The catalyst was his difficulty in answering questions that required him to fragment his thinking about music – and even detach music from its place within the rest of his being/existence. It wasn’t – it seemed – that he was unwilling to. It was that to do so felt somehow dishonest, especially if the question seemed to be loaded with an expectation that a certain fragment of information – whether it be about a particular technique, bit of music theory or piece of equipment – would somehow prove to be the key that unlocks ‘music’.

The tricky thing when teaching is getting across the way that those fragments – which at one level seem to be discrete from one another – are all parts of the same whole, and that the process of learning music is an ongoing discovery of your relationship with music, what it means to you, and what the music ‘is’ that is part of who you are.

There are two contrasting but complementary sides to the idea: a fluidity that makes it impossible to use any language the implies ‘arrival’, but also an overwhelming sense of just how important the ongoing process is. It’s the action of becoming. At its best it overrides the need to ‘look like a badass’ to a room full of bassists, or to pimp a particular piece of gear, or even to make music that other people like. (not that making unlistenable music is an achievement, just that music is too important to be measured by how many people ‘get it‘.)

So it seems to me that the best expression of that journey towards the integration of who you are and how music reflects and influences that is a pyramid. A pyramid where the lower levels are made up of lots of little things -

•  pieces of equipment
•  techniques
•  ideas about which notes fit with which other note

elements that are learned as discrete entities just to make the processes manageable, but which each time you move up a level merge together.

So with music gear, initial thoughts about brands and types of pedals and cables becomes thought about clarity and tone, which in turn become inclinations towards a transparency of creative intention manifest as musical reality.

Likewise theory starts as a disparate collection of notes, scales, arpeggios, chords with ‘rules’ which when explored in context become a series of idiomatic experiences, as you learn what jazz/punk/latin/reggae ‘feels’ like as much as what it’s made up of, which in turn feeds into your mapping of sounds to emotions, experiences, shared cultural reference points and dispositions as music starts to represent who you are and how you see the world.

And finally technique – what starts as a series of stylistically-driven concepts – slap for funk, plectrum for punk and metal, fingerstyle for jazz, palm-muting for reggae – becomes what Michael Manring describes a gestalt – a way of engaging with and experiencing the bass as a whole, (or your instrument of choice) based on understanding its physical parameters and how your manual dexterity unlocks the potential within those parameters for creating sounds that combine with the theory and equipment in the service of expression.

All of the elements that we initially saw as discrete entities still exist. Just as when you talk in your first language as an adult, you think about communicating, not about nouns and adjectives, or how your accent influences people’s perception of you, or whether or not different degrees of vernacular expression are appropriate to the surroundings. You just talk, and completely subconsciously respond to where you are and who you’re talking to, with communication being your goal.

It’s not ‘wrong’ to focus on whatever specific element needs work, just as it’s not wrong to learn a new language, or to try and absorb new concepts and ideas in your first language. The pyramid isn’t a pejorative one, it’s about orientation. The Australian theologian and agitator Dave Andrews is want to say, ‘It’s not where you are, it’s where you’re heading that matters’, and that’s what music learning – and therefor teaching – is all about. Orienting yourself towards that place of integration – of integrity – where music and self and all the elements that contribute towards that are combined. Where the process of making music is one of getting out of the way of the music happening.

It’s not a ‘destination’ – it’s all a journey, and your impression of what the ‘horizon’ is will keep changing as you progress. Embracing that is the first step towards integration, towards convergence.

The process of explaining that can often end up with the people you’re talking to thinking you’re bull-shitting them, trying to come up with some zen bad-ass routine to make yourself look deep. It’s why the format for Beyond Bass Camp fits my teaching approach so well – it’s not one conversation in which I try to explain all of this stuff. It’s 5 days of exploration, that are in and of themselves part of the practice of convergence. Learning by doing, and finding within the structure of the day one of the main convergence points, the place where practice, performance, composition and improvisation all just become the action of making music.

But it was the last session I want to address here, a panel discussion on ‘how many graduates can the music business accomodate?’.

The question is, I think, a false one, given that just about everyone I know who’s doing anything interesting in the world of music right now is doing it outside of the music industry, or at least, independently from the general morass of people clinging to the rigging of that slowly sinking ship, hoping for a deal or a contract, for some work to fall in their lap…

One point I raised that seemed to be a bit of a surprise to some of the people was that of the crisis facing FE and HE colleges thanks to the skewed priorities of the kids they inherit from schools.

Here’s the problem – in almost all school situations, kids in the UK are punished for not doing their work, or even not doing it in the right way. There’s no sense that the consequence of not studying is not knowing. The consequence of not doing what you’re supposed to do in school is punitive punishment – detention, extra homework, stern talkings to etc… all stuff that has pretty much no relevance in the rest of life, and that breeds in kids a mentality that often seeks to do ‘enough’ and beyond that just ‘not get caught’.

Contrast that with the world of music, where the consequence of practice, of dedication, of imagination, of daring, risking and chancing your way into the creative path is just that you stand more chance of writing music that means something to you – and therefor other people – if you’re doing it than not. The consequence of not doing it is that it doesn’t happen. Unless you’re a contract songwriter for a publisher, there are very few situations where there’s any kind of punitive arrangement set up for not being creative. Lack of creative output is a bad enough consequence. ‘You’ end up with nothing to play, nothing to sell, nothing to give away…

So before teaching kids about the mechanics of music, the structure of the dying industry, and some thoughts about creative entrepreneurship and collaborative working principles, perhaps we need to let them fuck up massively and not ‘punish’ them, give them space to forget, to miss things, to be too hung over to make it to class… And then talk them through the alternatives, the advantages of taking responsibility, the subversion of proactivity. Perhaps we should put ‘The Road Less Travelled’ on the reading list for music courses above Donald J Grout’s ‘History Of Western Music’.

The ‘old school’ music industry was is chock full of people in a regressed state of adolescence, with a team of minders and spin doctors clearing up after them, never facing the consequences of their actions, never dealing with grown up encounters, always relying on someone else to pick up the pieces. When they do get caught, a bunch of enabling morons in the press make out like it’s a fantastically rebellious thing to do to get wasted and fall face down in your own puke in the street. Yup, and it’s pretty rock ‘n’ roll when your local homeless drunk does it too…

The problem is, not only is that massively costly in human terms (people who live like that are generally horrible to be around, and are rarely in a position to contribute much to their communities), the cost in financial terms is huge too. ‘Minders’ don’t come cheap, neither do TVs thrown from hotel room windows, cars wrecked – or even drugs bought with “record company money”, and it’s all recoupable of course. (and I’ve not yet heard of a source of fair trade cocaine…)

If we’re doing this ourselves, in collectives, creatively, playfully, experimentally, we can’t be preparing students for a world of work that’s utterly unsustainable. We need to make sure that they aren’t reliant of the ‘machine’ not for a job, nor inspiration nor to cover up their stupid expensive behaviour.

And that is the big challenge facing music schools, not how many grads are going to get jobs with Sony…

So, how do we change things?

The process I outlined in the previous blog post can be reversed when we start working on drawing musical information out of learning someone else’s music.

I often classify this loosely as active vs passive learning.

• Passive learning leads us to learn the song we’re working on, play it like the original, tick that box and move on.
• Active learning asks why the line is the way it is, what lead to it being like that, what the musical elements are the comprise it and how we can make them our own.

So from melodies, we can extract phrases - elements from within the tune or riff or bass-line that are transposable, that we can build variations on, that we can put into other music contexts, we can harmonise to create a different emotional layer on top of the now-unrecognisable line. We can draw out all kinds of material that we can then use in our own music, which hopefully is happening anyway as we build/find context in which to practice the phrases we’ve identified as existing within the melody.

And then, in order to make sure that our own musical prejudices and limitations don’t stop us from discovering the hidden gems in the phrases we found, we can process that material even further by way of applying our ‘parameter and permutation’ approach to the phrases, so see what other patterns are in there, which in turn lead us to less obvious phrases, leading back to melodies…

The combination of having a distinct process for turning ‘music’ into ‘my music’ with a learning approach that demands context for every exercise removes the need for a lot of the questions about ‘where’s the value in this?’ or ‘what’s the point?’ - if the value isn’t apparent in the specific thing you’re practicing, move on and try something else – there’s so much amazing music out there to be found, that spending hours frustrating yourself in exercises that have no apparent learning outcome is just a recipe for being put off the instrument.

By all means dig deep into complex and challenging music – understandable doesn’t mean ‘simple’ it just means that the nature of the outcome is somehow linked to the material being worked on, whoever seemingly complex or basic the start point.

Does that make sense?

Anyone who’s read more than a few words from me about the process of teaching music will know that I’m obsessive about providing a musical context for everything – there are no exercises that should exist outside of an explanation and demonstration of the musical situations in which it works.

However, I do also rely heavily on intervallic permutations to generate ideas away from the age-old practice of transcribing other people’s lines.

Transcribing is a great way of seeing how other musicians employ the mechanics of playing an instrument to create magic, but there’s a layer of organisation underneath that – that of patterns based on ‘parameter and permutation’.

What that means is that we can take a fix set of notes – say one octave of a G Major Scale – and a particular interval – 3rds, for example, and work on all the possible permutations within that, all the while creating new scenarios in which to practice it – how does it work with a latin groove? Try playing a straight rock bassline under a I IV V chord progression – does it work?

What’s important with the contextual stuff is that hearing things that DON’T work is as important as hearing things that do. Why a line fails to work in a particular musical context is a bit part of how we train our ears to ‘hear’ things that work ahead of time, so we can head towards the improvisor’s goal of ‘playing what you hear’.

The other important upshot of contextualising the patterns is that it leads us automatically into the next stage – phrases.

The importance of phrases requires us to understand what improvising is, or more specifically, what it isn’t.

• Improv resolutely is not ‘playing things you’ve never played before’, any more than a conversation is about ‘making up new words as you go along’.
• Improv is playing ‘good things’ that you choose to play in the moment, based on the compendium of ideas, phrases, sounds, techniques and other musical devices that you have at your disposal. (with that in mind, knowing when to stop playing – or not start in the first place – is a great improvisational skill).

Which means that as we start to choose the bits from within the patterns that sound nicest and most useful to us, we begin to build up a library of ideas, phrases that we can call upon when need to, either when improvising, or as the basis for compositions…

Which leads us ever so smoothly into our 3rd stage for ordering musical material – melodies. By which I don’t just mean ‘the top line in the music’ – I’m using it more as a classification where a particular phrase is chosen as a distinct part of the composition. Not a generic or recycled phrase, but a specific element in the song, to be repeated every time that song is played.

So we move from patterns, to phrases, to melodies, allowing our taste and musical sensibility to inform the selection process, thus heightening our musical awareness, not just the speed at which we can zip up and down major scales.

So, how does that map against the way you practice? Does it sound familiar or alien? Questions or observations are most welcome in the comments

OK, this is one of the best presentations on learning music I’ve seen in ages.

I got to play with Evelyn Glennie a few years back, in her studio – she had been talking to Rick Turner about electro-acoustic music, and he’d advised her to talk to me about looping. I went to meet her and talk to her about looping and processing, and demo the Looperlative for her. Her sensitivity to everything we played, every processed element I added to her percussion, was incredible. Her profound deafness was certainly no impediment to her musical performance or her ability to collaborate. Given just how quickly she reacted to every change, and how sensitive her touch was, one could just as easily suggest it was an advantage, based on experiential evidence alone.

What certainly is advantageous is the way that Evelyn has used her profile as a musician and her unique history in studying and performing music to speak about learning music, and learning in general, across the globe. Including the talk embedded below from the Ted Conference.

It’s no overstatement to say that this is one of the finest presentations I’ve ever seen on learning an instrument. Evelyn demonstrates and explains so clearly many of the things I talk about when teaching, particularly the point about learning music in the context of playing music, rather than what I refer to as ‘practicing practicing’ – getting good at musical exercises without rooting them in the magic of playing actual music.

Watch, learn, be inspired:

On the blog post announcing Beyond Bass Camp, Kevin posted a very pertinent question relating to syllabus/curriculum. So here’s an outline of the kind of approach I’ll be taking.

As with everything I teach, much of the content will remain fluid and be based on the needs and personalities of the musicians who attend… Having taught privately now for 20 years, and lead masterclasses of this type for about 6 years, I’ve found that the best format is to have an outline of the ‘approach’ and allow the detail of the content to form itself in response to those needs.

That said, each day long class will be split into 3 two hour sessions.

Contrary to normal methods, we’ll be asking ‘Why’ at the start - So much that goes on in music education fails to look at ‘why’ we do anything:

• Why do we play?
• Why should we ‘learn’ anything?
• Why learn scales?
• Why use particular techniques?
• Why practice the way we do?
• Why play in a particular way?

The answers to these questions will form the basis of the exploration and experimentation of the later sessions. We’ll also – as the weeks go on – be exploring how the terminology of music theory and performance either limits or enhances our understanding of how and why we play what we play. Additionally, we’ll be discussing the musical backgrounds and aspirations of the people on the course, to consider how those influence the kind of questions we ask going into the process of learning the instrument.

Session 2 each time will be about applying practical exercises and exploratory methodology to the answers to those questions from part 1:

• Developing ways of expanding on the things we already do well.
• Recognising the things we do automatically, rather than the things we consciously choose to do because that are ‘what’s best for the music’.
• Pinpointing ways of building exercises that put musicality and expression at the heart of our practice time – finding ways to develop the right kind of skills to play the way we hear in our heads.
• Combining dexterity with technical breadth and depth,
• Linking technique with expressive potential and harmonic possibility.
• Connecting the right kind of approach to the desired outcome – e.g. how practice aimed at performing pre-written music differs from practice designed around building a vocabulary for improvisation, or how stylistic preference/focus can change our practice choices.

The consequence of this will be us finding our own filters in defining what are the right things to practice and work on, learning from each other in that process of discovery…

Session 3 will be about 2 things – Student Questions and Playing/Application.

It’ll be a time to show things you’re working on, get group input, to ask questions that haven’t been dealt with, or about things that weren’t clear, and to try out some group playing in duos/trios/quartets/quintet. While the general atmosphere will be one in which questions, queries and comments can be raised at any point during the day, this section will provide us with plenty of space to make sure the things that are supposed to be clear, and the things that are supposed to be exploratory/open-ended are defined as such with an outline of how to explore them, moving forward.

If you’ve got any more questions about the kind of things that will be covered, please post them in the comments below:

Because so much that happens in music education is based on a model established for teaching classical repertoire, the emphasis is hugely on “Is It Right?” - the notes on the page are the right notes, any other notes are wrong notes, and there are pre-established measures of what are the ‘right‘ ways to play a piece, what are the ‘right‘ techniques to use… The fact that at some point they were were established as ‘right‘ because of someone’s idea of ‘good‘ has been lost somewhere down the years – the subjective aesthetic assessment of a piece of music by the person playing it is no longer a factor in deciding whether the performance is worthwhile, meaningful, pleasing or anything else…

Which, if you’re playing your own music – be it rock, jazz, pop, funk, soul, folk or open improv – is clearly nonsense. The question of “Is It Good?” is far more important than some externally imposed notion of ‘right’. The history of musical innovation is full of people doing the ‘wrong‘ thing and finding that it was ‘good‘… Better in fact than when they tried to play it ‘right‘. But in the classical tradition, that space for innovation was the sole preserve of that lofty class of musician; the composer. In truth, we’re all composers.

Composition and improvisation are very much a part of a healthy beginning in music - in fact, even kids learning orchestral instruments often write music of their own until the culture they operate in impresses upon them that they should really be playing the music of the ‘masters’, not trifling themselves with writing ‘inferior’ music. For too long, composition has been something that people grow into, or are ‘allowed’ to do once they reach a certain point. Rather than seeing writing and improvising music as two strands in the thread of musical development, they’ve been hijacked as destinations.

So it’s something that’s integral to the way I teach – encouraging students to make their own assessment of whether what they are doing is ‘good’, and developing better listening skills to be able to really hear what that are playing rather than what they think they are playing. It’s one of the huge gifts I’ve had from looping – when what you play loops round and comes back at you as part of the music you’re performing at the time, you get pretty good pretty quick at assessing it, adjusting it, and making sure that it is ‘good’ – you’re going to be hearing it a lot!

And it was also a big part of the motivation behind The Recycle Collective; my currently-on-hiatus improv music night, in which I brought together different musicians to play improvised music together, with no notion of what was ‘right’ or ‘acceptable’, just a shared desire that what we do be ‘good’. In that situation anything I choose to play is about adding to, shaping, building and moving the music towards an evolving shared idea of what ‘good’ is. It too was one of the best learning environments I’ve ever been in.

At the Beyond Bass Camp masterclasses, there’ll be plenty of time and space to consider what we think is good, get better at listening and develop the control to make happen that which we’ve decided is ‘the best‘.

The title of this post is taken from a book by American futurist and Christian writer , Tom Sine. The thrust of his book is that by chasing ’stuff’ – bigger/better/faster/more – we end up missing the magic in life, that which we were born to do.

As musicians, the parallels are many – I know so many musicians who are downcast not because their music is in any way ‘bad’ but because in the pursuit of someone else’s idea of what music needs to be in order to succeed, they’ve ended up playing music they have no belief in, love for, or commitment to.

The idea that to ‘make it’ as a musician, they need to play the right kind of hip music, write songs that work on the radio or play music that promoters will understand has crippled so many musicians from playing the music that they really love, and ironically, has resulted in music of far worse commercial potential cos it’s starting life as music that even the creator of it doesn’t believe in.

They have, in short, settled for a vision of ‘more’ and missed the best that music has to offer; creatively, personally, spiritually, socially…

The ideas behind Beyond Bass Camp stem directly from my own journey into playing the music that I love, the music that motivates me, the music that soundtracks the world as I see it. It’s not about me having all the answers, but more about providing a space and a starting point for questioning the assumptions that so much music making is built on, and then providing the tools and time to explore what’s possible creatively if we let go of other people’s vision for how music should be and start a new kind of relationship with the sounds our instrument can make, and how they interface with the music we hear in our heads.

The picture up top is taken from a site called ‘Someone Once Told Met’, where people are photographed with something that someone once told them. Something wise, something funny, something weird… Mine, as you can see, says ‘First Prize Is Ten Years On A Bus’. It’s a quote from my good friend Kennan Shaw, and is his description of the lunacy of the ‘dream’ of becoming a successful musician.

I asked a question the other day on Twitter, whether or not people thought that music education (in Britain specifically, but Twitter has no national boundaries) was complicit in peddling the myths of fame and superstardom, in collusion with ‘Big Music’ (a few people asked what ‘Big Music‘ meant – I used it in the lineage of terms like ‘Big Tobacco‘, ‘Big Food‘ and ‘Big Pharma‘ to refer to the multinational corporations who operate businesses on an international level making millions and, generally, caring little for much beyond profit margins.)

The reason I asked it is that my own answer to that is very definitely yes. Having been around music schools a lot, and having studied in one, there’s a heck of a lot of talk about ‘the music business’… I’ve even got ScotVec modules in it to tell me that I know all about the workings of the PRS/MCPS/Record Deals/Lawyers etc.

All of which is fine, but much of which serves to mask that which is most important and special about studying music full time. The music!

The problem with the way that the music industry is often talked about in that setting is that a causal link is established between learning the ‘right’ kind of music/playing/whatever, and ’success’ – success being fairly tightly defined as ‘getting a deal’ and all the music industry stuff that goes with that – making albums, touring, promo, etc. etc.

What’s never addressed is the toxicity of that to ‘art’. Or the alternatives to it, both culturally and in terms of building a music career on anything other than record deal dependency.

So in everything I do as music teacher, I try to put art first – not out of any high falutin’ lofty idealism, but because what the ‘industry’ has to offer isn’t worth the sacrifice of not playing the music you love. So few people in the world are good enough at guessing the taste of others as to consistently meet the needs of a market that we really are much better off playing the music that matters most to us. That could be covers or it could be original. It could be chamber music or it could be death metal. There’s no qualitative distinction between styles or genres that’s even worth the time it takes to hear someone pontificate about it, but there is a difference between any kind of music done for the love of it, and music made in the mistaken belief that we’re going to make millions out of it and that will make us happy.

So at B-B-C, the focus will be on making the music you were born to make. The music you love, the music that provides the soundtrack to the world as you see it. Then we can go and find an audience who shares something of our vision.