or the first Rising Force record) until the end of time.  I don’t know that “autumn leaves” will ever be a song I want to listen to but I can always find a reason to seek out recordings or performances by players like Ornette, Trane, Bird, Monk, Frisell or a couple dozen other musicians that are lumped in that category.

• A lot of the music that moves me is melodic and rhythmic rather than harmonic.  I find myself going back to the melodies of favorite works from traditional Arabic music or traditional music of Japan, Korea, Turkey or Iran.  I’m sure that it’s been done, but I have yet to hear one of those songs performed with ii V I’s superimposed over them that made them any “better”.

You might play what you practice but you perform what you know.

At Berklee, there was a lot of pressure to become a Jazz guitarist, and I felt like a failure for a long time because it seemed beyond me.  Eventually, I realized that the issue wasn’t that Jazz was some pursuit that was intellectually beyond me, it was that I had no interest in Real Book tunes so there was no fire inspiring me to learn the vocabulary or put the time in to developing those areas.

While classical music was interesting to me, I realized that I am never going to out perform the recorded works of Bach interpretations from the guys who lived breathed and ate that music 24 hours a day.

I doubt that I’ll ever have the passion necessary to be a traditional jazz guitarist any more than to be a traditional classical guitarist – but realized that there was a lot from both disciplines that I could integrate into what I’m doing.

As guitarists, we talk a lot about skill sets (both physical and mental) but we don’t talk a lot about passion and at the end of the day that’s the thing that really matters the most.  People don’t buy into your performance based on the number of notes that you play, they buy into how it makes them feel.  If you’re not passionate about it, they never will be either.

What are you doing to achieve your goals?

If you’re having trouble reaching your musical (or other) goals – take a moment and examine what you’re actually doing to achieve them. 

If you feel like you’ve hit a rut in your playing, take a hard look at what you’re actually doing to get out of it and readjust if necessary.  For example:

• Did you just buy a book or did you actually read it?
• Did you really sit down and work on your picking or did you just play the same thing that you always play?

Like I’ve said before, It’s easy to confuse doing something with getting something done, but if you don’t feel like you’re making progress taking a close look at what you’re doing an excellent place to start.

(A teacher can also help you get get on track to get where you need to go.  If you need help in this area, feel free to email me for in person lessons or Skype lesson information!)

As always, thanks for reading!

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