The daily grind

I am a shaman, come in guise of a comic, in order to heal perception by using stories and jokes, and always the voice of reason…..

If comedy is an escape from anything it is an escape from illusions. The comic, by using the voice of reason, reminds us of our True Reality, and in that moment of recognition, we laugh, and the reality of the daily grind is shown for what it really is – unreal – a joke. - Bill Hicks

Back in the 1960’s music was a force for change and it was again in the 1970’s with Punk and Two Tone. Today it seems that most people are rather tranced-out and things seem to be going along with no one seeing what is happening. More and more things are being taken away from ordinary people and being placed in the hands of big business and the authorities.

Take schooling for instance; they are now more like businesses than places to learn, with some schools running several others like some form of corporate takeover. This is bloody ridiculous but no one seems to think it is, surely schooling has some aspect of locality to it so how can a school from a different area take over and know the aspects of that school.

It seems that any comment made that would have been fine down the pub in a matter of fact way now being delivered on the internet can result in the authorities moving in, well I am suspicious of them as well. I have NEVER believed in the well-meaning nature of the police or the ruling class and this is from a white guy; I just wonder how I would have felt if I was black and I had lived in Brixton in my early years.

I think that music and humour still has and maybe has even more a role a play to prick the bubble of pomposity of the authorities of this country, the USA and Europe as they are not only manipulating and corrupt but also inept.

So Bill as in all things the true nature of things shows itself in time and the daily grind is still grinding on.

Vic

 

RGT Electric Guitar Exams - Grade 3, Grade 4 & Grade 5

After the next election the taxes will go up whoever gets in, no matter what they say when they are trying to get your vote.

So many of the structures of society such as politics and government, health and the education system is based on an industrial model; this model is outmoded and we need to rethink, however the situation is like the guy who driving his car through Cornwall asks a farmer how to get the Midlands to which the farmer answers, ‘Best not to start from here’.  We have trapped ourselves into a system that is expensive and dysfunctional and part of the problem is that within the political arena, the country is being governed by people that really are out of touch and therefore many of the dictates that are handed down from on high are misjudged and in many cases are divisive. How can the political classes many of whom have had an elitist education understand, maybe because they are experts! Certainly not experts in scratching a living and making ends meet.

No one likes to pay taxes and Benjamin Franklin said that the only fair and successful way to run a taxation system was to run a lottery. But our taxes are being used to prop up the banks and the armed forces in an attempt to carry on punching above our weight on the world stage, maybe it is time to step back and not get so involved, not so interesting to the politician who wants to make their mark in the sands of history. They need to remember they are sands not rocks

Maybe there is a song in this.

Vic

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Change the context, change reality.

Language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in language but is actually produced by language. – Terence McKenna.

Our world is set in a contextual reference and this is a way of not only exploring ‘reality’ it is also a way of trapping us in a hypnotic state within a ‘reality’.

Music expresses this brilliantly where the context of the music will set the parameters of what is possible with the music such as what sounds correct in classical and what then sounds possible in blues and Jazz and so on. What is impossible in one form of music is possible in another by the change of the parameters of the context. In certain forms of music every note is possible whereas in other forms they would sound wrong.

This is true with ‘reality’, change the context then things become acceptable and also not only possible but the norm; war for instance makes death and destruction the norm which they is not in peace.

Listen to the speeches of leaders leading up to war and see how language changes the context that people are living in preparing them for a different reality.

If you think this is not the thing that is consistently happening by the powers that be think again listen very carefully to the news and think about what they are telling you and ask yourself two questions; Why this and why now?

Now I have set the mood now here is how to change this go and listen to the great shape shifters of consciousness in music, Bob Marley and John Lennon. Music has REAL power let us use it.

Vic

 

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Agents and making money from metal hopefuls.

For me doing a concert is a form of advertising and therefore I am not a wholly dependent upon playing to earn a living. I have always found that the publicity attracted by playing can be far more valuable than the actual amount of money that you will earn from doing them so therefore I tend to do fewer but larger gigs and try to do as much advertising to maximise my time.

I have recently become aware of the amount of money some young players are paying ‘agents’ to get them gigs it seems particularly rife in the Heavy Metal scene. It costs somewhere in the region of £150 a month for the band for gigs in this country and then extra for gigs abroad where these so called tours are costing each member of a band a grand to do the tour of Europe for a week. What a con this is. These high profile gigs at prestigious venues are nothing of the sort; it is the same old story of the A and R men being in the audience, what rubbish!

They could have done this themselves and spent the money on promotional work but it takes years of experience to see through this patter. It is the same old thing; get out there and play, promote yourself get your name about, create a fan base, do not expect someone to do it for you.

It seems that even when people go to college they still fall into this trap, perhaps the courses should cover some of the aspects of what to watch out for.

Vic

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Something Missing?

‘To the world that modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential.  It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something.  It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality, and with natural human experience.  It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt that the source of integration and meaning.  It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia.  Man as observer is becoming alienated from himself as a being.  Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimensional of reality.  And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only guy mention, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became.  Today for instance we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems that they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.  The same is true of nature and ourselves.  The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structure and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as their unique self’.  Vaclav Havel the first President of the Czech Republic.

 

Reductionist thinking reduces us to a closed mind in any area of endeavour remember the mind is like a parachute it works best when it is open. This seems to be lost on the education system not just here but in most countries; what we need now is diversity and flexibility of thinking.

Vic

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  Play in a rock band for three days

 

All people are musical it is just the way that music is taught that is the problem.

I was listening to Hugh Laurie on the radio a few days ago on Desert Island discs and he made the statement that he had a number of piano lessons as a kid but gave up having the lessons and carried on learning by himself.
He is a good amateur player and I suppose that now you could say he is a good professional as he has two best-selling albums out but the point that he went on to say was that when his children had lessons the way that music was taught was still as bad.
I see lots of music teaching and because of the way that schools function and I would in this respect point the finger at independent  and grammar schools in particular, the focus on the classical style puts most children off learning an instrument altogether.
For me learning classical music was like doing a Shakespeare play whereas playing contempory music such as rock, blues and jazz was like having a chat and learning to become fluent in the language  and carrying that analogy further most  do not like Shakespeare they would rather have a chat with their mates.
So pick and an instrument and start talking through it.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

three days playing in a rock band

Lightly does it.

There is a lot of talk about bees and the falling numbers of butterflies and general degradation of wild life and many of us wring our hands and say that we support conservation BUT we do nothing about it.
What is needed, and this is not just my opinion, is that people should do nothing! Just leave their gardens uncut and let the wild flowers take over and then the flowers needed for the insect life would return and the biodiversity would rebalance. HOWEVER we would incur the wrath of …. the neighbours.
Where I live, the profusion of wild flowers if left is mind boggling but the people who live in the villages are often fighting a war with the weeds and the insects that although critical to the eco system are not the ones liked by the villagers. Weeds, gnats, wasps, snakes, flies and mice are essential food for the birds bats and other hunters however if they poison everything in sight then we are going to destroy what we want; such is human stupidity.
We are now aware that saving one species requires the saving of many others and in the final analysis if we lose the lower layers of the food chain the top layers will collapse, hello that is us!
For me, my interests in music come from a deeper interest in life in general it is where I get my inspiration and this is what I encourage others to do; to find theirs. Apart from the Bluescampuk courses where people are taught the tricks of the trade so that they can play and write songs I also do more abstract courses in woodlands where we go back to older forms of music and its inspiration; that of nature both in the natural word and the esoteric because for our ancestors nature was divine. For them the trees and plants were sentient beings and along with the animal spirits they could be communicated with and used as allies, and for this they would use music.
This sounds to the modern ear rather crazy but the basic plot of altered realities are the biggest sellers in movie and song so there is still a desire for that way of thinking even if it is just a creative dream.
Many musicians and artists become passionate about conservation but I am suggesting that we can go better than that we can be revisionists’ getting back some of what we have lost but to do this we need to change our minds. I think that we are doing this in many ways and if you look back over the past 100 years many things have got better. I am not suggesting that we need to go back to mud huts but we need to use our humanness and our technology to fit back into nature because there really is no way we can carry on like this and change when it comes will be very fast. We have already seen this with regard to the collapse of the banking sector, it was not a slow thing it was almost overnight.
Again I am giving the general attitude a kicking as I often do, normally it is education but I would also say that we have a mind-set that the experts of got it under control. Well they had experts organising the banks, we have experts in the government and experts in the health sector so I think I will leave with two quotes, one from a sage and one from an Emperor.
Napoleon first; someone was put up for promotion to Marshall because he was such an expert in tactics and leadership. Napoleon was unimpressed by how much of an expert this gentleman was, what he wanted to know was ‘Is he lucky’. So much for logic!
The Taoist sage Lao Tzu said that people should be governed as you would cook a small fish; lightly. This may be true for gardening as well.
Vic
 
 
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One word of caution

‘My one word of caution is that a cow chewing contentedly in a field, once you have looked over the wall and seen what is out there, chewing the same old grass never seems quite so satisfying again.’ – Nigel Twinn

At one of the schools in which I teach they have introduced a scheme through the pupil premium where the pupils can have music lessons to develop their self-esteem. I am teaching either guitar or singing and there is also a drum teacher.

This seems to be an enlightened idea and I know that if they are able to acquire a skill that means they achieve something, maybe performing or passing a grade they will have something different and positive in their school lives which quite honestly they are not getting at the moment.

Over the years that I have taught I have often heard from past pupils that music has been something very special and it has really changed the way they view the world. For some they realised that the teachers at school who told them that they were spending too long on music and should be working on their science had got it wrong. In one case this was viewed from the stage of the Hollywood bowl and he reflected that the best thing he ever did was to stop doing science.

I have also a number of pupils who would say that music has become a religion or certainly a spiritual experience which informs them about life on a deep level. I spend a lot of time listening to great musicians and I would say that this is something that figures significantly for many deepening their experience and adding something that ordinary life does not give them

So maybe they need to heed the warning that music will change one’s life in ways that you cannot see in this moment making you realise that you are special so special that you are a musician.

Vic

 

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Play like you don’t know. - Miles Davis

This is a story that Santana tells about Miles talking with Eric Clapton, for me it gives us an insight into the workings of the mind of a genius. We have gone so far down the road of the clever clogs where we anal-ise the hell out of everything that we end up with a sterile piece of sound. There is a joke about the similarity between analysing a joke and dissecting a frog to see how it works; the result, you end up with a dead frog.

Miles came to music from a line that said it is not the technique or the knowledge that mattered it is the feeling, as he would of said playing ‘from the heart not the head’. But is that not true of everything, education, medicine, relationships, politics? We have become too clever by half, lots of things can be a lot simpler and far more effective and this is so true for the art of music making.

So sit down and listen to some Muddy Waters and feel what is going on because it sure damn well isn’t in the number of notes or the complexity of the scales and chords.

Vic

 

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Be lazy like a fox’. Linus Torvalds

This is similar in many ways to ‘Do not reinvent the wheel’ the solutions are out there and some have been used over and over again throughout history so look for the answer that is staring you in the face. Sometimes this answer is to be found in someone that you know you just need to ask around.

I have found that many people that I teach have skills that I need, whether that is fixing a computer, sorting out software problems, advice on building websites, finding somewhere to live, advice on gardening or fixing the car, but in all of these cases I would not have known unless I asked and also suggested swapped lessons for their time and knowledge.

I have got the point that I am quite lazy and I always look for the simple ways to deal with problems which are often cheaper, this has led me to looking into recycling and what is now termed upcycling. This is something that can be used for electric guitars, taking knackered instruments and rebuilding them incorporating parts of other guitars or ‘junk’ like old vinyl LPs for scratch plates, or making plectrums from old credit cards.

We need to consider that people in the past were as clever and in many ways cleverer than we are today, some experiments suggest that the Victorians had higher IQ’s than we do so look back to see the solutions that previous generations adopted for solutions as their main resource was ideas.   

Vic

Focus on what you want not on what you do not

Listen to the news, there is always a focus and analysis on what we do not like, want or desire and virtually nothing on want we really value or wish for. We give this negative aspect our added attention and we mull over this and run it over and over until it becomes a habit. The glass becomes half empty in fact you are feeling that someone else is about to steal it or it is full of so many chemicals that it is not safe to drink.

If we turn these things around life can be so much better, we do not focus on the bad we focus on the things that we want, this means that we start to make more interesting choices and when life gives us lemons we make lemonade. For us as teachers we look not at the exam nerves or performance anxiety but we look at the opportunity to play to someone that we have not seen before and enjoy the feeling of making music.

Great art is often forged in visiting dark places but better to do this as an observer; there is a point where we can put some sort of emotional charge into what we focus on and it becomes part of our belief system but if you are the actor then you can distance yourself from the emotional feelings. I have met a number of people who have become rather screwed up by what they do but not every actor that plays an evil character becomes a murderer! However there are some roles in the theatre which are infamous for their negative impact on the psyche of the actor like the role of Lady Macbeth or one of the witches.

By focusing on what you want and not on what you do not want we can make sure that your pupils believe in their ability to learn and develop and that all things are possible and in that way they will achieve great things.

Vic

 

So let us use our limitations to be creative.

‘Then one day in 1965, he came by my house to say goodbye before leaving for Hong Kong where he said he intended to become the biggest star in films. “You remember our talk about limitations?” he asked “well, I'm limited by my size and difficultly in English and the fact that I am Chinese, and there never has been a big Chinese star in America films. But I have spent the last three years studying movies and I think that the time is ripe for a good martial arts film - and I am the best qualified to star in it. My capabilities exceed my limitations”.

This was a small man whose right leg was an inch shorter than his left and was seriously short sighted which for a martial artist was rather a handicap but got over this by wearing contact lenses which in the 1960's where not the most comfortable!

The man in question was Bruce Lee and this story comes from Joe Hyams who wrote a book called ‘Zen in the martial arts’.

Bruce Lee made a point of saying that because he was sort sighted he trained first in close quarter Wu Shu and then when he got contact lenses learnt to fight from a distance. For his short leg he formulated and perfected a stance which led to his powerful kicking technique.

The history of achievement is full of people that started with a disadvantage and because of their determination to be as good as others the skills that they developed from their disability meant they surpassed their rivals.

For me the great example is that of Django Reinhardt probably the greatest jazz guitarist of all time. Django an illiterate gypsy was so brilliant  that after hearing a piece of Bach once could play it back on the guitar; his playing was truly amazing but Django only had two fully functional fingers on his fretboard hand so the licks that he played that seem impossible anyway were played by someone with a crippled hand.

So let us use our limitations to be creative.

 

Vic

 

Its a pentatonic scale Jim, but not as we know it.

A few years ago I was at a guitar show in London doing a number of sessions for the RGT about the guitar exams and in one of the breaks I was hanging around the stalls looking at the guitars. The noise at these shows is incredible with hundreds of people playing on the instruments and what you hear is a sort of pentatonic hell where the twiddling fingers of young males are shredding their way to some chaotic frenzy.

I reflected that they were using the same scale as used by Hendrix, Clapton and just about every other rock guitarist yet none of them sounded that good because quite simply just as the meaning of language is more than just the words the meaning of music is more than just the notes.

The great blues players were able to get great music from one chord and a few notes and we miss that in the race to complexity and therefore going back to the roots players for any form of music be it the roots of gospel, soul, reggae, African township or folk will give you an insight into what really works in the musical form.

I have four years of guitar magazines that are unread sitting in the teaching room with loads of technical stuff in them, however  going back to simple songs and solos has given me fresh insights into the things that got me interested in the first place and helped to add something to the music that I do now.

I think it is a very valuable life lesson.

Vic

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In the house of lovers, the music never stops, the walls are made of songs and the floor dances.- Rumi

That is a great house to live in!

We create our immediate world by how we think. This became very clear to me over the years because one’s mind set filters and creates the choices that we make.  If we are full of unhappiness our minds find those things for us as the genie says,’ yes master your wish is my command’ and we conjure something to fulfil our wishes of despair.

I believe it is about choices that we make based on our programming and that is why I think we need to be careful not to just go with the status quo. History proves that the status quo is often seriously lacking in common sense for one thing.

I have lived long enough to have lost a number of significant people in my life and I have realised that when you look back there are many things that were unsaid that should have been and if I had been truly in the moment I would have said how I happy I was to those close to me. Now I make a point of saying it because in my experience people are often taken by surprise and it makes their day better.

One of my joys is playing music with others and I often say how much I enjoy their playing and again they are often surprised because they do not hear that.

The secret of music is that it travels with you in your body and therefore even if you are alone it is your companion, the Greeks were right to say that the Muses brought music to you and that you could call on them to create and share your energy with them as long as you were generous in spirit to others. I do not share the modern idea that music is a set of rules; it is like saying that someone is a good carpenter because he has good tools, the tools help him but they are not the reason that he is a good carpenter. The rules of music help us but what is important is the love you put into it and it is a great way to build a house, with or without a carpenter.

Vic

 

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Music is a language that expresses emotion and transfers that feeling to the listener.

When we listen to language we hear the words and then express those words in ways that we are personally programmed to understand them. This is fraught with problems, when we say something the meaning that we connect to the words can often be lost in translation with the words meaning something else to the listener. Take for instance a word like ‘dog’ this will mean something to a dog lover and something emotionally different to someone with a fear of dogs.

Words take on different meanings with the introduction of tonality and emphasis. Language is unreliable just listen to a politician and notice how they ‘answer’ a question. When we think of the word myth we often interpret that word as lie or fairy tale but myth was something much deeper than that.

Myth contains within the story truths hidden in the text using deep structure and metaphor therefore within the tale there is a truth that connects with the unconscious. It is possible to view many ancient stories in this way bringing new meaning to them such as the Arabian Nights and the stories of the Genie being an instruction manual of the mind and how to reprogram your thoughts. It is the same with language, that much is going on in the deep structure of the communication which the great orators in the past understood.  

Music has the same aspect of carrying emotional messages through the song both in the sound and the lyric much of this is locked into your memories of when you heard that music originally but much of this is about deeper things in the sound.

There seems very little of this being passed on to pupils when they learn, particularly in classical music. Only much later does the idea of the musical energy seem to be introduced, if at all, shame it seems to be what music is all about.

Vic

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Smell the Music

Playing on a Saturday night in a small bar in Chelmsford in Essex, no rehearsal just a bunch of numbers on a sheet, great stuff!  Some of these songs I have not played for thirty years and what is amazing is how easily they come back.

Memory is incredible; you just need to hit the right buttons and then out it comes. There are certain triggers that work amazingly well for creating memory recall, one of these is smell. Have you ever had a time that you smelt something and it took you to a memory that was so real that it felt like time travel?  I have, it was the smell of Bunsen burners and it took me back to the chemistry room at school to the point that I was standing in the school science room, quite extraordinary.

When learning music the more that you layer memory with sensory information the better, this may explain why the great players always look like they are totally involved  in the music; maybe that is their secret .

When learning or teaching have an internal film of the song that locks to the music and make it so real that you are standing in it and you can feel the atmosphere and the smells of the landscape make it more than real, this will help with the dynamics and deals with performance nerves. Just think of what the music makes you visualise and then use the pictures to relate to the music.

One of the problems that people often experience in playing is that they never play out as well as they do at home a bit like public speaking, we speak all the time but for some reason when we get up to speak in public we find it difficult, why? because we think about it and then all our programming goes out the window, but picturing and adding other senses to the music takes you to the same place wherever you are.

 

Vic

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‘Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I'll meet you there.’ Rumi

Rumi’s quote is the idea of being in a neutral space, a disassociated state which is a powerful place to create.

Every neutral space leads us to opportunity some good, some bad and even within that space there is a neutral space like a dream within a dream. The interesting aspect is that as soon as we ‘think’ we can polarise that space.

Rumi the great poet and the mystic was one of the minds able to transcend time and humanness to reach the depth of consciousness and paradoxically the heights of expression open to all but only found by a few. He was able to express in a few words deep meaning in the areas of thought and reality of mind.

Exploring this in teaching and music we need to look at what we think of as right or wrong and suspend judgement. If someone comes to you with dyslexia realise that this is an advantage to them becoming a great musician, also expressing that to them and their parents if they are children will create a positive vibe which will aide their learning. I have often found guitarists with dyslexia are great improvisers.

If someone comes to you as a bright intellectual person suspend judgement and it will help you to discover the things that hold them back from learning how to express themselves. This is the problem for many adults.

True learning is so deep that it often does not make sense on the surface just as the surface of the sea creates an illusion hiding the life forms living beneath it.

Vic

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‘Let us not look back in anger, not forward in fear, but around in awareness.’ James Thurber.

This quote could have easily been written by the great samurai warrior Musashi whose teaching was that the mind and the eyes should always stay the same; eyes open to all things and the mind relaxed but alert even in the heat of a battle.

For us many have never had to deal with life threatening situations but we are still wired up in the same way as our ancestors and therefore when small events happen we tend to over compensate for them.

The levels of stress that people experience not only cause problems with their health but also on a social front. In the past we would have experienced something very physical such as fight or flight that would have dissipated that stress, now we have to put up with Ofsted and other small problems without the ability to burn off the stress. (Maybe there is a business idea here of the ‘Ofsted inspector punch bag’ that could be a good seller).

I have looked at using aspects of human emotional energy in performance techniques such as using memories of sadness, anger and happiness and it is very powerful; it is often the missing ingredient that makes a reasonable performance outstanding. However to be the master of this one needs to be aware of what you are doing and although to take people into a trance one needs to go there first you need also to be aware and in control of that power by being disassociated from it rather like an actor.

Anger is like fire and it will burn out of control if not dealt with fully and fear stops all forward movement in life. So if you feared standing up in public maybe you should get out and visit an open mic event and step up to the microphone.

Vic

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The miracle is not to fly in the air or walk on water, but to walk on earth.

When working through ideas for music we often become drawn to the amazing and fantastical and maybe this is something that we tend to do in life generally. But looking deeper into the world of music we actually respond to those who connect with us in an emotional and not a cerebral way.

The great blues players, the great reggae musicians, the flamenco players and the world musicians know this deeply and when I say ‘know this’ I mean ‘know’ on an intuitive level. Because of our education system we are trained that everything should be in your ‘head’ and you have to be thinking, thinking and then thinking which stops us using the greatest gift that we have, the unconscious, and this operates at its best when we are in the flow or in the zone and strangely this happens when we are grounded.
I heard a quote once from a saxophone teacher from the US that said when you are improvising you should ‘think about the soles of your feet’ in other words stop the chatter in your head of which notes to play and focus your thoughts somewhere else.
What better way to put it that getting to the basics of being human may hold the answer to the questions of life which philosophers have pondered for ages but ironically the answer maybe not to think about it but feel it through your feet.
Vic