I want to play, but there’s no room …

I’m sitting in a coffee shop listening to music playing in the background.  Usually it sounds good, sometimes the mood is inappropriate, sometimes it hits dead on; I suppose what hits you as good depends upon your life condition at the moment.  I’ve been in more than a few coffee shops, many of them Starbucks, some of them not Starbucks.  I’ve never seen a band play at Starbucks, but sometimes I’ve been able to get a sense of the adrenaline rush that comes from hearing good LIVE music in a setting where it is worth being.  I loved going to the Hotel Café in Hollywood before it was ruined by the publicity Carson Daily brought to it; no matter I wasn’t in Hollywood when that day happened, and maybe if I move back “home” someday, the place will fit again. 

I have no place to play music at the moment; it’s winter, and the back seat of my car is a limited space.  Over the summer, I managed to play in the park nearly each morning, going through a routine of scales and chords and trying to get what I call “on top of the instrument”.  On top of the instrument means that the brain processes the notes and chords and the sound that is produced and projected at whatever speed you are playing.  In sports, it’s called “in the zone”; even when I was more a sports participant than a musician, I believed that it was possible to practice to the level where “in the zone” was a natural state of mind achieved through effort, repetition, and focus.  There were days when I was younger when I was able to hit a baseball from in the zone – I spent two whole seasons hitting near “.500”, but then I lost my ability to do that and turned to golf, where I learned how to think mechanically about body motion at a speed faster than the brain could tell the body while still thinking that the brain was telling the body.  Playing music is like that – it often is happening right in front of you at a speed you couldn’t really comprehend if you weren’t in a form of suspended mind body connection that is akin to muscle memory.  You’re really hearing a voice tell you about what your body has already done, but you perceive it as being simultaneous.  Hopefully, the audience will hear what you think you hear – as that is the test. 

That sound, that connection, that is the source of the adrenaline rush – for the listener & the player.  It’s worth a cup of coffee … and a place to play in a “music city” …    

Market Share

This morning I was reading about market share; the story started out talking about how Wal Mart had taken nearly a quarter of the market in the U.S. in one of the aspects of its business which was an expansion of its core business, retailing.  Immediately, I began to think about the Music Industry.  People say that the Industry is more open than it ever was before because of the Internet and the various ways to distribute music digitally.  Actually, I’m one of those people who believe that you can make your way in the music business without having to really work inside the industry corporations.  I believe it only to the extent of some severe limitations.  You can play the note, and maybe you can make a living from it, but the industry is going to be playing the chord, and somewhere you are going to intersect. 

Sometimes people who don’t want to get involved with the Corporate politics of the music industry bounce their way directly out to the non corporate industry path.  The trail they take isn’t taken because of money issues or opportunity issues or personality disagreements, it is taken because they just don’t like corporations and the idea of the system skimming from the artist.  That is a valid point of view, as far as it goes.  It is like a note in a larger sound.

Corporations in music do more than just publish music and skim profits.  There really is a whole industry of support structures and opportunity creation that exists within the various Corporate structures of the media and entertainment Corporations.  Many of the Corporate people don’t know much about music at all.  They know accounting and insurance and publicity, not music.  The development departments are structured to ensure that they develop artists who can produce product that sells consistently.  That is “one note” – make money is the goal.

The real problem in the way the music industry development professionals present themselves these days is twofold.  First, the development is aimed at the youth market – because it is assumed that once you’ve passed high school, you’ll never want to learn music well enough to publish.  Second, and this is the bigger issue, EVERYTHING the corporations support seems to turn out to be “pay to play”.  Pay to play is a huckster method of getting money up front for a service that might or might not be completed.

I know from personal experience that the music industry is almost exclusively a “closed shop” operation.  There are a few “open mic” nights and “send us your tape” indies, but when it comes down to developing the interest in the foundations of music – teaching the fundamentals that run through all the levels of professional music from Classical to genre – the one road in, if you can make it further on up the road, is a pay to play road.  This is not shocking when you think about the way that education has been treated in America.  Education has been made increasingly expensive even in the public sphere, despite the widespread claim that “knowledge is power” and “education is the road to knowledge”. 

When I was very young, I had two sources of music education that stuck.  While I could also count the two classes a week in Elementary school, and they really should count, I actually group that class with the “public” education I received from my home city’s Symphony Orchestra.  That part of my education was brief – if I slept hard, I’d probably forget that I received it; somehow, I remember.  I remember the place where the education was given, and I remember that I was dropped from the classes because I was too young to know that I was supposed to keep up by making classical music my only real goal in life.  It would have meant practicing two or three hours a day when I was not yet 10 years old.  The instruction was designed to tell me what it took, what was in it, and then to leave it to me to figure out how to implement it.

The other source was a girl from up the block who used to “babysit” while my parents went to some social event.  She taught me everything there was to know about learning chords and scales, and she tried to teach me “House of the Rising Sun” which was a hit rock song at the time.  She was probably in high school at the time, and I was still in Elementary school.  Whatever she told me on Saturday night, I’d generally forgotten it by Sunday morning.  Still, there was a piece of what she told me that remained dormant inside my mind, in my memory. 

It wasn’t until I really made the commitment to music as my whole heart venture many years later that I started to look for schooling on music theory and music practice.  When I found a local music school in Denver – Swallow Hill Music Association – that took music learning by adults seriously, and made it somewhat affordable to me at the time, it was a totally new experience for me: Learning as an adult.  I had spent years working “around” musicians in Los Angeles, asking them questions and generally being an almost pest in my curiosity about what they were doing, and “what is the music business”, but I had never found a place like the Musician’s Institute – even though some of these people were part of the Musician’s Institute Programming, according to what I later heard.  I guess they just wanted to get away ….

From the beginning of my “music relationships” in Los Angeles, I had started focusing on the areas of development that might fit my skills.  I didn’t play an instrument well enough at the time to even consider the “talent” side of the equation; I was thinking about production, and how to tie what I was learning and studying at the time, which stretched from Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism, which I basically remember, to teaching and learning theory, which is mostly a bundled blur.  It took me fifteen years to make the whole connection – from philosophy to “kyo” [sound or “teachings of the Buddha”].  When I finally did make the connection between what I was seeking while buzzing around those professional musicians in the 1980’s and the “whole heart commitment” to music as a career, I realized that I needed to play an instrument well to demonstrate what it was that I was talking about, if I was talking in a “teaching mode” as a Producer or an artist.  For the next decade, I tried to practice as much as possible – two, three, four hours a day.  I went through the peaks and valleys, forgetting just about everything, then remembering what had driven me forward in my learning.  Perhaps I wasn’t organized – I was not in a school – or perhaps I just needed to pound the information into my brain.  It was the opening of the “caged method” that came and went – the closer I stayed to understanding by practice in the C-A-G-E-D system of chords and scales, the more my playing reflected what I wanted it to project.  That chord and scale system is “Classical music”.

As I’ve searched for a way to make a career in the music business, I’ve increasingly found that there are few inroads to employment that don’t involve pay to play.  Even the companies that offer “introductory programs” start making demands about qualifications for employment that involve having spent money, an education, or certification before being considered.  Companies that should be developing from within aren’t – a lesson I learned this past year which opened my eyes to how closed the shop is.  Everywhere I look, you must pay!  Want to network to write or pitch songs?  Pay to join an Association – and maybe that could happen ….

Problem with all the pay to play angles?  When you’re not making money, and you’re doing jobs to get to the next level of learning on your own, eventually, you’re so far marginalized in terms of employment [“the note”] that you can’t reach the chord [“the Corporations” & the industry].  Development is a growth  industry in the music business, if you can get the job.

Perhaps when the shop is closed is the time to start looking for market share …, despite the laughter [and silence] on Music Row. 

Talking to the right person …

I had a moment of clarity, and then it was gone again, into the ether where I apparently keep it or where clarity is kept. For a moment, I knew why I wanted to teach music, with a view toward education and spiritual awakening, directed toward building a functioning production system with active participants in what would be a business. I knew how I could explain it, and then the doubts arose again. There is too much information, and people’s patience demands the quick answer when the quick answer is not available. I have been studying many quick answers, and it is the sum of those answers which add up into the starting place of what I am trying to create.

There is an age group that needs to start. I have studied how to start, and how to approach teaching how to start. The younger students must start at the beginning because they do not have the residual knowledge base to construct from within the frame with missing pieces between. It is called building from a foundation, and all good architecture starts that way. I know how to start from the foundation, but how deeply into the construction must we and/or should we go? There is a solid starting point in just getting to know how to play the instruments, without going into all of the “tricks” and secrets that will come out in time about the instruments.

I envisioned finding the spot where the instruments “cross over”, where the playing starts to be both the playing and something more. I am a storyteller from the ground, from the Earth, but I am also a spiritual being, and I work in the spiritual realm as well. I work in film as a film director, I work in music as a sound director, and I work in education as an educator. The music is the learning instrument. Without the instruments, the film is an image in an imaginary space, as are all of my “movies” so far, as none are published and I have not been to film school, although I have studied. I am not a cinematographer, and I am technically not an engineer, but I have studied sound, and I know how to lead an engineer to the right questions, and I know how to teach somebody to think about the right questions if they are a sound engineer. I have learned how to teach, but I have not really taught, because teaching is learning, and the opportunity to teach should only be accepted when it is at a stage where learning is part of the teaching. These are simultaneous cause and effect relationships.

I love the technology we have now, that allows us to isolate objects, even objects in sound waves, so that we can follow how the path of the cause enters into the field as an effect. I love the idea of setting up a production company that is responsive, that can help people grow to understand their personal mission in life, and to better see cause and effect as they fit into a whole picture. I love that opportunity could come, if I could just pull the whole concept out of the ether, when I was talking to the right person ….

The Last Dollar Spent

People think that the rhythm of life doesn’t include the music, if they think about that at all. One of the things that I thought about, and tested against the times with my ears listening to hear the underlying language of the music, was if there was a pattern to the sound of the music that was considered “hit music”. The notes of a melody are clearly designed to be expressive of the voice and voicing of the singer, but the music that plays behind a vocal, or the music itself if it is a symphony, are played in language as well. Sometimes that language is specific; sometimes that language is musical, built from the accompaniment and the “rules” that go with accompaniment. There are the “theory rules”, which aren’t really rules at all, more like guidelines which help musicians find the muse that was in the writer or to become the muse when they are writing a “response” to a call. When your ear can hear the language, it can start to explore the music, and the intention of the writers. Pieces that are more musical have a hypnotic effect, being tied to a rhythm, but as anyone who has the heard the exploration of rhythm which is in the Japanese Taiko drum or the African chant knows, the timing of a beat is also or can also be a language, so accompaniment of a rhythm can be a language hidden in the music.

The question I started to ask myself is “when do we start speaking English”? I ask this because in some cases I can hear it in the music, but in some cases I don’t hear any language at all. I began asking this question a very long time ago. It was part of hearing symphony also; what about composers who never spoke the language of the people for whom their work is being played? Is the music translated by the score or by the feeling of the translation, or by translation?

A few summers back I went to hear Herbie Hancock & Lang Lang play with the Los Angeles Symphony and I heard a classical piece which I “translated” as being about a certain story – I then found out what conditions that the symphony had been written under. I might have been right about what the composer was “saying”, I had the right story, but it was a story based upon instrumentation, not language, it was based upon the use of instruments in a particular fashion to express a certain emotion and a certain movement of the social culture upon which the piece was a commentary. That was for me a symphony performance that was realized. Even sitting high up in the Hollywood Bowl, I could feel the transcendental emotion of the music as a “hurricane”, which is the emotional goal for most composers.

My question about language came from a disconnection in other cases because the interior language of the music is not in a language that I can hear – and so emotionally, I have difficulty attaching to “that emotion”. So I always wonder, “when are we going to talk in [“ “]?”  The facility to learn to talk in music is ‘someplace in time’, and too often encased in corporate money expectations that limit reaching out.  For years I have heard the same silence about the question, “can we talk about music”? 

I came to believe that part of the equation about language in music is a matter of the education and desire of the musicians. For me, it is a great accomplishment to know how to write transcendental music in your native language, but there comes a time when that is “easy”. When it is easy to play and write with a voice, it is time to study with a voice. That voice is not just the language of the music, both the music language, but also the culture language. We learn to communicate across culture with music through the rhythms and the spoken language voice which we add into the music.

I had a teacher/friend who used to say that when he was travelling he was always silently proud of himself when he was asked if he was from a certain place – a place he might have recently been, where he knew and spoke the native language – and was asked if he was from [“x”] because he had their accent in his attempts to speak locally, even though English was his native language, and the other languages were not. His was an example of someone who knew how to dive into the culture without falling away from his own personality. That he generally looked like Einstein didn’t hurt ….

What is disappointing me more than any temporary state of affairs I might find myself in today, is that while reaching out to find out if I simply missed the educational opportunity or if it was not there, I have seen how wonderfully value creating expanding the reach of music can be, but it’s so sad, because I wonder if it was the last dollar was spent ….

Writing out the whole thing ….

Lately I’ve had some time to really delve deeply into the writing out of the various parts of the Production & Education system that I’ve been building, mostly in my head or as a response to experiences.  I’ve been through almost every level of the crucifixion for the idea that local spirits can come up with  -- I’ve dealt with being accused of not being a musician, of not being a musician with enough interest in certain kinds of music, of not being prepared for the responsibilities of a lifetime commitment, of being “tone-deaf”, of being stupid, of many things, obviously.  What I haven’t had was an opportunity to speak with people who can fix what they think are the problems with my being a “music producer”.

One of the educational lessons I learned when I was teaching myself through reading and interactive media is that there are three levels of direct learning:

1. Present – teacher and learner are physically “together” in a learning session.
2. “Presented” – this might be a live interaction or it might be a delayed prescience, like a video with internet or written, or even telephone follow up. 
3. Written – this is one way communication, where the idea of the teacher is still presented, but there is no way to interact, other than through trial and error of application of what is written. 

Obviously, when you can ask your teacher anything, and get a full response, the environment is conducive to learning.  When there are physical barriers, but there is still interaction, the environment can make corrections for misinterpretations.  When reading material produced by someone else, there is always room for error in how it is interpreted.  I think of these stages as “I’m here”; “I’m going, but I’m still here” [why do I think of Shirley MacClaine when I here that phrase “I’m still here”?]; & “I’m already gone” (but make of it what you will [hope I hear of, and enjoy the interpretations]) . 

Unfortunately, the exercise in writing out the “angles of my production company” is not being done in concert with a mentor, so far anyway.  I know that the ideas that I’ve generated are solid because they are built from the foundations of scholarship and experiences gathered by me from those who have written or “presented” their ideas about what music is, what music production is, how to approach it as an art and as a business, but there are levels of Production which are not so easy to describe and organize in writing.  Some of the problem with “not so easy” is probably erased as soon as the material lands not in the social wasteland of those who are not in a communion relationship, but some of it comes from not being in the field with contemporaries and contemporary teachers who want to share and mold information for the betterment of the craft and the art.  I’ve been writing from the same base perspective on production, and my approach to producing particular music projects, for well over ten years, since I started realizing that I knew enough to trust that my perspective was grounded in the fifteen years of observation of music and art that came before that in the workplace and in educational and corporate environments.  What I mean is that I’ve had to learn from “not music” as much as from music, and the basics of the music production itself haven’t changed much since I became focused on music theory and applying it to the business of music production.  Explaining music theory in “corporate terms” is however a task that can seem never-ending.

Mentors?  Where do they come from, and how do you find one who can actually help you in your musical search?  That question came up in 1997, then it was in a religious and in a business context, but I was already well on the way to understanding what it was specifically I wanted to “teach” in music.  Having been escorted through the maze of the golf industry teaching field, I realized that in the music business, there was probably something similar – where individuals are whisked off to an Elementary School music teaching job, but only if they are “certified”.  There is of course the “way up” through the players school – produce your own work until somebody else asks you to produce for them.  That requires no educational training at all, and is experiential.  The “music people” I was involved with in Los Angeles in the 1980’s probably qualify on this path – they were working  musicians, perhaps well known, perhaps not even regionally known, who were seeking to improve their ability to make a living from music enterprise.  It’s easier to make a living in music if you can get a “gig” anytime you want one, and even better if you know that the venue will make money on the “event”.  And then there are the people who came to music because the Corporation sent them there, and they may or may not know anything about mentoring, or about the musical arts for that matter, but they have their position and they do their best to keep it.  Nobody has the time to take on the outside world ….

When I watched professional tour golfers, I was following them to learn how to see the golf swing.  I made it to the top of the Golf field’s “professional teacher club”, but I was unqualified as a direct teacher because I’d never taught someone else before.  Even the few lessons I’d given were admittedly awful, from my perspective anyway, because I didn’t know how to organize the material so that somebody else understood it, and could use it in a way that might help them to enjoy the venture. 

When I listen to music, I am listening for the lessons also.  Soon after I knew I had to make the switch from “education” – golf as “player” – to music, I realized that in order to really express music “theory” you need to at least have a passing ability to demonstrate the concept on some form of instrumentation.  I began working on guitar in order to improve my bass playing … .  The whole exploration of “guitar application of music theory” was really a venture into the theory of how to “teach” music production.  It isn’t easy to teach production with instrumentation, unless you are the composer, because the artists often are temperamental about what they have created or are trying to create.  There are producer arrangements where the Producer is strictly an  “engineer in charge”, and there are also those situations where the Producer is someone who is like a motion picture film producer to the musicians’ Director.  So having a system of production, and getting it to “paper” is not an easy undertaking.  It is a delicate process because the misinterpretation sends the meaning of the point being written about off course, in a great percentage of cases.  There are so many details.

Even as I started this month re-writing “all the points to here”, I soon realized that what I have is a monster production process.  Perhaps, that is what is necessary to produce “world class music”.  Perhaps that is why I seem to nearly always find the mentor [and employment] hopper empty – pursuit is consumptive.  And just maybe, it is why I hear the sound of the Eagles singing ALREADY GONE while I wonder if hell has frozen over ….

A Classical Note Introduction–“How We Met”

I can remember the image of the classical musicians laughing at me; they were laughing for many reasons. Foremost, they laughed out of fear, fear for me and fear of me. They knew what they had been through to achieve their level of success. They knew all the tricks that they learned by making mistakes. They knew I was likely to make all those mistakes too, if I stayed in pursuit of the dream, the idea, and they drew their laughter out of the many emotions that their frustrations had drawn out of them through the years. They could remember the emotions; it was one of the keys to playing well, knowing what you were supposed to feel when you were playing a piece, and putting all of that feeling into the instrument and making the instrument sound the emanation. They laughed because it is next to impossible to learn how to play like that; to play like that without a mentor is a phenomenon that scares them, because it means more frustration, born of something not obvious or something obvious that maybe they hadn’t thought about or felt. They wanted to be prepared to play, but that is no easy task.

When I told them I was going to compose a symphony, they laughed even harder; it was like a hard rain of a hurricane becoming the band filled wit the most saturation, the saturation that rises from below the ground and goes to the highest storm cloud of the storm.  People don’t write symphonies – they progress through music circles and they wind up with one already written that they piece together out of works they already know.  They looked at me, struggling to remember which key I was in, which note my finger was on, unable to read music at speed, nearly incapable of keeping time on a score sheet, and their laughter, well, even I could understand their voice.

That, was thirty years ago.  Some days these days, I can remember the key, and I can play well enough to demonstrate and hear the idea; but I am still riding against the wind.  I am still riding against the opposition which says “Symphonies are for time; make contemporary music first”.  But maybe that’s all wrong.  Maybe wanting to be a writer, wanting to build a system to create inroads to Education and motivation and music and arts and sciences and broadcasting and the religion of scriptures, all of it reaching out toward enlightenment, toward God is THE SYMPHONY, the sound of the place where we are, and that is the sound which reaches out to time.

I still wondered, would they bother to hear?  Would they bother to notice that my applications say NEED EMPLOYMENT not WANT employment, although want is “in there too”.  I want to work, but they’re not letting me.  I work on my own, I study, I practice, I learn, but the cost is taking my life now, not in some distant future.  The cost has me practicing where I compete with the echo of the airplane that just took off with its four hundred dollar seats, and my five cent bank account.  I don’t have a room where I can hear the notes, the reach of the emotion, the feel changing in response to hitting it wrong, or staying the same when it is right.  I am likely to get pushed around “just one more time” like a junkie on a last ride, an winter is here, although it is nearly 90 degrees outside today, winter is here, because the cold will penetrate my “practice room”, but I will not stop playing until the instrument is taken too, and the cold is snow and the freezing is penetrating the practice room of the downtown parking lot where I am managing to get nearly an hour, maybe two a day instead of the three or four or more [on the subject] that it takes to catch the wind.  I am nearly all caught up with the wind, but the wind does not seem to penetrate the laughter ….

Exploring the trail, but staying “grounded”

It seems like everybody has a dream for what they want their music to be or do or who they want it to reach.  I’m not different there, I do have ideas about how to utilize music to reach out and bring them into the world where arts and sciences cross.  Not everybody is interested, I know.  In fact, it’s better if not everybody wants to know what is “behind the magic” of the mystic construction music is.  Music is the energy form that leads our thinking; not everybody gets “into” thinking and feeling, they just let time go by ….

I’ve spent the past fourteen years in fairly intensive study of music theory as applied to daily life with a focus on media broadcasting and internet and “network computing” offshoots.  Once you start to look into all the areas where the engineering of music is an “applied science”, you can easily get lost in the side trails and never actually get to the music.  It is a difficult journey to manage when there is no guide on how to do it , or how far to go to really know what is important well enough to reach a “production stage”.  There is literally a ton of information that can be gathered by simply understanding a little bit about the the construction of recording science and how broadcasting and “media” in general are linked together through music and music networks.  We have “unique phone numbers”; music is the line that leads our connections ….  It’s an industry that is hidden in plain sight.

None of the things that one could study and spend time learning about – not marketing nor event management nor various electrical engineering parallels – can help “making music” like time spent learning to really play and know an instrument.  When the experts used to tell me about canting “Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo” “you need to Chant an hour a day” then “.. two hours a day..” then “four hours a day”, I used to look at them as if they had lost their mind, and needed to chant about it themselves.  When I realized that to really stay on top of the instrument of music the “practice time” is one,two, four hours a day, I knew they had not lost their mind, they simply found peace and enlightenment from the process of chanting “Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo”, which is a simple recitation of devotion to the mystic law of cause and effect through sound or ‘teachings of the Buddha’.  The chanting is a complete body devotion of mind and spirit, a fusion with the Law of cause and effect; music practice is the same fusion, in another form.

Over and over again during the past fourteen years – the time since I made the decision to really go “all in” with music, even though  I’d been on the fringes of music development and playing for twice that long – I’ve spent countless hours learning and relearning the CAGED chord and scale sequences and how the chords are constructed and how to play them and make them fit in a “rolling sound” that speaks in language, sometimes just music language, sometimes “call and response” [and “English”] language.  I battle to stay on top of the instrument, where I don’t have to think about where my fingers are or where they should be going now or next.  I rise above the thinking and get into the simple feel where I can process after the fact that “that was a third I played there a moment ago” while I’ve actually moved on to the next notes.  There most definitely are obstacles along the way – older artists are holding onto their copyright sounds and I don’t hear them until I really focus in on hearing them, and then, when all the CAGED ideas are in the right place, hearing and playing them is “easy”, at least for one run through.  The goal is repeatability; the goal is to have a clear, repeatable sound that can be repeated with the underlying phrasing coming out of the projection, like a rerun, maybe even a rerun of what God heard …

Counting … .

For years I’ve struggled with “counting” in music; I’ve become better at reading the notes on the grand staff, but when it comes time to transfer the notes to a rhythm that I’ve not heard before, it’s been a lifelong nightmare so far.  The “interference” doesn’t last through the night; if I’ve heard the way that the rhythm should be, I am fairly adaptable.  It’s been since I started playing the drums when I was not yet a teenager that the “problem” started.  When I began studying music seriously, now more than fifteen years ago, I began playing the guitar hours a day to try to engrain the scales and modes and chords and “rhythms”.  I had learned before that it is important to have a “muscle memory” level of playing in order to project an instrument – I learned from “high pressure golf” – to the level where as a player you can almost become a spectator, with your eyes and your ears, to the music as you are playing.  At that stage, it is possible to project – in music, to “voice lead” [where the audience is likely to hear exactly what you played as you meant them to hear it]  -- in such a way that a question arises “did you mean to play it that way” or “were you conscious that it said [“”]”?  When a player achieves that level of playing, from my point of view, then, for the first time, writing music can become possible on a level slightly higher than just “that sounds nice”, approaching more of a social value creation than just “a melody”. 

This week, I ran across a book which was written to teach a particular “rhythm form” through the use of a counting method where the “pulse” of the count is kept in “an upper box” and “the beat” is kept/marked in a “lower box”.  While this is fairly standard in its approach to teaching how to “count” complex [or even not complex] meters, I was reawakened to something I had realized many years ago while “reciting” the Lotus Sutra as part of the practice of Buddhism – the Sutra was in “Ancient Mandarin” and the “little characters” each represented a “beat” in the phonetics of the story that was being recited out loud as part of the practice – :  If you tried to “count” the characters and maintain a 4/4 rhythm [side-note:“do you ever wonder how it came to be ‘4/4 == common time’”?], you would probably run into difficulty getting through “the book”; it takes practice to understand the rhythm.

Learning how to “read the rhythm” and to put it onto an instrument, while “counting” and “hearing”, these are complex tasks all put together; but music, music is meant to be fun.  Perhaps there’s just a little too much competitiveness about one character in pursuit of “the right rhythm”, and not enough searching for connection.  I suppose, when I learn/teach myself that piece of the puzzle that has been slipping in and out for years – how to count,read, play, and make friends on stage – I’ll forget about everything all over again, be “born again” in a new life … .  Then again, “tomorrow never knows” … 

The right notes

I’ve always wondered when I listened to music that I liked, “what made it hit with me”  There is a rolling nature to the music that I really enjoy, and I ‘m not talking about the beat or the timing necessarily, because I’ve enjoyed my share of Brian Eno inspired dissonance.  What I mean is that the music, regardless of its rhythm, seems to roll through my brain with an ease as if all the right notes are being played.  Of course, whoever writes the music is playing the “right notes”, more or less, but when the music really hits, it leads and there is no particular moment when the listening process is interrupted by a thought that “gosh, that is the wrong note” or “are they in tune” ….  When I started studying music and music composition, part of the  answer to the question “how does music ‘hit’” became obvious; it is simple music theory in the construction, but simple theory is not enough.  A composer has to know when to play a note and when not to play it, when silence is better than sound, if this note should be for this or that length and should it be held or ‘hammered’, up or down, and how far, muted or full ….  These are all questions that go into the process of composing parts when playing music, but there is more.  There is something else that goes into playing “the right notes”.

I don’t speak for anybody else, or really from anybody else when I talk about what my composition process is.  I taught myself from the knowledge base that exists.  Yes, there are too many to mention influences, and I was not [necessarily] the one who invented “Western tuning” [equal temperament], but nobody ever told me how to go from knowing the notes to knowing which notes to play.  I feel that it is a process that all people who choose to compose music eventually struggle with, and they either master the process to their own satisfaction or they “flame out” – as one local composer once commented to me about it.  You can know all the notes, but you might not be playing all the right notes. 

As I’ve learned to become a better player – I still consider myself barely decent, not as good as I want to be, need to be, and am working to be – I’ve struggled with the process of learning how to know that I am playing the right notes without thinking too much about it.  There’s the level of playing where everything fits within the theory structures and appears to be “right”, but that is almost wholly dependent upon the composer having followed the rules and made it “easy”.  After it is easy, and maybe recorded, the harder parts come into play.  Is the recording at an accurate pitch?  Is the mastering level at a constant reference tone?  Was there something else in the writing which was “hidden” by the use of standard tuning and fingering of progressions?  It is these things that become important to think about, know and anticipate as the playing level – the improv & anticipation – increases.  Music construction is object oriented story telling.  Knowing which fingering position to be in and why can be an important difference when the time comes to “write now”.  Writing now is what makes a live band sound better than a studio band, or a studio construction more pleasing to the ear than a live band out of synch because the engineering wasn’t quite on the same wavelength as the playing. 

My goal was to move from teaching about music application in an education framework toward producing music.  Since I had come from a background where teaching the “object” included the need to “perform” – to demonstrate the object in use – I knew that it was important that I learn to play the instruments I was going to be discussing conceptually, and in theory.  This process of expanding the reach of the producers’ chair is not an easy one to master because there are so many other aspects of what have to be done to actually call yourself a Producer and to produce professional music that gets reproduced in media and paid money for performance, broadcast, and mechanical usages.  It’s a joke, really, to think that a Producer can master all that needs to be done. 

One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve worked on my playing – it was a hobby for twelve years before it became a passion and obsession for longer than that – is that in order to create “music that flows together” all the right notes must be all the right notes.  You really can’t pick and choose which position your going to play in, what notes in the “shells” you are going to play or leave out, or simply play at random if all of the notes you can play are not the right notes to be played to write what you are trying to “write”.  Every note must fit within the structure of the song.  While I know that there are those who say “it’s music, you can play what you want”, and I understand what they are saying, somewhat to a degree, but in the end, you can’t “play what you want” once you set the song off on a course that the music is “supposed to follow”.  You can play the dissonant note, but when you do you will interrupt the playing of the music as an experience for the listener, who is the audience for whom professional music is intended.  Playing the right notes is not only a matter of knowing which notes are “available”, but when and how to touch them for maximum effect. 

Gosh, it’d be so sweet to hear all the right notes again … .          

It Seemed Like Forever

It seemed like I was working to really understand the one point, the one note that leads to all the others “forever”.  I can say that it felt like a blood clot in my brain, stuck and causing headaches that I couldn’t fully understand; I can say that my memory wouldn’t stick because the “strokes” kept erasing the material that I had already gone over a thousand times.  Even so, even as my body starts telling me that it is moving more away from youth and toward something else, there are breakthroughs that come as the repetition finds its way to the right memory storage location – somewhat like a 36 year old beating a 46 year olds’ “standard of excellence” at the 46 year olds’ “tournament”, as happened today, although it is a “tie”, with ten years to go and some differences in quality …, but that’s golf.  Bears are bears, tigers are tigers ….  If you know the way that these global connections are created, then you understand. 

I don’t know how long it is supposed to take to master music playing; I doubt that I’ll ever be all the way as good as I’m trying to be at performance, but I know that as long as I keep pushing myself to stay on top of the instrument, the time will come when the next level gets conquered, and then the next and so on.  That is one of the most beautiful things about music, that it doesn’t get unreachable as you grow older, granting that you remain physically capable, it gets more coordinated.  I used to know what I “heard”, but I couldn’t pin point what it was; I used to know what it was, but I couldn’t explain it; I used to know how to explain it, if anybody cared, but I still would miss it as the mastery would slip in and out of my control.  It isn’t easy work, and nobody pays you, not for long anyway, until you are on top of the instrument, watching the boxes on the guitar, seeing the “shells” and the movements and the modes and knowing that this is the way that piece of composed music is supposed to be played, if you were saying this, or this way if you were saying that. 

I set out to be a “Record Producer” somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty years ago now, and it is only now that I am beginning to fully comprehend what my job actually entails, at least as far as I envision this instrument in this setting in these times.  When I started, the choice was just one of many paths I could take.  More and more through time, I was shuffling around from dead end entry level work to dead end entry level dungeons; I felt farther and farther away from the point, and being more forced to battle a perception by people who don’t either know what they’re doing or are simply remnants of Darwinian thought processes who don’t care about anybody but themselves and their construction.  The point is creating music and art, not profit margin and slave driving, although there is room for discussion about both of those latter issues too.  The first part of the project is to know what you want to do; the second part is to know how to do it.  In the dead end world, they don’t know how to do it, and they don’t want to tell you what they know because that would reveal what they don’t know.  Revealing what they don’t know would end the production as they’ve done it ….  When you start a project, you don’t know more than a fourth grade elementary school child, who if I’ve calculated correctly would be about nine years old, in the springtime.  I believe Sir George Martin once recorded the concept as “Rock and Roll Springtime” ….  He taught me everything Wayne Shorter did not; between the two, well is there much?

When I was born, I would not have been allowed to learn from Wayne Shorter, not by societies’ standards anyway, no matter what his genius was/is.  The good fortune that “tied me to the bumper of a State Troopers’ Ford” is documented in Michelle Mercer’s book, which Doctor Shorter might or might not have agreed is accurate.  There was something in the Lotus Sutra that just wouldn’t let go, and it grew through the first decade of my life as the Civil Rights movement was hijacked by liberals with an agenda for retribution rather than a passion for a cause with an effect.  That’s another story, a story where people get passionate about their lies to the point of no longer listening to the sound or the silence.  Twenty five years from now, if I want to go see and hear Wayne Shorter, I’ll go to the wall, the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Wall and I will remember.  I will remember walking into the ghost field at the opening of that Memorial tribute in our Nations’ Capital, and breathing the air of what the time of my childhood was, with all of the emotions that come absorbable in the events, the people, and the sounds and sights of the music of a specific time.  Life is Jazz music, but I am not a jazz musician, not a jazz artist, and not a Veteran, not in this lifetime anyway.

Something I learned while studying music composition construction was about Military Generals.  I can’t say why the subject came up, it’s not worth calling 911 over it.  The point I learned?  The only War a Military General who deserves the rank wants is the one to avoid Warfare.  Something else I learned:  Sound is the front line of all battles of thought.  It’s not a lie to say you hadn’t heard about what somebody else is telling you is their experience. 

George Martin was the “key music instructor” for me; his production of the Beatles is the centerpiece for me because it says “I understood this”.  When someone attaches themself to music, they are saying that they hear the rhythm of the sound.  If you’re good, you’ll hear the rhythm of the music; if you’re really good, you’ll hear the rhythm of life with the music; if you’re pushing that edge between accomplishment and greatness, you’ll understand the application of the rhythm in your life and works, and you’ll turn it into music, into a cause for others to hear, learn, and apply as well.  Someday, somewhere, people who were “with the Beatles” might say “George had nothing to do with that”, and he understood that ….

The problem with wanting to be a Record Producer in this time, with the advent of computer/digital recording and visual media overload is that just about everybody thinks they know how to do the job.  Schools race past the formula which has worked for thousands of years to push an agenda.  By the time the music reaches “speed”, the “pace of play” in the Entertainment Business, so many lawyers and attorneys have lathered up the grease on the wheels with things that are not necessary that the majority of “industry insiders” think that the Education system documentation is the measure by which music can be made “professional”.  Even since the 1960’s the railroad mentality of “if you haven’t done that before” [from “player insiders”] or “if you can’t show me your school credits” [from “industry insiders”] has grown to be such a repetitive bore that there is no train, rather than a slow train coming.

I love what we now refer to as “country music”, or as Whispering Bill Anderson recently said on the radio show he appears upon with some great regularity “what used to be called Country and Western music”, but the more convoluted the entry points become, the less I care to fight the owners of the show, the “collection” that was/is the REIT that “protects” the show, which once was something significant in American Music, but is now threatened with a type of extinction because they aren’t asking the right questions.  “What is Country and Western Music”?

In the Lotus Sutra, there is a story about enlightenment, and the Buddha who must go away from the people for a time, hiding unseen, until there is enough desire for enlightenment for there to be benefit from a return of the Buddha ….

Country and Western Music is a celebration of music, dance, and social kindness & trust.  It’d be a sad thing for that to be too gone for too long ….  There’s money to be made in music, but with the way that music is being marketed and promoted and the entry points being guarded, it’s like money that’s been taxed out of the desires of the wealthy and the knowledge base of the hungry.  Maybe those far off “professionals” know it all, but they ain’t sayin’ ….

The best thing anyone can do is to be ready, to stay on top of the instrument, to listen to what the composer and the players and the producers put onto the recording, and hope that the money doesn’t run out on those dead end entry level jobs before somebody, anybody with a conscience, notices that  it mattered …

Electric & Acoustic

I’ve read that the bass rules the chords, and the chords rule the notes, but what to do about the beat?  Often, I hear the time differential between what I hear and what I play and what  I hear myself playing, and I haven’t entirely figured out how to know if my ears are being hyper-critical, or if I just need to play “ahead of the beat” better.  My experience tells me that this “problem” is much like what a golf instructor – I was a qualified one for a number of years – sees in a scratch players’ swing, where the “normal person” only sees a beautiful swing. 

My goal when I switched the focus of what I was trying to accomplished was to take the spiritual aspect vision of the game of golf that I had developed into music – which is actually where the vision started anyway, at a sound board long ago.  What I “saw” was an electrical process that was a “language”.  In golf, the electrical process is between mind & body working to get the ball into the hole from the teeing ground.  In that venture, what I noticed was that the mind/body connection was like a psycho-analysis toolkit, partially influenced by the exterior ground – the course.  In music, the notes, chords, and “sounds” are also a mind/body connection, with the goal to arrive at the correct “hole” – the precise sound wave length – which is intended as the language of the composition.  I began looking for this place as a “instrumental vocal”, where often the rhythm is contained as a series of percussive points which might be a “vocal language” but is just as often a “measured number” language.  At the sound board, it was easy enough to “see the cycles” of the frequencies, and to manipulate and mold them to the ear through the various processes that are used on recording and mixing boards and through the techniques of shaping sound, a process that starts at the instruments.  If a player is thinking in a language, and knows how to play the right notes, then the language will come out on the other side, theoretically at least.

My problem is that often there is a delay between what I hear being played on a tape or “digital track” and what I hear played and reintroduced back into the mix of the “digital track”.  Of course, the easiest way to get around this problem is to play with other people, and to work out with them exactly what it is you are trying to do, what is acceptable and working, and what is not working, and what the limits of the parameters are at each stage of arranging to play or write songs together.  Because I understood exactly how far that “concept” could go, I studied music production some before I started taking playing seriously.  I hadn’t been in a band since I was fourteen years old ….  I had been around bands, and music production, so it wasn’t like the environment was new to me, nor the obstacles.  In the end, Producers who can’t show the function wind up unemployed as producers ….

It only took me ten years after I had a clear vision of exactly what it was I needed to explain and how it needed to be explained to be simplified to an extreme before I began feeling confident that even if it was the notorious John  Lennon [still here, at least in memory] harping “what are you doing, just tell me what are you trying to do because I’ve got better things to do …”, I would have an answer other than an expletive.  “Dig it”, John said ….

Déjà vu, perhaps; perhaps not …

When I was fairly young, I had a “baby sitter” – somebody who would come over to the house to make sure nothing tragic happened while my parents were off at some event or another – who tried to teach me guitar.  She wasn’t much older than me, I can’t remember if she was old enough to drive at the time, but I do remember that she taught me how to play “House of the Rising Sun” in one evening.  I’m sure I promptly forgot how to play the song by the end of Sunday.  I wouldn’t bring this up except that I wound up going to school in New Orleans and was living in a shotgun rental house when President Ronald Reagan was shot in Washington DC in 1981.  Of course, I’m not certain my future in music had anything to do with the life rhythms of Ronald Reagan, but perhaps there are things we just don’t get until “later”.  My older brother had  often told me of how he had experienced the time immediately after President John F. Kennedy was shot, and I realized that it was a pretty significant marking point, generationally speaking.  You either remember the house when the sun is rising, or you’ll see it at sunset …