I once said to a musician and former Berklee College of Music student that I met in a club in Rochester New York that it must be really cool living in a dorm with hundreds of other musicians. He looked at me like I was crazy. Of course, years later, I learned why he looked at me like that when I found myslef living in Berklee’s infamous 150 Mass Avenue dormitory. All in all, I wasn’t crazy (at least not back then), I was just terribly naïve.
Naiveté unfortunately is what leads many young people down the path to a college major that they are ultimately not suited for. With the ever increasing cost of a college education, it is more and more important that young people make well informed decisions about their higher education destination. Not decisions based on fantasy or wishful thinking, but decisions based on experience and facts.
As a teacher I have supported many students desire to study music at the college level. Often sitting down with their parents and answering their questions and laying out the facts as I see them. There have also been students whose desires I have not supported, as hard as that was. Not all students have what it takes, if you’re a student of mine and you want to take the plunge, you have to really show me your drive and determination, not just your love of music… I’m not going to just go along with it because you say it’s your dream.
If you want to go to music school and you’re not already doing the following things, then you either want to get to it or reconsider music as a career choice:
• Study your principle instrument with a qualified teacher
A good teacher can cut years off of the time it takes for you to master your instrument. Sure, you can learn on your own, and you should be doing that as well. However, unless you possess an incredibly keen musical mind, are amazingly disciplined, and have access to a storehouse of information revealing all of the techniques and secrets of your chosen instrument, it’s best to seek a highly qualified teacher to guide you and kick your musical butt when necessary.
• Practice your instrument on a daily basis
Perfecting your craft requires daily practice, end of story. If you can’t discipline yourself to sit down for an hour, or two preferably, everyday, to practice the necessary skills required to perform on your instrument, then you should definitely consider a career at McDonalds instead.
• Play regularly with others
It is so important to leave your musty room and to start playing music with others on a regular basis. Music is almost always a communal sport, a sport with its own rules and its own strange rituals. Practicing in your room, waiting until you’re ready to unleash your talent on the world is probably leading you nowhere quickly. Get out there and play with everyone you can, this is how you really learn, by actually doing.
• Hustle your own gigs
If you’re not gigging now, it’s definitely time to start. You and your friends need to get out of the basement or garage and go down to the local teen haunt or anywhere else you can think of and start plying your trade. Hustling gigs is one of the most important skills a working musician can have, start learning this skill now.
• Get involved with other peoples gigs
Worm your way onto other peoples gigs, in a nice way. Ask to play guitar with your school choir or orchestra. Sit in with your friend’s bands or bands playing at local clubs. Get involved in any type of performance activity that you can. I learned as much, if not more, from being lost reading the music in my schools orchestra and performing in the pit band for local musicals, as I did playing Black Sabbath songs with my friends at the local coffee house.
• Study music theory
Music theory and ear training are the areas most lacking in freshman electric guitar and bass students. Shouldn’t you already know how to read music and understand the inner workings of music theory? Going to music school to learn these basics is a huge waste of money. It’s akin to an engineering student needing to learn how to add and subtract in their freshman year. Learn everything you can as early as you can and pass out of the basic classes. You will get to the cooler things quicker and save yourself some money along the way.
• Study the business of music
Don’t fool yourself; they call it the music business for a reason. Learn the ropes and understand what you’re getting yourself into. While you’re at it, make sure to read only a few books written on the music business before 2005, and all of the books written on it since. The rules of the business have changed dramatically in the last five years, many in favor of the artist. Study this area well!
There is no reason to be naïve in this information rich world of ours. Don’t bury your head in the sand and say that my talent and destiny will lead me were I need to go. Just getting into a good music school can be a herculean task these days. Don’t waste your time and your or your parents money, open your eyes, learn the facts and gain some valuable experience before you leap onto this very difficult career path.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Inspired Part 1
Stevie Ray Vaughan stands on stage tearing huge concrete slabs of sound out of his Stratocaster, hat pulled down over his eyes, big globs of sweat pouring down his scrunched up face. At times it looks like the guitar is just going to snap under the pressure. Every note of every song is played like it’s going to be his last. Although I never saw him live, I’ve seen a lot of video and I’ve never seen him slack off, not for a single millisecond.
I’ve seen Buddy Guy live three times. The first time I saw him was in a small club where I was only ten feet away from him the entire show. At one point Buddy bent a note, a long sustained scream of a note and we locked eyes, from ten feet away it was like we were connected by a high voltage wire. The note sustained and his eyes stayed locked on mine. After what seemed like a beautiful eternity he smiled and let loose with a fountain of notes. I’ll never forget that moment. Oh, by the way, Buddy was in his 60’s at the time and he never slacked off for a moment either.
Wynton Marsalis came to our town and gave a clinic and a concert. At the clinic, geared towards teens, he called for players to come on stage and perform for him. A bunch of younger players clamored on stage and one adult, a local sax player, Dick Adams. Everyone performed a short scale or melody for Wynton, who made a few comments about their tone or technique. When he got to my friend Dick, Wynton made a positive comment about Dick’s sound and then something about his humility. That’s what struck me the most as well, Dick Adams is a fine sax player who has tremendous ability and never holds back, and I thought that it showed enormous humility for him to stand up there with those kids a third his age and be willing to ask for pointers.
I am inspired by people like this, people who come from all walks of life and do what they do with intensity, focus, honesty and a sense of humility. Not going through the motions, not mimicking emotion or intensity, but honestly attempting to express themselves’s through whatever medium they choose.
I am also deeply inspired by those who are always seeking. Not satisfied with where they’re at, not sitting around fat and comfortable playing their patented “beef stew” licks, but always striving to learn new things and to improve their abilities.
Some players, like my friend Grammy Award winning drummer Steve Mitchell, are always happy to be playing music. Steve could easily sleepwalk through most gigs and still sound great, but he is always alive and focused on making great music. So many of us musicians who’ve had the opportunity to perform thousands of gigs over the years become jaded and bored with our music. It’s so easy to just go through the motions, to fake it. (Like counting the notes going out into the space and attempting to calculate how much you’re getting paid per note while comping during the keyboard solo.) It’s so easy to simply play the notes and chords while rarely, if ever investing anything of yourself in the music.
This, it seems, is the real challenge as we grow and learn to perform at a high level. Not to lose that sense of awe for what we can create with focus and intensity. To play every note like it might be the last and not to lose your love for the music as you use it to make a living. One of my teachers once told me that in those moments when I was disillusioned with my music, to think back to and connect with the feelings that brought me to music in the first place. To look at it through a child’s eyes … "no one dreams of going through the motions of playing music" he said.
To be continued…
I’ve seen Buddy Guy live three times. The first time I saw him was in a small club where I was only ten feet away from him the entire show. At one point Buddy bent a note, a long sustained scream of a note and we locked eyes, from ten feet away it was like we were connected by a high voltage wire. The note sustained and his eyes stayed locked on mine. After what seemed like a beautiful eternity he smiled and let loose with a fountain of notes. I’ll never forget that moment. Oh, by the way, Buddy was in his 60’s at the time and he never slacked off for a moment either.
Wynton Marsalis came to our town and gave a clinic and a concert. At the clinic, geared towards teens, he called for players to come on stage and perform for him. A bunch of younger players clamored on stage and one adult, a local sax player, Dick Adams. Everyone performed a short scale or melody for Wynton, who made a few comments about their tone or technique. When he got to my friend Dick, Wynton made a positive comment about Dick’s sound and then something about his humility. That’s what struck me the most as well, Dick Adams is a fine sax player who has tremendous ability and never holds back, and I thought that it showed enormous humility for him to stand up there with those kids a third his age and be willing to ask for pointers.
I am inspired by people like this, people who come from all walks of life and do what they do with intensity, focus, honesty and a sense of humility. Not going through the motions, not mimicking emotion or intensity, but honestly attempting to express themselves’s through whatever medium they choose.
I am also deeply inspired by those who are always seeking. Not satisfied with where they’re at, not sitting around fat and comfortable playing their patented “beef stew” licks, but always striving to learn new things and to improve their abilities.
Some players, like my friend Grammy Award winning drummer Steve Mitchell, are always happy to be playing music. Steve could easily sleepwalk through most gigs and still sound great, but he is always alive and focused on making great music. So many of us musicians who’ve had the opportunity to perform thousands of gigs over the years become jaded and bored with our music. It’s so easy to just go through the motions, to fake it. (Like counting the notes going out into the space and attempting to calculate how much you’re getting paid per note while comping during the keyboard solo.) It’s so easy to simply play the notes and chords while rarely, if ever investing anything of yourself in the music.
This, it seems, is the real challenge as we grow and learn to perform at a high level. Not to lose that sense of awe for what we can create with focus and intensity. To play every note like it might be the last and not to lose your love for the music as you use it to make a living. One of my teachers once told me that in those moments when I was disillusioned with my music, to think back to and connect with the feelings that brought me to music in the first place. To look at it through a child’s eyes … "no one dreams of going through the motions of playing music" he said.
To be continued…
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Musical Archaeology on YouTube
As a teenager growing up learning the guitar and music in the 1970's and 1980's I couldn't have dreamed of the information resources that we now have at our fingertips. Hours spent dropping the needle (yes, that would be the record player's needle) on to the intro to Hendrix's Purple Haze led me eventually to a decent version of the intro. Of course 5 minutes of watching him play it would have made it all so much easier to understand and ultimately more educational. At that time however it wasn't likely that I would get to see video of him playing, let alone have the chance to rewind his performance the 10 times it would take to understand what he was doing...
Fast forward to today and not only can I find 8 live videos of Hendrix performing the song on the first page of a YouTube search, but also a host of Hendrix fans offering their own videos of how to play the song and its solo. The accuracy of the fans offerings aside, this is an amazing resourse, a community of people showing you the way they think its played. This is something that every student should be taking advantage of.
Of course the wealth of information to be found on YouTube isn't confined to rock, but every style of music you might be interested in. For instance, I just did a search for Klezmer (Secular Jewish Dance Music) on YouTube and found video performances and even a few lessons. File sharing allows people from all walks of life to share the things they love, it's like having an enormous group of friends from which you can borrow videos on an endless variety of subjects, indefinitely.
For the serious student of music, musical archaeology should be a part of your weekly practice schedule. Peeling back the layers of time and peering in at great players performing their music at the peak of their careers will teach you so much about music, about them and about your instrument. If you're studying blues slide guitar, watch blues players play, view their lessons and live videos. Make a study of it. How do they move, what chord shapes and tunings do they use and what scales. When you're working on learning a new song, just getting the notes right is great, but learning the types of fingerings the player used to perform those notes, what model instrument or amp they used to get their sound is all incredibly valuable information.
Of course you will often find that the camera cuts away just as the player peels off that 16th note run from hell that you can't figure out, or the video goes psychedelic as he or she plays the coolest chord in the world. It's not a perfect view into the past but it is incredibly educating at its worst and totally revealing at its best.
As a guitar player I have created a short list of important guitar figures I think you should dig up, some modern and some old. Some you might have heard of and many you probably have never heard of. I've tried to avoid the most obvious. My list does include some greats in different styles, but also musical freaks who do things no one else does and so are worth looking into. Some I just think are funny, either way it's better then watching videos of cats playing piano. Please ad to my list via the comments box, thanks. Enjoy!
In no particular order:
Roy Buchanan
Buckethead
Allan Holdsworth
Manuel Barrueco
Kurt Rosenwinkle
Stanley Jordan
Yngwie Malmsteen
Eric Johnson
Michael Hedges
Eliot Fisk
Ry Cooder
Chet Atkins
Albert Collins
Andres Segovia
Danny Gatton
Steve Morris
Jr. Brown
Joe Pass
Bill Frisell
Andy McKee
Lenny Breau
Ani DiFranco
Micheal Angelo Batio
Fast forward to today and not only can I find 8 live videos of Hendrix performing the song on the first page of a YouTube search, but also a host of Hendrix fans offering their own videos of how to play the song and its solo. The accuracy of the fans offerings aside, this is an amazing resourse, a community of people showing you the way they think its played. This is something that every student should be taking advantage of.
Of course the wealth of information to be found on YouTube isn't confined to rock, but every style of music you might be interested in. For instance, I just did a search for Klezmer (Secular Jewish Dance Music) on YouTube and found video performances and even a few lessons. File sharing allows people from all walks of life to share the things they love, it's like having an enormous group of friends from which you can borrow videos on an endless variety of subjects, indefinitely.
For the serious student of music, musical archaeology should be a part of your weekly practice schedule. Peeling back the layers of time and peering in at great players performing their music at the peak of their careers will teach you so much about music, about them and about your instrument. If you're studying blues slide guitar, watch blues players play, view their lessons and live videos. Make a study of it. How do they move, what chord shapes and tunings do they use and what scales. When you're working on learning a new song, just getting the notes right is great, but learning the types of fingerings the player used to perform those notes, what model instrument or amp they used to get their sound is all incredibly valuable information.
Of course you will often find that the camera cuts away just as the player peels off that 16th note run from hell that you can't figure out, or the video goes psychedelic as he or she plays the coolest chord in the world. It's not a perfect view into the past but it is incredibly educating at its worst and totally revealing at its best.
As a guitar player I have created a short list of important guitar figures I think you should dig up, some modern and some old. Some you might have heard of and many you probably have never heard of. I've tried to avoid the most obvious. My list does include some greats in different styles, but also musical freaks who do things no one else does and so are worth looking into. Some I just think are funny, either way it's better then watching videos of cats playing piano. Please ad to my list via the comments box, thanks. Enjoy!
In no particular order:
Pat Metheny
John Petrucci
Leo Kotke
Jeff Beck
John ScofieldRoy Buchanan
Buckethead
Allan Holdsworth
Manuel Barrueco
Kurt Rosenwinkle
Stanley Jordan
Yngwie Malmsteen
Eric Johnson
Michael Hedges
Eliot Fisk
Ry Cooder
Chet Atkins
Albert Collins
Andres Segovia
Danny Gatton
Steve Morris
Jr. Brown
Joe Pass
Bill Frisell
Andy McKee
Lenny Breau
Ani DiFranco
Micheal Angelo Batio
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