Keep moving to stay alive and relevant

Art, technology, you name it and it’s all basic evolution.  The simpler organisms get built upon to make room for the bigger more complex and more adapted to its environment.  Simple worked a long time ago.  But as the world changed, so did everything in it.  This applies to art, science, history, and anything else you can think of.  It’s a basic law of nature that was never discussed in school.  It’s a law of psychology that was never discussed either.  All ideas get built upon and given to the next generation to build upon further.

Everything is constantly evolving.  So although we may grow tired of whatever is new or the new fad and how “stale” it may be to us, what’s that actually mean?  It may mean that you’re not evolving.  If you’re not evolving, you should prepare for a mental battle.

Simple isn’t so simple anymore.  There is a constant breaking and rebuilding process that happens on all fronts of life from politics to art.  For you that means that you have to be constantly evolving in all areas to keep up.  You can’t keep up with everything.  There’s far too much information coming in.  You can’t categorize and process it all in a timely fashion.  But one thing is certain, plant your feet and you will die where you stand.

Pick your area of expertise and evolve there as much as possible.  Many empires have been taken down because the rulers got comfortable and overtaken by someone who thought a little differently and acted in a new way.  Either by violence or by thoughts, they were taken over because they didn’t evolve with the times.  You need to evolve as much as possible with whatever field you’re thinking.

Bottom line is it does come down to a basic principle.  Everything changes.  The best way to not be left to oblivion is to be a moving target and go with the flow and if at all possible, ahead of the curve.

  

Basic Principles of Music Theory Hostility – Rhythm

Rhythm is King

Rhythm serves as the physical laws of sound within the sphere of every song. It creates musical coherence in an otherwise chaotic dust storm of sound much like physics provides the scientific models that help make sense of the physical world we don’t understand. What’s beautiful is that we can dictate the rules of this particular type of physics.

Rhythm takes precedence above other aspects of music for me. I mainly play bass and drums. Two thirds of those instruments are the rhythm anchors in most forms of music. I practiced drums and bass for around a decade before I picked up a guitar. When I did, I hit the ground running. Drums have a unique and challenging learning curve despite how those drummer jokes go. Once I overcame it and became a competent drummer, learning other instruments was easy. The rhythm I developed on drums translated perfectly to everything else.

rhythmic war cry, rhythmic drumming by shamans, rhythmic drilling of the soldiers, and contemporary professional combat forces listening to the heavy rhythmic rock music [...] all use the ability of rhythm to unite human individuals into a shared collective identity

I strongly believe that rhythm is king. Rhythm develops basic musical building blocks. In my case, I developed the mechanics in my hands to handle different techniques and different permutations and soon, solid songs followed. It merely took an innate discerning ear to separate the wheat from the chaff. I can fool a lot of people into thinking I know what I’m doing musically simply because I’m confident in my rhythm. My closely held songwriting secret: I keep a look out for anything that sounds interesting as my fingers move about randomly across the fingerboard. No joke…except that my method for creativity is a joke. My redemption lies in fact that we are much less likely to excuse bad rhythm than a loose grasp of music theory.

Rhythm gets us to take action. Rhythm is everywhere from your heartbeat to the mundane administrative tasks of corporate structure and to the most esoteric of religious rituals. Things get done once a rhythm is established. It’s as basic a form as it gets: order.

“Rhythm is the basis of life, not steady forward progress. The forces of creation, destruction, and preservation have a whirling, dynamic interaction.” – Kabbalah

Related articles

• Introducing Funk (camcash21.wordpress.com)
• What Really Makes Rhythms Human? New Research Investigates Perception, Preference, Tech (createdigitalmusic.com)
• Concrete/abstract Distinctions in Music (centretruths.wordpress.com)

Basic Principles of Music Theory Hostility – Emphasizing Emotion

[This is part of my Basic Principles of Music Theory Hostility series. Check back for new posts!]

Touch at a Distance

RadioLab is a great podcast that I’m a huge fan of. One in particular, Musical Language spends some time on the idea that ”sound is touch at a distance” as quoted from Anne Fernald. A study examined how people speak to babies. When anyone praises an infant by saying “Good baby,” they universally drop the pitch of the last word – everyone. In essence, we sing a tiny song to babies that sends a message of praise. Do you hear it? “Good baby.” They’re too young to understand the words but they understand the music as praise.

Are there other tiny songs exist that convey messages like that? They may only be limited to our emotional range. What if we could map out the possible emotions with technical definitions? Assign models to every nuanced emotion like any discipline. Could we analyze music and understand what the music is saying on an emotional level? Should we focus on that rather than the obtuse “major scales are happy scales” and “minor scales are sad scales?”

Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought. – E. Y. Harburg

Pursuing Emotionally Emphasized Music Theory

Emphasizing the emotional part of music instead of dry key signature abstractions would help integrate distinct human emotions into theory. It could be used as a map to navigate an obvious part of music. Whether contrived or spontaneous, emotions are elicited by key signatures and action elicited by time signatures. It’s possible with the right combination of emotional key signatures along with the right rhythm to inspire something significant to the listener. Shouldn’t that be the real focus?

I put together a spreadsheet that lays out the emotions of certain key signatures. This gives an idea of what I’m grasping for although it’s far from thought out well. I stole the information from http://www.wmich.edu/mus-theo/courses/keys.html.

Emotions of Key Signatures

[This is part of my Basic Principles of Music Theory Hostility series. Check back for new posts!]

Related articles

• Basic Principles of Music Theory Hostility – Introduction (slightcurvature.wordpress.com)
• Basic Principles of Music Theory Hostility – Language (slightcurvature.wordpress.com)
• Music Theory: ¡Oh yeah! (soundtangent.com)
• Music Theory and where to learn it?(gearslutz.com) 

Slight Curvature Art Theory

It’s hard for me to stay focused on any one thing for too long.  That’s a flaw of mine that I’m reminded about every so often.  It’s been a pitfall in my career and schooling.  The one place I think it was not a pitfall and it was an advantage is in art.

With music it has been a blessing to be scatter-brained like I am.  I can stereotype a wide range of musical styles.  I can play metal, rock, jazz, Spanish style, ambient, symphonic, and even cinematic type music.  Our last album shows the range pretty well.  But I also have spent much of my youth drawing comic books.

I still draw today and I’m much better than I ever was growing up.  Being a comic book artist is still something I fantasize about.  I’ve created many sequential comic book pages telling stories of revenge mainly.  What else do I know about at 16yrs old?

Haven't finished this guy yet, but you can tell he's going after someone. Imagine Cut-Up playing in the background.

The point is that in art being scatter-brained has proven useful.  Not only do I have a larger pool of experience to draw from, but I also can appeal to many more people as my interests are incredibly diverse.

That’s the thing about art.  It’s all subjective.  To me, these kinds of drawings are what I can create and musically you can hear the range.  If I were to say I was just a guitarist or just an artist, that would be selling myself short.  It would also be selling you short by not sharing all of my abilities.

My first 10,000 hours dedicated to a craft was to drawing.  The results are shown here.  Let me know what you think.

Related articles

• Scott McCloud on comics (standinfreedom.wordpress.com)
• PSU-Comic Art Careers (pluginin.org)

Improvising/making new ideas

Improvising is how I come up with all of my ideas.  This video illustrates that.  You can see at the end of the video that I start stringing together chords to make an interesting transition.   Although there is no song around this idea, you can see what the process looks like for me.

Also, you can see in this video what my whole setup looks like.  I have my guitar, laptop with Guitar Rig, Reaper (DAW) and my tube-pre to warm up the tone since I’m recording direct.  Take away message:  Don’t get brainwashed into thinking you have to have thousands of dollars of gear to make good music.

Here’s another instrumental rock/prog  band (The Lofty Oaks) that also use Reaper in their recordings http://theloftyoaks.com/2012/03/06/gear-review-reaper-4-daw/

Timing is everything

Steve Vai (Photo credit: Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com))

Put in the Time

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a few books that I really like, Blink and Outliers.  Outliers I really like because he talks about successful people and what made them successful.   He states that to become an expert in any field, you need a minimum of 10,000 hours in the field.  Do the math.  If you dedicated 40 hours a week, that would take roughly 5 years to reach.  Or it would take you a decade at half the speed.  When you think about it more, you realize that the only time you really have to get this kind of time in is when you’re growing up.  Summers off, home by 3pm and weekends with no responsibilities is the perfect storm of necessary circumstances to get those 10,000 hours in.

Be in the Right Time

Malcolm Gladwell points out another important factor in becoming successful.  Not only do you have to be an expert (with your 10,000 hours), but you also need to be in the right place at the right TIME.  Timing is huge.  Think about it.  One of the examples in Gladwell’s book was Bill Gates.  He put in his 10,000 hours of programming in one of the few places on earth at a time when programming was not available to everyone like it is today.  He was literally one out of a small handful that even had access to the university that had a computer to be able to program.  Also, it was a time where computers were not as widely used.  So the market was still very fresh and unexplored.  He was in his early twenties.  That’s a time in your life when your mind is most open.  You haven’t had life lock you in your ways yet. So with his 10,000 hours and a virgin market, he already had the most important parts of success in his back pocket.

Steve Vai’s Time and Timing

Thinking about my life, I have done this with two fields so far, music and businesses/entrepreneurial pursuits.  When I think of my guitar heroes when I was growing up there is one that stands out that had the same set of circumstances;  Steve Vai.  He got his 10,000 hours in early in life too.  Plus when he was still a teenager he was working with Frank Zappa.  There he got even more time in.  Also, Steve Vai dominates a genre of music that he helped make as big as it is today, Instrumental Rock.  At the time, instrumental rock wasn’t really much of a scene.  But Steve Vai, went from Frank Zappa to Alcatraz to David Lee Roth and Whitesnake.  All of those side projects got his name out in the guitar community.  He had Flexible out, but it really wasn’t that much of a success to speak of bluntly.  But after his big name projects, he put out Passion and Warfare.  That was a polished masterpiece at the time.  A time that was not dominated by one name really.  It was just a loose type of genre that people didn’t really think twice of.  After Passion and Warfare, that solidified Vai’s career in the genre and helped propel the genre upward.  That’s why today if someone tries to dominate instrumental rock with technical prowess like Vai did, they will fail.  Every time.  The subgenre is the new genre. The ‘classics’ created genre’s in a broad sense but the nature of the internet is to push out into the fringes.

Timing was huge for Vai.  He had to capitalize at that time or the genre and his chosen style would not survive.  What helped him do it?  10,000 hours before he was 20 years old and impeccable timing! 

“Treading Trodden Trails…”

That’s why any Vai copycats will fail miserably. Maybe they’ll fail as well because a lot of uber-fans set their sights too heavily on the Vai/Satriani personality than they do on actually trying to present something unique. It’s more of a karaoke day-dream. People write original songs but do so with Vai/Satriani on the brain and secretly want to be them and that traps them in that bubble they obviously can’t get out of.  That’s why anyone in instrumental rock that sounds like Satriani, Vai, Petrucci or any of the big names will fail. They’ll be as popular as Star Wars fan fiction, and the fan fiction will never compare to the first time people set their eyes to the very first Star Wars movie in the theater. People’s minds will never be blown like that again if you only focus on the past. Why?  Because it’s already been done and the people who did it are still big!!!  Give it up if you’re a copycat.  It’s over.  You’re chasing a ghost.  Technical skill is necessary, but it won’t get you where it got the big guys.  You’re too late.

Related articles

• The 10,000 Hour Rule (optionsanimal.com)
• http://anandbenegal.wordpress.com/tag/steve-vai/
• http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/malcolm-gladwells-new-book-the-outliers/  (Outliers-Malcolm Gladwell)
• http://compassioninpolitics.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/my-takeaways-from-malcolm-gladwells-outliers/ (Outliers-Malcolm Gladwell)
• http://johnmusicnz.wordpress.com/ (Guitar shredding)

Shred outside the box

I’ll be following this post up with some technique building exercises.

Odds are pretty good if you did a search and ended at this article, you’re looking to improve your chops or get some kind of edge in your playing.  Good.  I can get you there.  I can do you one better, I can get you there and make you stand out when you are there.

Here’s the thing though, when you start shredding and playing notes very fast (ie tapping, hammer-ons, pull-offs, legatos etc), your playing starts sounding like everyone else that can play fast.  Let me ask you a question first though.  What do you gain by being able to sound like everyone else besides technically being proficient?  I believe you gain nothing.  Being in the same category as everyone else is not an advantage.  It’s a disadvantage.   Why would I want to listen to a guy that sounds like Van Halen?  I can just listen to Van Halen.

So what do you do then?  Here are a few ideas to start with.

First, when you start sounding like someone, stop.  Just stop what you’re doing and do something else.  The wrong feeling is being proud that you can do what someone else does.  You can be happy you can do it, but then move on and scrap whatever idea makes you sound like whoever it is.  Seriously.  Stop.  It’s pointless.  You’re a unique person, so sound like one.

Second, when you practice, practice what you ultimately want to be doing.  What I mean by that is this; if you want to be the king of soloing, then practice everything that involves soloing (ie scales, techniques, improvising, etc).  If you want to be writing albums, then you have a different task ahead.   You need to be practicing writing songs.  So you need to be doing more improvising and rhythm practicing more than anything else.

So with those two things in mind lets go over some basic shred techniques.

Playing an odd number of notes per string. 

-Pick a scale any scale and play 3 notes per string.

-5 notes per string

-mix 3 and 5 together, meaning one string gets 3 notes the one after gets 5

An odd number of notes per string sets up your pick to just be able to go to the next string much easier.  That’s why playing an odd number of notes per string can end up sounding incredibly fast with practice.

Now do this exercise and the second you sound like anyone else, change what you’re doing.

Your comfort zone is you compromising

I want to get outside of my comfort zone.  When I was younger and taught guitar, my students would force me outside of my comfort zone all the time by asking me to teach them how to play this song or that song.  It forced me to learn things that weren’t in the genre I liked.  It was good for me to get well-rounded.  But now as an adult with a full-time job and no longer teaching music, I play what I want.  Which means I’m in my comfort zone a lot.  I need more growth.

I spoke about this with my brother last week and here are some ideas we’re kicking around.

1)      pick a genre that’s outside our norm and be able to stereotype it within a month.  Weekly progress would be needed to make sure the work is being done.

2)      pick books outside of our normal reading to learn about new subjects

Those were the biggest ones to come from the discussion.

It’s good to venture out and expand.  When you’re younger,  you do this kind of thing all the time!  The whole world is new.  You then put together a picture of how the world works and then you start operating in that.  Then you kind of work within the framework.  I want to see if we can rewrite our framework and bust out the edges and maybe make a few new synapse connections elsewhere.  I don’t like to believe that I’m done learning or expanding.  I’d like us to keep pushing ourselves to do more, learn more and be more.  Why settle for what I already have?  There’s no way that I’ve learned “enough.”

Plenty of psychology experiments and research point to the evidence that I’m pretty much set in my ways now, but I think I want to fight it.  I saw my parents get set in their ways and when the world changed around them, they were left with a perception that no longer served them well.  In that time my brother and I were young enough and not set in our ways to capitalize on how the rules got rewritten and we profited from this economic downturn.  So why couldn’t we do it with music and our understanding of other subjects as well?  Is it too late?  I don’t think so.  Here’s why.

Last month we did this RPM challenge and released 11 new songs.  If you compare those songs with the songs we did on our first album, you’ll notice a big difference stylistically and technically.  We play with authority in whatever style the song happens to be in.  The playing and songwriting are more mature.  We’re not trying to “prove” anything (chops or image-wise).  We’ve come to the conclusion that we simply don’t care what anybody thinks.  If you like our music, listen.  If you don’t, find someone else.  You’re not going to hurt our feelings.  But we won’t write for you.  We will write for us and you can come along for our ride.  You’re with us, not the other way around.  The only we, is my brother, me and anybody that accepts what we do.  We choose to do whatever we want.

Related articles

• Stepping outside the comfort zone (jennykellerford.wordpress.com)
• Success is not safe (beccabutcher.wordpress.com)
• Leading beyond your comfort zone (cbsnews.com)
• Moving Out of My Comfort Zone (gloriawalters.wordpress.com)

RPM Challenge – Finished!

Release the doves! Cue the confetti and trumpets! We finished writing a new album this month. All done within February. A musical snapshot.

A Family Portrait of Sound

Our new songs aren’t perfect. They need a lot of work with arranging and mixing. But after listening to them for a while, the imperfections grew on me. It adds a natural dimension that is lacking in a lot of high production music. If highly produced music is the cover girl model, our new album is the family portrait with mom’s eyes closed and the older brother giving the younger brother bunny ears.

No Time For Ego

It sometimes takes months to get a song where we want it. We decided to try this rushed, no-time-to-do-anything approach to writing an album. Only after we finished it I realized that if you give me time and space to think, to think about what I want to write…my ego takes over and I write hard rock type music. If you give me no time, the result is very different. It’s more scattered and free. 

If you take a strong spring and apply pressure to it with your hands, its tendency is to violently uncoil. Perhaps that’s where jazz derives their inspiration; pressure. Apply enough pressure to your writing, it confines into a volatile ball of sound potential.

Take a listen!  

Related articles

• RPM Challenge Update (slightcurvature.wordpress.com)
• Taking a Chance on the RPM Challenge (slightcurvature.wordpress.com)
• RPMChallenge.com
• More info on RPM Challenge 2012: press release (justanotherfolksinger.com)

Conquering New Ground–Where I’ve come from and where I am now

My relationship with music has changed a lot since I was kid.  When I was a teenager I used to just put a record on the turntable and listen.  I’d only listen to the music.  I would rarely do anything else while listening.  I was a sponge back then.  Listening to my dad’s old records, going to Sam Goody and Music Trader and listening to CDs for free.  I couldn’t afford to buy CDs back then so I could only listen for free.  That forced me to listen to all kinds of music.  Guess how I’d decide on what to listen to?  I’d walk to the section in the music store and pick something based on the cover.  That forced me to listen to all kinds of music.

Now I’m older and technology has made listening free (with ads…thanks Capitalism!!!) and easier to get than ever before.  Now I don’t have to take CDs to the clerk and ask if I can listen at the designated listening station.  I can just plug it into my car and go.  But a lot of the tactile enjoyment of having the CD in hand and also selecting completely random music is now gone.  The love of the randomness and enjoyment of finding something totally new are almost gone.  After a while my Pandora station starts to sound stale.  So I switch it to some other station that is stale.  The quality of the sound is diminished too.  The great crystal clear clarity that I once enjoyed isn’t present with streaming.  It’s a sad state.

The only thing that gets better over time is my relationship with my instrument.  Sometimes I get in a funk and I can’t come up with anything cool for weeks at a time.  But then I’ll hit my stride and every time I touch the guitar I better have that thing recorded because I’m walking on water.  It’s been years since I’ve ever given my technique and ability a second thought.  I remember when I used to nitpick my alternate picking technique or wonder how the hell am I ever going to be able to tap like Eddie Van Halen or even play rhythm like Metallica.  Now I don’t care.  I can do that.  I can write music.  I have finally gotten to a point where my thoughts can be manifest in time through a song.  I can elicit an emotion with a chord sequence.  It took me years to get to, but I’m here.  Everything I set my mind to when I was younger has been accomplished.  I’ve had to set new goals and new targets to have new frontiers to go into.

That next frontier you’re going to see tomorrow morning.