audiot

wooooooo, check out this guy

ha! to tie in with yesterday’s entry, here’s the next tip:

no.2 get the big picture.

you can’t tell which one comes first, because it depends. if there is a big picture available (like a song for instance), then you should of course concentrate on that before you break it down. in this case it’s best to provide your brain with an overview and then go from there. but there are situations when there just is no big picture (those are usually the ones where mr brain up there smoothly glides into standby-mode). scientists, for example, need to work with things and understand things without knowing what the end result will be or how it’s all connected. in a situation like that, you need to deal with what you have by using the breaking-it-down-technique, so you can then work on unveiling the big picture. this also happens with music. think drums: you can learn and practice rudiments to achieve certain skills like precision or speed and then later discover that other things, you never understood before, make use of exactly those rudiments… it’s impossible for you to get an overview of all rudiments including all possible uses for them in the first place. so you work on one at a time and then discover what you can do with them…

now, what’s the priority?

no surprise here, if it’s possible to get the big picture first, then by all means do so – it makes the following a lot easier. to give you an example: if you’re reading a book (apart from novels of course), it really helps to focus on the table of contents first. give your brain the chance to see what it will be dealing with, where the journey goes. that way, it will be prepared, open for things to come and a lot less stroppy…

never fight your own brain – it’s a fight you can’t win :-)

finally i’m back online, the provider solved the problem without (and now the funny part) even knowing what the actual problem was and (even better) how they solved it, yay. anyhoo, as long as it’s working again, i give a rat’s a$$ about how they did it…

well, i was thinking a lot about teaching and learning lately – as you can read here for instance – so i’m gonna give some learning tips that might be useful to you (at least i hope so…). please remember 1. that not everything works for everyone of course and 2. that you need to try it before you can say it does or doesn’t work. this is not about music exclusively, so check it out on other things you want to learn as well… i’m only giving one tip at a time to give you the chance of thinking about each one and checking it out. there’s plenty of ’20-tips-on-how-to-entries’ in the blogs out there but i usually feel overwhelmed with them and just read them through instead of really working with what’s said there. and by the way, this one-tip-at-a-time-strategy is the first tip i’m giving you:

no.1 – the larch :-) anyone remembering that one?

seriously, the first basic tip is – whatever it is you want to learn, break it down into very small steps and do one at a time. if it’s about a guitar solo for example, depending on how complicated it is, you could even go down to single notes. most of the time, tough, it’s most useful to have small phrases of maybe one or two measures. once you’re able to do the first piece, learn the second one and then combine them with a focus on the crossover-section. for singers it’s usually lines (not what you think!), but also words or single notes are possible. don’t panic! you will get pretty good at this quickly, so the pieces become a bit larger, which saves you time. but no matter how good you become, the breaking-it-down-technique remains.

now, why does this work? it’s quite easy, because our brain likes things it can manage. if you overload it with a whole mass of input, it loses track of it and needs time and energy to sort things out first, to find a pattern, to make sense of it. learning things that don’t make sense to us is almost impossible, we might be able to repeat it so many times that we can recite it, but we’ll forget it again soon or just won’t be able to put it to use (instead of just blindly reciting). so if we don’t understand what we’re trying to learn, it’s only wasted time and effort. but to make sense of it, it needs to be divided into small pieces of input, so our brain has the chance to figure it out. as soon as you know/understand what it’s really about, it’s just mechanics from there.

don’t confuse this with getting the big picture, which i will talk about in the next entry…

this is something that lots of musicians don’t think about. and if they do it, it’s often for the wrong reasons. i know a lot of musicians who teach, but most of them do it for the money and that’s just wrong. you shouldn’t become a musician to make money and you shouldn’t become a teacher for that reason either. if it’s money you seek, work as a banker (maybe now’s not the right time to start…), lawyer, doctor or whatever else. if you’re a musician because you want to make money, you’re either a moron or Paul McFriggin’Cartney. don’t get me wrong, if you happen to make money as a musician, that’s great! if you make a living by playing music – awesome!!! this is the no.1 dreamjob. period. but if you are even thinking about money during ‘work’ – you’re in trouble.

well, why teaching at all then? first of all, to spread the art – to enlighten – to help others grow. not your cup of tea? alright, the next reason is for the me-people out there: to learn something! ahuh. i’m serious, since i started teaching (back then it was for the wrong reasons, i admit) i have learned so much, it’s still hard to believe for me. when i started, i thought ‘hey y’all, i’m so good at what i’m doing that i’m gonna show you how it’s done and you’ll pay me to bathe in my wisdom.’ ugh.

the first thing i learned though, was that i was not half as good as i thought. i guess today i’m half as good as i thought back then (and that’s a lot :-) :-) :-) ). then i learned that teaching is more than just talking about how you do it – you need a plan, a concept. you need to set goals and you need a way to achieve them – and, most important, you need to have a plan b for everything. because in almost ten years of teaching, i never ever had a single student whom my concept worked on without adjustments. every student is different, especially when it comes to the voice. so by adjusting, improvising and figuring out new ways to deal with problems you’ve never encountered before, you learn. and not just as you would learn from a book or something – more like new horizons. we always get used to things, it’s our nature. but that means once we have found our way of doing something, we don’t think about it anymore – and therefore, don’t learn anything. but dealing with problems we never had ourselves forces us to think and to make up alternatives and that’s how we learn.

i would even venture to say that teaching is the next step in learning music. once you’re a decent player/singer, it becomes the next thing to do.

i should mention that not everybody makes for a good teacher, and if you simply don’t like the idea, then you probably shouldn’t teach. but there’s still two things you should do. first, learn about teaching – or better: learn about learning. learn how learning really works, that alone is worth so much… and second, create a concept on how you would teach someone. yes, even if it doesn’t come to it….

and who knows, maybe you even make some money ;-)

once more, i discovered an interesting discussion on new music strategies right here. it’s about when to put your own musicstuff online. is it better to wait until it’s properly mixed, mastered, produced – so it’s good in quality, maybe even polished and slick. or is the answer more like “now”?

there’s a lot of comments that lean more to the one or the other side, but one aspect seems to be quite important to most of them. the fear of scaring your fans (or people that might become fans) away. boo!

my thoughts on this are a bit different, i’m saying “now”! put it all up, all you’ve got. polished? fine. raw? fine. good? fine. it sucks? fine. no matter what, show it to the world! now! you might think, so what has he put up so far? and you’re right, i might be the last person on earth to give advice about this. and i don’t, it’s just my thoughts on it, remember? by the way, i put stuff up here – remember? and it was neither good quality nor good songwriting or whatever, it was just nothing, a little gag. but back to me being the last person…. right now, i have nothing to upload. ridiculous? damn right it is. it’s a shame that all those years i spent making music only exist as memories and stories – i can’t change that. but i can do better from now on – and i will.

now why is it good if you upload anything that just sucks? well, for one, any publicity is good publicity. and this is now more true than ever. you might scare people who otherwise would have become your fans? think again. tastes differ. one man’s crap is another man’s gold. maybe your sweet little popsong is soooooo bad, it becomes a punkhit – who knows? and if noone likes it at all (and that’s hard to believe, someone on earth would love it. guaranteed.), so what? if you work on your internet-appearance, so that you’re findable – you have as many chances as you like. so the first hundred visitors didn’t like it? maybe the next hundred will. no? maybe the next hundred will. no? maybe the nex….. you won’t run out of possible fans, it’s the internet.

another thing that comes to my mind is the renaissance of bad quality. since everybody’s able to put cellphone-videos online in an instant, there are no more quality issues. today people sit in front of their screen watching clips that are just plain black (maybe with a little blurry-brown-something) and sound like a horsie making love to a running lawnmower. if someone would have brought you a vhs-tape with that clip to watch it on your tv in the pre-web-era? yep, my thoughts exactly. and let’s not forget: even well known acts put up low-quality-stuff. think bathroom sessions of the barenaked ladies – and people loved them. certainly, it’s nicely performed. what if you just can’t play? again, who cares? you will improve, and someday people might be proud of having known you since your first steps. even if they’re not, even if noone likes your music. i say it’s still far better than not releasing it to the public. because now it’s out there and its never going back. YOU are out there and you’re never going back. there’s more danger in waiting and trimming and polishing a little more and trimming again and…. “cool, there’s a new effect-device coming out next month. this will so improve this song of mine. i’m saving some money to buy it and then this song will rock and i can put it up there…..” this never ends. you’re really planning on releasing something as soon as it’s perfect? that moment will never come. it’s not the past, where independent artists saved money to make an album and because of limited time and cash, needed to decide which song and how long etc. today you have the possibilities to throw out whatever you like and an infinite amount of trials, so………………….