Mentoring

For me mentoring is one of the most effective ways of creating a change in a pupil particularly when they have got to the point of having some grasp of the scales and chords and basic theory: maybe at around grade four.

I have always started from the premise that you need to find out from the pupil what their dreams are and where they currently are in their ability to play. That journey always has to be taken from where they are and not from where you are. I find a lot of teachers spend a lot of time trying to make pupils do what they can do, I personally find this inefficient and the best results from my experience comes from igniting the pupils imagination. This can be rather troublesome and challenging for you as a teacher because there are things that you are less than adequate in, which you have to really brush up on in order to help but I found in the past it enables a pupil to develop very quickly  on their chosen path.

I’ve had great successes with bass players, song writers, singers, virtuoso rock players, classical players, jazz musicians and what we could loosely term as musical artists. This stuff isn’t really coming from me it’s coming from them and for me the thing that tips the balance is their personal motivation to achieve what it is that they really like.

Many of my pupils do gradings and the grades are only a target and an objective on the path to their personal aspirations. Once you have them motivated and they have a goal to work towards then you have to let them get on with it. It is them who climb the mountain, not you. You may have the map but they have got to do the hard work and therefore if they do not achieve what they set out to achieve that is down to them.

One last thing to consider is that your aim is to make them better than you, do not get into the old British management style of employing somebody is not as good as you. You really want them to be the thing that you aspire to.

Most often the pupils will have enough skills of their own that will develop over time, occasionally you will need to instil some new tools to assist them. Apart from musical skills these may be personal skills such as goalsetting time management etc. This is where I use NLP as I find this to be the most effective way of achieving change.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk check out the dates for next year on the website we are currently half full within two weeks of launching the new dates to hurry this is too good to miss.

Creation and destruction, I am dancing for them both.’ Rumi

One of the problems that we experience in today’s society is the mental attitude that anything can be got and anything can be fixed and straight away. When you apply this attitude to something like learning a musical instrument the immediacy that we are used to today does not apply. The idea that constant practice is required to achieve anything of any value is an anathema.

In the area of song writing you are going to produce a lot of frogs before you produce a prince I liken this to sifting through the attic; a lot of the stuff that you will come to first of all will be junk until underneath you will find a lost gem.

I am currently in the middle of producing a new album, which is a collaboration between professional musicians and complete amateurs. The idea of this recording is to put me on my back foot so that I actually create something different from the sort of habitual music making that I would otherwise do. So far the songs have taken interesting forms from the obvious Rock to the not so obvious Ska and Reggae mixed with strange Jazz and Oriental flavours.

Once you embrace the expected and the unexpected the good and the bad the easy and the complicated without making any judgements there is a uniqueness to the creative process because you are not falling into the type of habitual pattern that your practice has taken you to. In other words you have to hear in your head before you play or write.

We have just finished our ninth Bluescamp summer school which was an amazing success. Each year improves on the last however I always caution team members and other campers who regularly visit that we cannot always get better and sometimes we have to face something that really didn’t work. Otherwise you become a slave to chasing your own tail, chasing the elusive butterfly of success to mix metaphors and this actually doesn’t help because it lessens the risk taking that I believe that you have to have in order to continue creative situations.

One other aspect of the above is that sometimes we have to destroy the thing that seems to be part of us and part of what we do. I had a friend who was a writer and deep thinker and he would run very successful groups and meetings and then every now and again when they were really going well he would stop doing them. This used to shock and upset people but I understand what he was up to that sometimes you just can’t get any better and sometimes you need to change otherwise it just becomes a habit and you’re going through the motions.

So maybe it’s time to write a song for Rumi’s dance in one or two areas of your life.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  or visit https://www.facebook.com/BluCampUK/ and check out what people are saying …………

Sea of Tears

Science has liberated us ‘cogs’ from the religious machine and revealed our complexity. We are now shiny drops reflecting the world around us in all our individual glory. But science, with its acceleration of communication, has also brought us to the ocean. I see myself as a drop-an individual with a vital message to give to the world-but when I tried to express it I am brought face-to-face with the fact that I am one of millions of unwanted writers clogging up the in trays of thousands of unwanted publishers when all that the world really needs is a steady flow of bestsellers from leading celebrities published by a couple of top publishers. The same is true for everyone -hopeful pop stars, bright-eyed school leavers, revolutionaries, inventors…. We all feel our enormous value as shining drops, but when we approach the ocean we just melt into insignificance. Science has given us a cruelly indifferent universe……….  Ramsey Dukes

As a musician and teacher I am constantly aware of the problem of the rationalist aspect of education and the general media babble. Much of this, from the media especially, is loosely scientific and maybe best put as pseudoscientific. Stories that knock unscientific thought abound in the media and particularly in the hallowed halls of the BBC where they will quite happily knock alternative thought but quite happily embrace some religious programme in the guise of free speech.

What I would like to do is to look at this from the point of view of the artist and musician and that scientific thinking is not conducive to creativity. The above quote by Ramsey Dukes is a good example of this because anybody who wanted to start a band only has to look at the statistical possibility of having any form of success is so remote you may as well become a professional lottery player.

However because people are irrational and illogical we have art and we have music with new musical bands and solo artists of which the United Kingdom is truly blessed. So being naïve is probably a gift for the young, for the irrational, no rules, and no holds barred sensibility of the artist.

The scientific viewpoint as pictured in the above quote is intriguingly homeopathic, where a small droplet in the ocean can make the significant difference in somebody’s health. This is of course poo-pooed by science but strangely seems to work for people since the time of Hahnemann back in the 18^th century and intriguingly also works for animals. Hey but according to science doesn’t work.

If we look at the world of computer programming we find no problem with a small program acting as a virus that can destroy complex computers and this is the attitude that we need to adopt as an artist that something that we do which in the scheme things will be incredibly small will have a vast impact in the sea of human consciousness.

So be brave and irrational adopt a state of mind this is egotistical and naïve and create something beautiful. Remember small is beautiful.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  musical magic, book for next year

No boundaries on your knowledge increase the size of your map; make things less defined.

Dark light, good bad, happy sad, right wrong we have a world of opposites and this in its way causes boundaries to our knowing and ability to learn new things. They do create the topography of the maps that we create in our minds but they do also in turn stop us learning new things and there are moments when we need to turn them off in order to redesign the map and introduce new things that transcend the limits of what we currently know.

A good example of this is playing ‘outside’, in the jazz context being outside the scale or key and much of our perception of right and wrong are the boundaries that we create due to the presence of scales and chords.

Spend time doing the chromatic notes against a backing that is sitting on one or two chords and become family with all of the notes and how they sound, turn off the boundaries and hear the note as part of the chord and the chord as being part of the note and make the sound familiar in the way it is either relaxed or tense.

Listen to the possibilities of different pieces of music happening at once and allow them to co-exist. When they do how about making that happen in your playing? You can try this by playing two or three songs simultaneously on radios and computers etc.and become familiar with the feeling.

Other boundaries may include musical genres and by mixing these structures and patterns seeing what you get. Many different musical styles started like this from The Beatles to Led Zeppelin so see what you can find.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk next year’s dates are available, make sure that you book in

Once you have your first few pupils then ask them for referrals and PAY THEM

Have you had people ask you for favours and then never do anything in return? How does that make you feel? If you do something for them uninvited you do not expect anything in return but of you are asked there seems to be a transaction under way.

Often businesses will ask for referrals but they either offer nothing or something that is unwanted (think about this when you offer a teenager a free guitar lesson that means nothing if the parents are paying so that needs to be offered to the parents. What you offer MUST have perceived value to the person who is receiving it that will make all the difference when it comes to referring other people to you.

How many bands do this when people get them gigs? Not many; getting a booking referral fee out of the blue of £100 could be a very powerful incentive for them to get you more.

I have a friend who comes to see me ONLY when he needs help getting work and although I am happy to help him he never returns my calls at other times when I leave messages about things that I am doing, only if it means he can get work out of it. Shame really because there is only so much that people will take, so be careful to make sure that you are not doing this.

For all the problems that money causes and I am the first the use other forms of transaction than money, trading time for time etc. money is a powerful transactional force which needs to be fully understood.

Remember that money as such is just an idea which we all agree on but as such it is imaginary especially now as it does not relate to the Gold Standard and numbers are just created by banks. However the idea is VERY powerful and that is what you are using, the idea of the transaction. If you are paying a lot for the referral you must value that transaction. If you offer £5 for every new referred pupil that will work against you but £25 to £50, that is substantial and it means that the referrer could earn a lot of money from those transactions if they get motivated.

Now if you think that is a lot of money stop for a moment and ask yourself how much money does a new client bring you over the lifetime of lessons, gigs etc.? Then think again about how much you are willing to pay!

So giving someone a book that they do not want to say ‘Thank You’ for a referral which could make you £400 to £1000 a year is an insult, and not offering anything but just asking is a travesty to any good will that you have with someone.

Be generous and it will be returned.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk check out the video

It’s all about communication, if you are good with people skills, teaching is made a lot easier and so is being a good front man/woman for a band.

I had a comment left recently on a YouTube video that I did about developing a teaching practice. This person said that he would really like to get into teaching but ‘hated’ young children and the thought of teaching, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to young kids who didn’t care and weren’t interested would be a problem for him however he really thought that teaching teenagers in a secondary school would be okay. In my experience the ones who are disinterested and really don’t care tend to be teenagers not young children who are the ones often flushed with enthusiasm of doing something amazing but by the time they reach thirteen or fourteen years of age all of that disappears into the stupor of the teenage brain.

I am not suggesting that it’s impossible to teach teenagers because it is not but it takes a certain amount of patience to do that and the ability to create goals and things for them to aspire to, because you are not only dealing with the teenager but also the environment that they find themselves in, the pressures of school, academic life and what is expected of them from their parents either implicitly or explicitly.

My take on this is that you build a good friendship with people that you teach and in that way you can encourage them to learn and also understand where they are coming from and if you do this well you can encourage them to pass your name around to their friends and thereby develop the work that you do.

All of the above applies to performance as well, the most dedicated followers of a band or personality often resides within the young person’s age group. This is proven by the extraordinary numbers of people who follow bloggers and vloggers. Some of the video bloggers have numbers of followers that a successful band would kill for and they have an intimate knowledge of what goes on in the life of the blogger that used to happen when I was younger regarding pop bands. Magazines such as Smash Hits used to do features that were a day in the life of whoever was famous at the time such as the Bay City Rollers, Showaddywaddy, Slade, or Marc Bolan.

So friendship is the key to developing a business and in the world of business this would be termed as goodwill, which is something that you could put on the balance sheet but it is very much a guesstimate.

So the first area for developing a client base is speak to your friends and get their friends on board and you would be amazed how many people that could potentially be.

Vic

Www.bluescampUK.co.uk for three days of music magic, learn to play in a rock band learning the tricks of the trade.

Business Model

I was in Amsterdam for a seminar with a well known writer.I had never been to Amsterdam before and it certainly lived up to its reputation of the beautiful laid back city.

I found the roads so confusing with bikes and cars coming at you from almost every possible direction that to be safe I looked in every direction when crossing the road including up.

What I did find fascinating was the red light district and that rather sordid and tacky are side by side with the beautiful and picturesque and numbers of people on bicycles going about their business.

The ladies in the windows plying their trade made me reflect on the statement that most business plans that we adopt are the same business plans of the prostitute.

Prostitution is rightly regarded by some as the oldest profession and I think we should look at it from that perspective for the moment whether you agree with it or not, that it also  follows it must have the oldest business plan as well.

I know I have made mention of this before but I am fascinated by the echoes of processes like this.

So for the ladies in the windows in Amsterdam they are using the business model adopted by most small businesses around the world and through time which is ‘ I have something that you want and if you want it enough you will pay for it’ also the basics of the marketing work on this principle.

Make it look appealing and make it accessible and to some extent exclusive. There are many cases with prostitution that women will have regular clients sometimes over many years as an exclusive deal.

So what can we learn from this? Well maybe that the fantasy of the experience, being a rock star. the dream needs fulfilling and that is why they come to us to spend their we need to recognise that.

I think the most telling aspect is that to make money we do need to be ‘client led’ which is very P.C. is it not? However it comes directly from the most un P.C. and the most ancient of all of our trading practices.

So to wrap up there is much to learn here from the ladies who want you to pay for plucking their instrument; see we are even closer than you think! 

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk   three days of learning to be in a band

Are you listening?

The other day while I was reading and I came across a quotation from the famous American medical hypnotist Milton Erickson concerning the difference between ordinary waking states and trance states especially deep trance.

.. The subject in a deep trance functions in accordance with the unconscious understandings independently of the forces to which his conscious mind ordinarily responds; he behaves in accordance with the reality which exists in the given hypnotic situation for his unconscious mind. Conceptions memories and the ideas constitute his reality world; he is in a deep trance. The actual external environment reality with which he is surrounded is relevant only insofar as it is utilized in the hypnotic situation. (Erikson Deep Trance and its induction)

I thought that this perfectly summed up the state of mind that a musician in full flow of playing finds himself and this is why it is so difficult at times to truly intellectualise what makes a musician give a great performance because the performing musician will often not be able to tell you what it is that is happening.

I have often found that some pupils who are highly intellectual find learning music at very challenging. Many things that they aspire to seem to not make sense and they seem to get to this point after exploring all the chords and scales and techniques and still they find the holy grail of the great performance evades them.

Yet when you tell them that they need to get in touch with their feelings and to listen to the music inside them (because the unconscious processes many, many times more data than the intellect) they try to rationalise what I say and think about it when they really just need to listen.

I think that if you want to be like a great talent you need to travel a similar path to them. So if your heroes worked things out by ear so should you, if your hero became a great sight reader, so should you, because what is going on in the unconscious of the artist is what makes the difference and although we can discover where that person has travelled to by our intellect we cannot visit that land unless we walk their path. The reason for this is, as Erickson says, is that the reality of someone in a deep trance (which is where any performer is) is in the world of the unconscious.

Over the last few weeks Keith Richards has been on the radio and TV a number of times being interviewed. Now if there is someone who plays from the heart and not the head it is his ‘Keithness’ bless him!  Not only does he confound the medical profession that he is still with us physically but he will continue to confound the music intellectuals on how to play the perfect rock groove even with his extreme arthritis that he has in his hands.

I am sure that his answer is not to think about it just plug in and play.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of rock fun in a band

Setting up as a teacher, What Why and How...

What?

We are in very strange times, good for opportunity and change but also for uncertainty about where the economy is going and jobs.

If you have a skill in this case music and if you are looking to earn more than the first place to look is at what you can do with it.

Also it is advisable to list all the other skills that you have either soft or hard.

Why?

 I believe that the world of employment will change to be unrecognisable in the next few years because of disruptive technologies and this will affect the middle class professionals in ways that were not foreseeable a short while ago and we need to be able to use the creative aspect of music because this will be an area that will be required.

There is a lateral shift here but in a nut shell we need people who can think the impossible because that is where technology will take us and I am saying that because that is what it has already done so more of the same really.

And the way to learn this lateral ability is through the arts and music is the easiest way into this for the mind in my opinion and for the purposes of this blog.

How?

Just start networking and maybe start teaching, song writing, and playing small gigs in people’s houses, in restaurants at parties, clubs or festivals. Do not wait until you are perfect there is no such thing just start and develop. Get things on the YouTube, remember that your recorded music may not make any money but it might get you work.

The set of videos are about getting started as a guitar teacher, however the same applies to any teaching so have a listen if you want to make some money and make a start.

The set of videos are here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtSQpny2D8

Happiness is playing music; with others.

It seems that whenever I meet new people and they asked me what I do, they then tell me that they have a guitar or they used to play guitar but had to stop because they had a family and life got in the way, now they wished that they could start again.

Some of them romanticise about the times that they played in a band or they think about the guitar that they sold and all of them lament the fact that if they had carried on playing they would be really good by now.

One of the sad things in today’s world is that people spend many years training to do a job, going to university getting into debt only to find the job that they have secured through all their hard work they hate.

It does not bring them any happiness, the money might be useful but with the increase of the money coming in there is also an increase of the money going out.

I teach in a number of public schools and when you add up the cost of the two expensive cars the school fees for the children and the expensive house and the expensive holidays which they need in order to deal with the stress of the job that they do not like, they could easily afford to have a happier life by cutting back and focusing on the things that truly give them happiness.

The problem is that once you get used to a lifestyle and the rest of the family get used to your income then it is very difficult to extricate yourself from it. Sometimes your body does it for you by making you ill if you don’t heed those warnings the illness gets more serious.

So let’s do something about it, find some time to jam and have fun meeting other people, this could be an open mike night or could just be getting together with a few friends and making a bit of a noise. Think yourself back a little bit to when music really gave you happiness, invoke those memories and get some joy back into your life.

You begin to realise that many things that were told throughout your life were lies, like how important science and maths were to the detriment of the arts. You were taught that many things were so important but your life experience has told you otherwise because after learning them you never used again; like finding the area of rhombus or calculating the value of X and Y.

So use social media if you haven’t got enough friends who play, make new contacts by asking around and start a ban, book a gig and have some fun.

Vic

You can find information about blues camp by going to www.Bluescampuk.co.uk

Make Money, take the chance

If you want to be able to make money from music like any form of art you will have to look at the opportunities as they present themselves.

It is so easy to get trapped in a form of thinking that is restrictive and this becomes the norm, so for instance if you were thinking about a lessons  just a half an hour of passing on facts then you are missing an opportunity to expand their experience. For the pupil to go without you offering anything else that lays beyond the standard music format then you are going to be caught in an economic trap that you set for yourself.

You really need to be able to offer something different for instance, sound engineering or guitar maintenance and repair, song writing, performance skills etc.  If you have a studio create experiences that excite pupils to be more involved.

Artists often forget that the general public are willing to pay a lot for interesting experiences such as training programs workshops etc. which could be in or out of the country for themselves or their children. Parents will pay a lot of money for their children’s education which they may not for themselves.

It is my belief that the teaching of music and the arts will become increasingly more important as education moves along in this very uncertain world that we are now entering.   Future generations will require lots of creative thinking and not so much of the factual education style that has been used up to now; the world is moving is so fast into the unknown.

Vic

check out video setting up as a teacher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtSQpny2D8

I want to be free……………

I noticed an interesting debate / argument develop on the internet the other day about whether or not to offer a free introductory lesson to prospective pupils. Both sides stated their case before becoming rattled at the other, trading a few masked insults. My thoughts on this were not whether it was right or not because of the professionalism of the musician but whether in the process of business it works to do that.

So let us step aside for a moment from the trade aspect of the job and look at the business looking at it from the point of another profession offing a service, say a phone contract or credit card. Do they offer a free introductory period? In many cases yes they do and contained in it is the hook to get you in. How about gym membership do they make offers like this such as a reduced price for new clients? Yes they do.

There is a classic story about the pet shop owner who when a family came in looking for a pet he offers a puppy for the weekend with no obligation to buy, as you can imagine after the weekend they do not want to give the dog back; this in the business is called ‘The puppy dog close’ and is a classic business strategy.

Now does this seem to diminish the professionalism of a teacher that they offer a free lesson maybe it could. Would someone who has a good reputation with lots of referrals need to offer this kind of inducement? No probably not.

So it is horses for courses, if you do not need to then don’t. If it works for you to do that, then do it BUT do not confuse business with the trade. What functions for business does not necessarily have anything to do with your skill, it is like saying that your improvisational skills will benefit from better book keeping.

What I think it does do however is make others feel threatened that the playing field is uneven but hey that is business. The battlefield of trade is all about topography so choose the high ground.

Vic

 www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Three days of learning how to be a rock icon  

The inner sky of the mind fills with images...

The inner sky of the mind fills with images, ideas and concepts on a continuous basis. Some of these ideas seem so real and so powerful they become apparently autonomous.

Yet the Gods and Goddesses are creations of our own minds. They stud the starry universe that wheels within and only within our eyes. They provide a way for consciousness to think about the whole with all its ambivalent and changing parts. They provide a functional cosmology based upon real observable polarity of male and female, which tells the whole story of creation. Consciousness flourishes in the mythic cycle that includes every aspect and symbol of the divine. Nicholas Mann

The rich and open canvas of the mind is the powerhouse of our consciousness it is our best ally and also our greatest enemy and to understand it is to be able to use that tool that is also fundamental to what makes us who we are.

I have always been interested in meeting new people, especially creative people; I am very interested to learn from them. Often these people become friends and one such person was Stuart Wilde.

Stuart was an incredible writer and thinker; he was a writer for music projects such as ‘Heartland’ and ‘Greenwood’ and his own metaphysical books and recordings. He was a lecturer on the occult and mystical and he was a natural comedian and bon viveur.

Some of Stuart’s ideas were so left field, but as you got to know him you could really grasp what he was getting and he had an amazing line of prediction which included the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the World Financial Crash (which no one else seemed to see coming) and the child abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church.

But what I liked about him was his generous spirit and how he wore his heart on his sleeve and his ability to move his mind into areas like music that even in his own opinion had no obvious skill. We did a recording a few years back and when I said he should sing on it he said he had a voice like ‘a frog in a bag’, I thought he could do a Lee Marvin but I could not sway him on this.

For people like Stuart opening the mind and ‘seeing’ the inner world and then creating from it was the magic that we as artists need to engage with. Too much of musical teaching is wrapped up in the theory and not in the expansiveness of the unconscious and we can benefit greatly from the pantheon of mind’s symbology and iconography so imagine what you want and start to manifest it through your work.

Vic

 Expand your mind and your ability to play www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Concerning the Way

Concerning the Way - Confucianists, Buddhists, tea masters, masters of ceremonial practices, Noh dramatists and such – none of these are within the Way of the Warrior. Even though their Ways are not ours, if you know the Way broadly, not one of them will be misunderstood. It is essential that each person polish his own Way well – Miyamoto Musashi

One thing about music that I love is that by learning its Way you learn so much about yourself and the world around you. I teach this dealing directly with the functioning of our mind and that to learn efficiently you will need to have an understanding of how the brain works, and then you will be able to learn the technique of playing with great ease.

Due to my interest and maybe my addiction to music I have begun to understand how music changes the state of consciousness of the listener and the player and how our ancient forebears used it for ceremonial use. This really came home to me when I was in South America listening to the icaros of the shaman and how it ramped up their work; this introduced me to the notion that great musicians particularly from roots styles of music have that ability to change states of mind.

I was playing through some old blues numbers by Muddy Waters and you can see that this man who Eric Clapton called ‘Buddha’ could play one riff for several minutes and sing a song that would drive an audience into a frenzy (Mannish Boy) or sing a song about the magical charms that he had and how he was destined to be a great man (Hoochie Coochie Man). This is easily found in all other musical forms, Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer in Reggae, Jimi Hendrix in rock music, Elvis Presley in Rock and Roll and John Lennon in Pop music, where the musician would take you on a journey to a different place which you could say was 'otherworldly'.

What is interesting for me is that when you see what really works on a deep level in one sort of music you will recognise it in other forms of music and then in other places, such as sport, business, human relationships because music is a reflection of human consciousness.

As Musashi says if you polish your Way, you will understand all others; not one of them will be misunderstood.

Vic

 Play in a rock band for three days learn it's secrets

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Every part mixes with the whole.

‘Every part mixes to the whole, remove the lungs, liver and pancreas, whether or not you have a brain becomes irrelevant, remove the plants, the forests, the waters, whether or not you have scientists or opposable thumbs becomes irrelevant.’ Stephen Harrod Buhner

I find this quote just as relevant to do with music, education or music performance, the fact that the arts are crucial to the well-being of the society seems obvious to an artist however I do not think it is obvious in this society as a whole.

Societies driven by the greed of a few people within and the idea that business and the academic pursuit of knowledge in order to create wealth beyond everything else to the exclusion of the arts does very little to benefit society in the long term; it is killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

As musicians we need to tell a story instead of just looking at music as some sort of industrial process, we need to get to the heart and soul of what music really is, we should be telling the story of people-kind in such a way that integrates music back into its landscape.

We cannot operate in a vacuum whether we are teaching or playing as it does not give what we do any meaning and then it just becomes another job which kills the very reason why we became involved in the first place.

Make your music and the music of those that you inspire to have meaning and let the surroundings in which the music is set feed what you do first then let the money come from that, it is more rewarding and sustainable in the long term.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of learning the art of playing in a band.

Gentrification of Lewes East Sussex

The artists residents and workers at the Phoenix Industrial estate have been battling to keep the development somewhere that the community could remain as the creative hub of the community of Lewes unfortunately the area will be gentrified so that a few people can get their hands on the money.. They put it better than me so for this week’s article I will pass over to Lewes Phoenix Rising ……..

Bitterly disappointing decision from the South Downs National Park Authority yesterday - which was more focused on recording the activity on the Phoenix for posterity than trying to nurture it for the future. Faced with a planning committee that was highly uncritical of the proposed plan and spent more time worrying about giving Willey's Bridge (which isn't even in the application area!) a lick of paint than the loss of facilities used by 1,000s of young people - and was more concerned with saving two windows from the Ironworks than the businesses within them.

Committee members repeatedly voiced "sympathy" for the livelihoods that will be displaced and admiration for the many activities that go on at the Phoenix and hope that businesses can find space "elsewhere".

We call on the SDNP and LDC to make sure that ACTION IS TAKEN to keep creative and manufacturing businesses and social enterprises within and thriving in Lewes - recognising that an industrial park on the outskirts of town with large corporate rents isn't the answer.

Offering makers and artists an opportunity to paint heritage murals in the underground carpark or contribute to the manufacture of street furniture of the new development (especially when they no longer have anywhere to make it!) - is at best crass - and at worst indicative of a National Park hell bent on turning Lewes from a working town into a museum town.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

The language of the notes

Many of the great musicians of the past were illiterate and obviously not being able to the read and write they were not going to be reading music either therefore their musical learning came from listening to other people play and working things from recording. They also didn’t really have any significant understanding of scales and chords for the most part sand therefore understood music as if they were phrases spoken by famous musician so for instance a line that Louis Armstrong played would have been referred to as something that Louis said.

I once heard the quote by Albert King referring to Jimi Hendrix in which Albert said, ‘Jimi Hendrix plays my blues and he should go and play his own’, at the time I found this a rather ridiculous remark but in hindsight he was referring to something from a completely different paradigm of musical thinking than my with a different understanding of how music was formed. Indeed as Albert King was one of the great sources of inspiration to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and many others it was quite true that these people were playing his blues as saying it with his ‘words’.

What is significant here is that we understand these great players were so driven by what they heard and not what they intellectualised; they understood music as a language form which if we can get back to that way of thinking would help our playing to be more musical and not so scale orientated.

  Just express words and rhythms through the notes that you play and by developing ideas of others remembering that these are truly phrases of a language; this is a great way for children to learn to play.

www.bluescampuk.co.uk    Three days of learning to play music in a band. The music summer school  

Children of the world unite and play the guitar

There is a discouraging attitude from government being made towards the arts., this is coming from ministers within government who should know better. This behaviour should stop because the country has always been excellent at producing music and the arts which is on display to the whole world bringing in massive amounts of money but also contributing to the country’s soft power. It is way that the quality arts are very beneficial to the UK and may in some way lead to a more peaceful perspective of us from outside that is of importance but in a subtle way.

It is true that the arts often benefit greatly from difficult circumstances within society; think back to the drama and music of the post war period leading to the 1960’s and beyond each troubled era leading to great innovation in British artistic output. However what worries me is the damage that is caused by people in power making remarks that are disparaging, these are subtle and subliminal and they have a bullying tone of the nanny state.

What seems very evident to me in my teaching and training work is that artistic people require self-expression, if these things are not fulfilled in their lives it can lead to depression and unhappiness and therefore for many people the full and thorough use of arts in their life is absolutely essential in making them happy. The idea of someone becoming scientific irrespective of their inclination or whatever it is that the government is trying to do is quite frankly absurd; so pick up your instrument and play and don’t get fooled again.

Vic

 

www.bluescamp.co.uk three days of playing in a band at whatever level you are we will take you further

 

 

 

 

 

What makes a good player a great player?

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

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.

http://www.realjunkfoodbrighton.co.uk/

Vic

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  Learn to play in a band over three days