The received wisdom is wrong and expensive.

The received wisdom states that to be a good musician you need go to Music College, learning what someone tells you is right. Learn what others do in such a way that you sound like them. In the past that is not how the great players learned, they did refer to other players by studying recordings and working it out for themselves, and that is an important difference.

If you work music out from a recording, you often get it slightly wrong and in that way one starts to sound like yourself, and not like somebody else. Think of Jimi Hendrix, he was a consummate guitar player who took from all styles and other peoples playing, however, when Hendrix played an idea taken from someone it always sounded like Jimi.

Now I’m not saying that a modern approach doesn’t work technically, but there is an unintended consequence to the way that we learned in the past, we do not make the type of mistakes that create our personality within the music if we learn by rote.

Our education system has created a clone factory that might be fine if you want to play in the tribute band, playing exactly like Jimmy Page or Steve Vai, but the drawback to this is these people still exist and therefore you are only a copy, and like any impersonator you can never be better than the original. If you take their ideas and deconstruct them, then reassemble you are able, with your own skills, abilities and personality, to create something that is for want of a better word, unique!

Teaching within a framework of a lesson plan is restricting and uncreative.

It is difficult to teach creativity because it’s so hard to define, whereas teaching something note for note is easy to measure and therefore mark. So the system itself causes a distortion in our approach, and this is as true for other subjects as it is for music.

Saying to a bunch of musicians ‘I’m going to give you five little tricks and tips which will transform the way you play and it will only take me half an hour’ doesn’t make for a good two year college course, and would be almost impossible to mark. However, from a transformative point of view that is the quickest route and the most effective way of teaching.

I have said it is important to have lessons BUT

My last point is the real killer, many music tutors think that teaching is showing a pupil what they (the teacher) can do, it isn’t, it’s finding out where the student is on their journey and helping them to achieve their potential. This I think is the mark of really good teaching, and you can see this in your own work if you are producing different types of musical personalities from your pupils.

If you find that your pupils are becoming bass players, guitarists, singers, songwriters, actors or music therapists you are a good teacher. All of these people are expressing their desires and their abilities and not trying to copy yours; you have no control over what they become.

Finally, how much is a college course now? £10K per year? What you need is time to practice and people to play along with and then the contacts………….

Vic