The Grammar School Effect

Within the schools there is something that I call the ‘grammar school effect’ because it is more prevalent there, that children who are being educated seem to lose the ability to dream, having their heads crammed with facts and figures. The one thing that you need to do as an artist is to be able to dream and imagine the impossible. The grammar school system does not lend itself to that.

I was talking to a drummer friend of mine who teaches at a grammar school in Kent and he was saying that when you ask a pupil what their dream is they don’t seem to have one they just lost the capacity to have a fantasy or dream that drives them to doing something musical. He cited the pressure that they are under academically for the problem and I agree that the children in the grammar school education are so pressurised academically that learning a musical instrument is so far down the ladder of needs.

What is so incredible is that we know the value of music, singing and the arts and yet even with all the scientific psychological research it is being ignored in education and the arts are being pushed outside the curriculum.

It seems to be almost the kiss of death for children to pass the 11+ when it comes to something like music or art even politicians comment that people need to spend more time on their science and maths we will look back on this and realise that it is a disaster to think like that.

What needs to happen for us as teachers is to promote the beneficial effects of music to the well-being of people I would add to this that the ability of people to think is broadened with the aspect of music and art and this is something we need in the economy in the years to come.

It is not even that we do not have great success with arts in this country because we do. British artistic establishments and the music industry are a very bankable asset and they add to the country’s soft power however for music and arts to be undervalued in the society is a scandal but again it is another example of the pathetic nature of politics and its involvement in education.

As always the politicians will never be held responsible for this like many other things that they have done over the last few years. It is your job to do something about it in whatever way you can.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  join the fun, music, song writing and meeting other musicians
 

Getting involved

Probably the best way of getting involved in music is by jamming with other people and although practice at home is good being a bedroom guitar player is not the best way to learn.

The old jazz musicians learnt their trade by hanging out with other players learning the standards and learning the types of phrases that their idols would play. Some great stories of people hanging out with musicians like Art Tatum and just watching close at hand what the maestro do and then going away and emulating it somewhere else.

Certainly the old blues and rock players did the same thing as well as working things out from recordings, and virtually all of the rock and roll guitarists got involved playing standards of the day at dances or at the numerous hops around America.

However what happens today is not so much of this thing going out and gigging but sitting in front of a computer screen watching people on YouTube. This does not teach you the inner language and dialogue that happens between musicians in the band. The only way to learn this is to go out and play and you should do this anywhere you can.

I started playing just before the advent of punk, there were plenty of places to play, village halls pubs etc. and we put on our own gigs they were not particularly good but they were great fun because we were young we had an audience of our peers.

What has taken over from this grassroots practical way of becoming a jobbing musician is this idea of going to college to learn the trade. Do not go to college and get yourself into debt to become a rock musician! That is quite frankly now ridiculous because of the cost. For the sort of money you are putting out you could launch a tour with the rock band and although I am not suggesting you do this you can see how far a debt of £30,000 could go.

If your university or college training is being paid by somebody else then all well and good but if it is actually going to be your debt learn what you can as cheaply as you can and build your contacts from the grassroots up.

So if you are starting out make sure you got time to practice at home but most of all play and have fun with others and be encouraged by the fact that the greatest bands of all time from the Beatles to the stones to Led Zeppelin to the Foo Fighters and Nirvana all did what you are about to do jam with their mates and got out playing.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music which is nearly sold out for next year

Intolerant minorities drive change

The above quote comes from Nasim Teleb and something that he noticed in America regarding food and labelling. His observation was that although the Jewish population was only a small percentage it was actually more cost efficient to make something accessible to a small minority than not.

He went on to state that this might be a recurring theme historically, this would explain the rise religions such as Christianity even within something as powerful as the Roman Empire. He postulates that the intolerant minority make it difficult for people to ignore them and therefore it would be easier to include these people than not. Obviously he goes into great detail historically to back this claim.

This could explain several interesting revolutions that occur in history including Bolshevism in Russian and Maoist China which was accomplished by very few people against vast odds. When we look at various structures within society we can see these minorities affect the way we do things take for instance flying. Because of a very small number of potential terrorists we all have to subject ourselves to the rigours of the suspects in order for us to catch a flight.

Education works in very similar way often regarding the to the ideas of a few people who  have influenced and directed education  for the last hundred to 200 years and possibly even earlier. In America the core idea of education emanates from one man.

As artists, teachers and performers we need to look at this as a possible way of influencing the direction of music and anything else that you try using music as a tool. Just being bloody-minded about what you’re doing can actually reap rewards well above the norm.

You might like to try some ideas if you work within an education establishment, try doing things your way in such a way that it would be easier for you to be left alone to get on with it than you to conform to the patterns laid down by others.

Think what this could mean in your musical life, be different ……………

Worth a try

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  rock out for three days, booking for next years summer camp.

The West has immersed itself in technique and the mechanics of things in nearly every area of art and learning and lost something very precious in the process.  Our lives are now surrounded by that mechanicalism. Our houses, our clothes, our art and our science all reflect it, more so every year and the need for Prozac increases right along with it. People just don’t feel well anymore.  – Stephen Harrod Buhner

Music is in the feeling of things and in the abstractness of the unconscious. We have confused the theory and the technique for the art itself.

Did you know that the number of mental illnesses that are listed have increased massively in the last 50 years along with treatments for them?  Weird eh?  Someone is making money straight away from the new diagnosis and listing, we rarely have a mental illness with no treatment. The linking of money with illness is one of the worse ideas that we have created in a capitalist society, great for business, bad for cure. The problem is the catch 22 syndrome that happens, take this pill and then you need this to stop the nausea and this one to protect the liver and so on.

The something that is precious is that art is flawed it goes wrong but in that something is created that has a life of its own. You did not create it, it created itself and therefore the work is art it has life and it came through you, you as a channel and conduit for the manifestation of the work.

With this in mind can we claim royalties for this? Or maybe we can do something different and make the creation of the song free but let the song do something for us in return for its birth. I am very serious about this because in the book by Charles Eisenstein. Sacred Economics the idea of protecting copyright and the charging for interest on loans are some of the reasons why we are in such a mess. I suggest you read the book as it is a very compelling argument and I think that free music could make amazing things happen but more of that another time.

For now create something and let it be its own boss, it maybe your baby but it is its own life but make it work for you and let something develop using that piece of music maybe let others contribute to it, use it and pass the word around about it.

This could be massively powerful form of publicity worth more than you would make from it by conventional means.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk Rock Summer school … check it out for next year 

Between Tigers

Hanging onto a cliff a cliff face, a tiger above him and more tigers below, the man feels the vine that he is holding onto begin to give way, its roots pulling out of the cliff. There is nothing he can do, but then he notices a beautiful ripe strawberry growing to the side. He reaches over and plucks it. And it is delicious. – The Buddha

Have you ever sabotaged your own success? Maybe you didn’t take the risk that would have given you the opportunity to do something different because it was too frightening or just too uncomfortable? It is only when we get into a situation which is so difficult that we actually value what is presented in that moment. I know from my own life I have turned down the possibility of doing something extraordinary. In one of those instances I went against my better judgement because somebody who I thought would know better told me it wouldn’t work.

At the time I was in a band the son of Roger Moore, Geoffrey had a good voice and the band was really good but this was in the time when the record companies were looking for duos similar to the Pet Shop Boys and not a nine piece rock band.

I thought that we should have taken the band out and gigged, pulling in all the advertising that we could muster which would have been easy because of the celebrity cache of our lead singer. By creating a momentum which could have built upon we could have bootstrapped our way up but I was persuaded that it would not work. Looking back at it I missed a great opportunity.

Take the approach that life is like being sandwiched between two sets of tigers and when it presents you with the beautiful ripe strawberry you need to grasp it and savour it. These events will not change the inevitable but it will make life more wonderful. This brings me to another possibility of this story that any opportunity to live needs to be grasped and sometimes this will mean ignoring the calamity of life in order to  spend  time doing things that are seemingly trivial but nevertheless beautiful like playing a musical instrument.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days at the amazing rock summer school; bookings for next year now being taken

BB King taught me to play the guitar

When the hugely influential guitarist BB King died, there passed an era that will never return in our memory or that of our children or grandchildren.

So many of the events in music are unique such as the arrival of the blues boom in England bands such as the Stones, Animals and the Beatles re exporting the music back to the USA, the uniqueness was not the music but the environment that fostered it coming out of segregation in America the declining British Empire and the aftershocks of war and then the children of the war casting something different in the world.

These events will only happen when comparable scenarios happen in the world. It seems that the context required for new musical innovation has to come out some form of poverty whether that is financial or cultural or even political. The fact many of the innovators in British music came from places that will close to ports is no coincidence. In my conversation with Chas Hodges (of Chas and Dave) on my YouTube site Chas explains how you needed to know someone who was in the merchant navy to be able to get access to recordings from America.

I was lucky because my brother was in the merchant navy and that gave me access to music from America which influenced my musical tastes as a very young boy, however I was lucky that when I was learning to play it was possible to have those albums on import by visiting record shops such as Dobells London to get jazz and blues recordings.

It still meant we had to learn off the record either because the music books did not exist or in the case of the Beatles Complete were completely inaccurate or just misleading. In fact the book should have been renamed the Beatles Complete Rubbish.

Chas also made the comment that on tour with Jerry Lee Lewis as his bass player he learnt to play the piano by watching Jerry Lee each night. I could say exactly the same about working note for note through the guitar solos of BB King, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Rory Gallagher.

I believe that working through the recordings puts the music into the context that the solos are set and therefore we get closer to the original magic of a great guitar player than by staring at a book.

Choose your favourite guitar player and let them teach you how to play.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music magic, booking now for next year

Seekers of patterns

We are pattern seekers, we see patterns in all things, our scientists find them, our thinkers find them, our philosophers unravel them, and our mathematicians decode them.

However they are all being processed through the human mind, maybe they do not exist as we believe they do, the very act of thinking makes them exist and even the rationale of science does not escape this trap. 

With music we have created scales, chords and timings that are the patterns that we seek however they are all about familiarity and they seem to be real because we have heard them before and that familiarity makes them real as if they are some natural law.

Maybe they do not exist on their own only through the prism of our consciousness in other words we imagine them. In fact the epistemology of the word ‘image’ is telling; because the word image is from the same root that creates the word ‘magic’ and ‘magus’ or ‘magi’. In this era of the iPad and iPhone look again at the word image. We have literally created something or a range of things that have been in our conscious for many years marked by language in fact we have cast a spell and it is in the spelling.

Try this; play something that is familiar, a tune that is famous like Summertime for instance then start to change the notes of the melody but keep to the rhythms of the original tune, after a short while this will be completely acceptable, then include notes that are outside the scale and after a while these will seem acceptable as well, that is how jazz works.

Nothing is true, everything is possible. 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of great rock music and learning from the experts

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