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” …