When I first heard Kevin’s music I was immediately transfixed.  That rarely happens to me.  I knew instantly that I was listening to something completely original sounding.  This very rarely happens to me. I was also gripped by the depth and richness of the musicality. I listened to it several times and then thought… hey I wonder if we could do something interesting together.  I had no idea what we would do.  But I had a feeling that I really should contact Kevin and suggest it.  I could hear that although we approach the guitar totally differently and that he was obviously very acoustic, and I very electric, that on an artistic level, there was a real connection there.  So I emailed him and suggested we talk about a possible collaboration of some kind.

We booked a studio session for Nov 2010 as I was going to be in the U.S. during that time.  As the session approached we emailed and agreed that we were not going to have any compositions or any preset musical ideas.  Our concept was loosely that we would improvise with the aim of making it sound like a composition, but that was all. I found myself in the strange position of being a week away from a recording session and having no idea at all, what we were going to do.  That’s not something I’d ever done before.  But I remember Kevin saying he had a strong feeling that something good would happen.

When we entered the studio we started recording as soon as we picked up our guitars and I remember thinking, well it could be useful to record while we experiment and work out how we’re going to approach this.  But that idea went out of my head by the end of the first four minute piece we played.  It was immediately clear to me that what we had played was a finished piece. Every piece that followed was like that, finished and complete. There was no question of experimenting or needing to work anything out. We took a short break between each track long enough to say, “who’s going to start?” or “shall we start this one with a tempo?” or “why don’t we change instrument/sound” and then we would be straight into the next piece. I have never experienced anything like it. So each piece on this album is a first take, completely improvised, not based on anything prewritten with no overdubs.

As we played I knew what we were creating was something special, it felt very organic and yet we were going to places in the music which normally just don’t happen in improvisation.  We were ending up in musical places that normally only happen when the music is carefully composed. Of course as is usual when improvising, we were listening very closely to each other and reacting to what each other played from moment to moment, but there was this whole other level happening where strong compositional elements emerged in the music as we played.  Listening back it is this which I find most central to what makes this music unique.

The type of sounds you choose to work with will have a big effect on the sorts of imaginary place the listener will invoke.  So if I use tiny incidental sounds recorded with a microphone a couple of centimetres away, even though you might not know what the sound is, it may evoke a feeling of intimacy and perhaps calmness.  Where as if I base the sounds on something large and metallic, with considerable physical movement involved its likely to have a very different effect. Even if I heavily process these so that they sound nothing like what they were, the place they create is likely to be colder, and perhaps even menacing.

What find particularly interesting is the use of sound which are not specific and can’t be identified exactly.  This is because it invites the listener to invent a place for the sounds.

There are other ways to invoke the imagination with non-musical sounds. If you collage various sounds that could never fit with each other in real life another interesting thing can happen. It can be like being in one place while thinking about something else, which is something we all do. Or it can be like travelling through places, while various different thoughts pass through your mind, some related to where you are and some not.  Collaging sounds can evoke all sorts of interesting things and states of mind, and again often to do with real or imaginary places.

One of the central points of interest for me in this process is that using sounds can engage the listener’s imagination in a very creative way.  The place evoked by the sounds is likely to be an imaginary one and this becomes a creative act by the listener.  If the music then inhabits this imaginary place, the listener is creatively collaborating with me in the music in an interesting way. Although I think there can be ‘objective’ elements in music, which to me, can be extremely important, the subjective elements present huge imaginative possibilities for the listener and player.

Of course it works in the same way when improvising with or writing for other musicians.  If I trigger samples of unidentified sounds or sound collages with the guitar while improvising with another musician, the music they make can inhabit whatever place these sounds evoke in their own minds.  This will of course affect how they hear the music and how they play.

View out of new house window

Have moved to the new house and finished setting up new studio.  The new location is fantastic, on an island in the middle of a river with road access and only an hour from London by car or train.  The surroundings are inspiring, beautiful trees along the water and birds flying everywhere.  A great place to compose and record as well as an excellent setting for workshops.

So I decided to draw together all the ideas I’ve learned and discovered over the years to help students move forward in ways that fulfill their potential.  Many of them need demonstrating so I won’t explain them here, however I can outline some of the concepts that underly them.  Grasping these concepts alone can greatly raise your chances of success in this area.

So I’ll start with the first one here and plan to add more as time goes on.

Its important to consider the fact that the key to all good technique, whether its playing very fast scale passages or slow blues, is developing and maintaining detailed control.  In fact reaching an accomplished level of technique in any style can be defined in this way. There are specific ways to facilitate this.

Its first important to establish in your mind, what areas of technique you actually need, to express what you have to say on the instrument.  If you try to practice every possible area of technique, not only will you spread your time too thinly, but organizing it in a useful way would be virtually impossible.  If you want to actualize your playing potential, you need to direct the time you can give to practice, efficiently into the appropriate areas.  If you get this wrong you’ll waste a lot of time and effort without seeing the results you could be seeing.

Below are some things to consider when determining what kinds of areas you need to practice.

For improvisors:

If you are primarily an improvisor some of the skills your fingers need are quite specific. You have to be ready to do a big range of different things at any moment.  You never know what’s going to happen next, so you can’t rely on set patterns or things you’ve worked out in advance.  You have to be able to play whatever comes into your head and that will react to the music, which will be different every time.  This takes a certain kind of technique and practice.

Some types of improvised expression need a lot of speed some don’t.  Some types needs a lot of detailed articulation, some less so.  Some need harmonic agility but not others.  All need an able ear.

For non-improvisors:

If improvising is not such a big part of your playing, or not part of your playing at all, then you will need to concentrate on other areas.  Some of the things you play might be quite different from anything anyone would or could improvise. What you are concerned with is being able to play sets of ideas, which you have worked out or learned, as naturally as possible with as much feel as possible, while keeping the execution as close to the intended idea as possible.  This takes a certain kind of technique and practice.

Some of these styles require a lot of fast playing, others almost none.  Some of these styles are primarily about detailed articulation, others not so much.  Some players combine several different styles, some only one.

I’m stating the obvious here, but for a reason.

You need to examine very carefully what you do play, or what you want to be able to play.  This is the starting point for establishing exactly which areas, out of the incomprehensibly vast areas that actually exist, you need to focus on in practice.

I can’t emphasize how important this process is if you want to reach your potential.  A lot of young players make this mistake of thinking they can cover everything, that its indeed important to cover everything. Or that they don’t know what they might need to play in the future so they’d better cover everything.  This is the wrong way of looking at things.

Its easy to prove this to yourself, buy just comparing the best players of different styles you know of – try some famous ones.  You’ll see that part of what makes them so good, is that they sound different from each other – they don’t sound like anyone else.  They have found their own road and travelled so far down that road that no one else can follow them.  That, by definition, means they have concentrated on some areas more than others.  They have found the areas that are important to what they want to say and put their time into those.

The term “Jack of all trades and master of none” really does apply here.  Some young players are so star struck by their favourite players that they believe they are capable of playing anything.  The myth is that these god like  players can play anything brilliantly, but they just choose out of all that, to play what they want.  Its important to realise that however good these people are, they are human beings with human limitations.  This is a myth.  No rock player for example, however good, can play jazz as well as a great jazz player.  No jazz player, however good, can play rock as well as a great rock player.

The reason is that these two disciplines are fundamentally different, they consist of different skills, different musical languages, different sensibilities and different mind sets.

You might be a rock player or jazz player who plays classical as well.  Its a mistake to think you can be equally brilliant at both.  Choose one and use the other only if it will in some way help your primary focus.

Once you have your focus you can look at some of the other important factors in how to spend your practice time.  As I said above, the specifics of these need to be demonstrated, but the underlying concepts can be explained.  I plan to cover these in turn in future posts.

Give up listening to any of the music you usually listen to.  If you normally listen to rock or jazz, spend three months listening to nothing but Stravinsky, Stockhausen and Bartok alternatively, spend that time listening to tribal chants from Niger, Bulgarian folk and Japanese Shakuhachi music.  If you normally listen to rock and country, listen to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett.  You get the picture.  Become immersed, completely in this different music.

Spend a month or two listening to this new music every day, and don’t listen to any of your normal music.  Then pick up your guitar and play along, join in, become assimilated.  Try to play what they play. You’ll probably play rubbish.  Keep going.  Even after some time playing along, its more than likely you’ll still play half formed infantile meanderings compared to the musicians on the recordings.  Stop playing and listen to the music for another month, keeping in mind what you learned about the gaps between what you can play and what’s happening in the music.

A month later, play along again only this time play your old style to it, be that rock, jazz or whatever.  Bring your baggage into their world and dump it.  More than likely you’ll have made a hell of a mess.  Try harder.  Try to make your old style fit this new music (which shouldn’t be that new to you by now).  Take some little piece of what you find into yourself.  Continue with this for two weeks.

Next, don’t listen to anything for a month, but you must play and practice every day.  Only play unaccompanied (ie no band or backing music) and stay with what ever new ideas you picked up, don’t play any of your old style at all (not even as a warm up).  Your task is to get used to any new ideas you’ve picked up and try to extend them.

After this month is over, go back to your usual music and ways of playing for a month.  Then do the steps above again.

You will probably find that none of these new ideas come into your playing during the months that you play ‘normally’.  But don’t be disheartened, year later some little strands of originality may emerge.  You’ve found a place to start, you’ve got a foot in the door, and it will only get better from there.

To learn how to play jazz you have to learn a lot about how music works and that takes serious study and you have to get very good on your instrument. To be able to really play jazz though – you have to learn all this so well that you don’t think about it when you play.  Its just like learning a language.  Say your native language is English and you want to learn to speak French.  You have to learn all the vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar etc… But to be able to really speak it well – you have to learn all this so well that you don’t think about it.  When you are talking to someone you aren’t thinking about sentence structure and when you play jazz its exactly the same.

Every good jazz player knows: if you are thinking you are not playing.  You are basically playing what you hear, what comes into your head and the musical sounds that form in your head are based on how the music makes you feel.  Of course to be able to do this does take years of study and practice and I think this is why people sometimes think jazz is intellectual music.  But to say that is to misunderstand what is actually happening for most jazz musicians when they play.

Yes of course a jazz player has a fleeting thought here and there about which scale to use or what chord is coming next, but primarily they are immersed in the feeling of the music, and reacting to that on an emotional level from moment to moment, this is the essence of what good improvising is all about.  So its primarily not an intellectual activity, but an emotional one.

If you understand what these scales are made of (which is actually quite simple) and also how chords are constructed (which is equally simple), it will be obvious which scale fits with which chord – no memorizing will be necessary beyond that.

It’s similar with learning scales. If you understand how scales are constructed, in other words what one scale contains compared to another scale, learning them will be much easier. In understanding them this way, you’ll see that it’s not really a matter of memorizing lots of scales but more like choosing a palette of colours to paint a picture.

Learning the fingering shapes for scales is something you will have to do and this does take some practice. Learning scale shapes, like learning chord shapes, is to a large extent about practising them until they become part of “muscle memory”. In other words, your fingers just know them without you having to think about it.

However, it is important when doing this practice, that you at the same time learn what these scales contain – so that by the time your fingers know the shapes, they also know what the scales contain – without thinking about it. I’ll explain what I mean about this below.

You want to minimise thinking (eliminate it if possible) when you play. This means building in everything you need to the point where you don’t need to think about it. Getting to this stage is just a matter of the right sort of practice.

Knowing what different scales contain is important. It makes it much easier to learn them and use them. What do I mean when I talk about what a scale “contains”?

Each scale contains a set of notes, one of which is the root note. Think of the root note as your home point in the scale. Also, very importantly, realise that the root note of the scale is always the same as the root note of the chord you are playing over at the time. I can’t emphasise enough how important this last point is.

Every other note in the scale is some distance from the root note. This distance defines the sounds of each of the notes in the scale. These “distances” are called intervals.

Each interval has its own sound, and learning these sounds is probably the most important thing any player who wishes to improvise can do.

Knowing how these intervals sound when played over major, minor and dominant 7th chords, gives you the tools you need to use scales effectively. When you know these sounds, it becomes patently obvious which scale to use for which chord. It will become crystal clear, because you’ll know how each interval in the scale will sound over the chord, so it becomes very easy to choose the scale with the intervals you want to hear.

This assumes, of course that your fingers have learned the shapes, and you’ve learned where the intervals are in the shapes – which as I said earlier is very important to do as you practice the shapes.

Using the methods and tools outlined above, you can learn scales in a quick and efficient way, and you’ll know how to use them.

Below I explain why this is and what is at the heart of the problem.

I’m a logic user, when Logic 9 came out I had a look at the features and I found several of them disturbing.  A lot of the new features are catering to players who can’t stay in time, want to ‘fake’ solos by recording at half speed and vocal performances which are micro ‘composed’ by the producer rather than the singer. Sad days for music IMO.

Worse, if you are a jobbing producer or engineer today – you are expected to take music made by a groups of people who can’t play or sing their way out of a paper bag – and make it sound like a polished record. So… Apple with Logic 9 are providing what the market wants, commercially you could say they don’t have a choice.  Or do they?  Apple have in many ways created the direction their products have taken rather than simply responding to the base market demands.  In this case they seem to be abandoning that philosophy and catering for the lowest common denominator.

Who needs a drummer who can keep time right? Who needs a singer that can phrase? Who needs a guitarist who can play in time? These features feed the production of a lot of sterile generic product IMO.

Used ‘ethically’ of course these tools can fix a slip-up in an otherwise fantastic take under tight studio time restrictions. But we all know that they won’t be used like that a lot of the time, they’ll be used to construct technically accurate performances from musicians and singers who don’t have the talent or commitment to their art to produce listenable music any other way.

You can’t stop technical progress though and I’m a fool to rail against it I know. I mean look at the internet, century old newspapers are crumbling before our eyes, replaced by newswire rehashes and blogging – threatening the end of investigative journalism, one of the pillars of democracy. should we be worried?  So who cares if music is crumbling under the same technological steam roller?

I shouldn’t really be worried, good music and musicians will always rise out of the sea of crap what ever happens – look at the Mars Volta for example!  And there are loads of other great bands out there, but I still cringe to see what we are demanding of our studio tools.

Of course its possible to use these new tools in creative ways, but that’s not why they’ve been put in there.  What I have a problem with is using these tools to ‘create’ performances that the listener takes as real (and they will take them as real).

The reason I have a problem with this is partly because its tricking the listening public and I don’t like that. But also because the result is inevitably a sterile version of the real thing.

Real musicians and singers, the good ones, don’t play perfectly. There are small mistakes, but the overall performance has something that goes beyond the technically perfect and imparts something far more valuable to the listener. But you can’t do that unless you can play or sing well in the first place!