Adam Rafferty’s Blog – Guitar and Spirit

Eating Frogs…mmmm Yummy!

Greetings friends. Wow, it has been a whirlwind of activity here on my end….so much to talk about.

I recently picked up a personal development & productivity book by Brian Tracy called “Eat That Frog” and it has been a life changer.

My most productive periods in life have been when I have essentially focused on something and allowed the rest of life to fall apart. Yet, I somehow would feel guilty when I did that. For example, when I dove into solo acoustic guitar I simply let EVERYTHING else fall apart.

And, I find that I have returned to my standard M.O. of feeling overwhelmed and spending my days taking care of little tasks trying to “put out little fires “. The problem is – the feeling of overwhelment and the hyper activity of taking care of little tasks like email, phone calls, laundry end up happening instead of the 2 most important things – practice guitar and organize gigs!

Brian Tracy’s message is unique – you can never get it all done, so do the big important stuff and just let the little stuff fall apart. WOW. In hindsight, I saw that’s what I have done in my most productive periods.

According to him – the most successful people have the ability to figure out which action is the most important to do at any given time. You may find you have “10 to-do’s” on you to-do list – but ONE action will be TEN TIMES as productive as the other 9.

He calls this “eating the biggest, ugliest frog first”.

Let’s see if you can spot the most productive task.

For example:

Go To Cleaners
Buy Cat Food
Call Mom
Sew Hole in Shorts
Wash Dishes
****SEND CD TO MAGAZINE FOR REVIEW ****
Go To Post Office
Jog
Send email to dad
Re-organize bookshelf

He approaches this basic premise from many different angles. I am reading, re-reading and highlighting.

How often I find myself getting stuck in the B.S. tasks!!!

Allow me to share a personal story. For years, I have had a dedicated web server. Yep, I was a hobbyist programmer / web geek designer and would do the occasional site for friends / family and then host them for a few bucks a month.

Well, multiply that by about 15 friends and before I knew It – I was accountable to 15 people. I’m a nice guy, have a hard time saying no – and I can’t tell you how much guitar playing got pre-empted due to being in charge of this server.

Most of the time, the thing ran fine – and I had months and months where I did not have to think about it – but nonetheless, it was there.

Recently I had to decide (since I was in need of an upgrade) to keep it or not. After reading “Eat That Frog” I realized that the low-level, unproductive task of all the talking, energy, emails TOOK THE SAME TIME that a VERY productive task such as writing music or recording does.

From the book – “RULE: Don’t spend time doing something very well that needn’t be done at all”.

So this was and is a big “letting go”. Silly as it sounds, I had to admit that I like the feeling of controlling the server and of being the “go to” guy for people. Time to let go – and really decide what activities will accomplish my goals and what won’t.

And yes, I remember being on tour in Vienna years ago doing web tech support across the Atlantic right before a gig. Ridiculous!!! Well, I am proud to say that I have made the right choice now – and I urge you to do the same so that you may reach your goals.

Eat the big frogs FIRST, not the little ones.

I highly recommend this book if you feel that anything I have said here resonates with you!!!!

Adam Rafferty Gig Review @ The Bug Theater – Denver, CO Sept 9, 2008

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Greets friends. Boy I feel great. Playing concerts makes me feel human again. After even a few days off from gigs, my skin starts to crawl!!!!

Last Night’s gig at THE BUG THEATER in Denver was really a blast. I teamed up with local songwriter / guitarist Wayne Gremminger and we played a set each for the audience.

It’s funny – on previous trips to Denver to visit friends I felt myself get very “squirmy” and downright uncomfortable. Playing a gig here paints an entirely different picture of the place.

When you are a musician you need to play just like a fish needs water. I am an addict, what can I say? 🙂

=-=-= About the Gig =-=-=-=-=-

Wayne’s set was an intimate, introspective, gorgeous 45 minutes of music. He has gone for free to hospices to play music for dying peopple. He’s even traveled to India to play music for dying people at Mother Theresa’s house for the dying – just to give these souls a ray of musical sunshine before they pass on.

That tells me something about his character.

I met Wayne at a friends party and we hit it off immediately. He expressed to me how much wanted to get back into playing music for people, after not having done it for several years.

Not only am I appreciative that he organized last night (all I had to do was show up and play – imagine that!) but it warms my heart to know that I provided just the motivation he needed to make his comeback performance a reality.

The result? Everyone wins – I had a blast, Wayne made his comeback and the audience had a great time!!!

Until next time, keep swingin’!

Introducing the Human Web Browser

By Adam Rafferty 1 Comment

I saw a youtube vid the other night which talked about quantum physics, spirituality and self realization. That’s my late night tv fix…since I have no TV, I tune in youtube. Sometimes I get very kooky stuff, and sometimes I stumble onto very profound information.

One video dealt with perception. Let’s say we see a bird out there. But wait – a small portion of the inside of our brain is showing us a bird. The eye is a camera lens letting in photons. So the image of a bird is in our brain, not out there. Better said if I say “when you think you see a bird out there, you actually see the image of a bird inside your brain.”

Likewise, the words you are reading now are not out there, they are “in your brain.”

Just think, a flavor or odor is not out there. It is only when it hits your taste buds, it sends a signal “to your brain”. That’s more understandable than sight, in a way. But if 2 people smell perfume, or a fart, they think it is out there in the air. Really all they know about is what is in their 2 brains.

Isn’t there something comical about always saying “YOUR BRAIN” over and over ?:-) Hang in there, let’s see where this goes.

When you hear something molecules move in the air and hit your eardrum. The sound is in your brain. And, the sense of distance – like “I hear the bus outside” or “I see the bird 50 feet away” – the sense of distance is – yep, you guessed it – in your brain!

The point is this – we get signals as input – and then de-code them into sights, smells, sounds, flavors and more. Then from there we experience feelings and emotions based on what we experience.

We know that our senses are limited. Blow a dog whistle – and to us it is virtually silent, so we see our hearing is deficient. Examples for all the senses like this could be given. Just think of how many radio signals and wi-fi networks are going, and we do not have the perception to even know they are there, further proof that there is more out there than “meets the eye”, ear, smell, taste or touch.

WE HUMANS ARE LIKE “WEB BROWSERS”

Then the thought occurred to me – as a person who has worked with coding for the web, if you look at “the source” of a web page it looks like total gobbledy gook. Please, do this as an experiment, go to View>Source in your browser menu. Look at the code. Then notice how the browser turns “information” into colors, fonts, images and more.

Yet, a web browser is a magical little program that “interprets” or makes sense of this gobbledy gook.

So, if we humans look out there and see shapes, colors, people, hear sounds, etc – that is akin to viewing a web page through a browser. (By the way, colors exist in our brain – they are not really there)

Just imagine this unbelievable electrical “matrix” out there – and we make sense of it, just the way a web browser makes a page of code intelligible.

You are like a web browser looking out into this unbelievable “field” of energy (code) and in your brain you are able to separate, identify and sense things. For the sake of total redundance – what you see is interpreted, just like a page of code is interpreted by a web browser.

WHAT’S THE POINT?

To see profound truth always sets us a little more free, and to see through the eyes of the creator always makes us more and more blissful. So, I sit in wonder and awe as I think about this. And then I sip more coffee….my brain likes that.

Don’t think there is a creator? Well just think about the incredible engineering it has taken to come up with a MAC G5 computer that can surf the nt and have a web browser. That was no accident, right? Can you really say that we are a random accident? Just as we created computers and are greater than them, something or someone greater than us must have created us.

As well….can a computer know the human? No. Imagine, a G5 as complex and unbelievable a piece of machinery as it is, cannot know love. I believe there are many things we can’t know much in the same way. However, through quiet and meditation we can know much more than what our senses tell us.

The point is this – can we look at our reactions to things and can start to take ownership, and know – beyond the shadow of a doubt that we are responsible for our life experience, out emotions and they are inside us, not outside?

Just like the bird image is in our brain, and sound is in our brain, so are the notions of success, happiness, spiritual connectedness…it’s all an inner game. Can we take responsibility for interpreting things the way we do and know it is not “out there” but inside us?

Have fun in your brain today.

Adam Rafferty Gig Review @ Henflings – Ben Lomand,CA 8-21-08

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Greetings Friends!

Well, I am back in NY after almost 2 weeks in California. Wow, what a great time, what nice folks and what PERFECT weather!

On the last night of the very successful Cali trip I played at a place in Ben Lomand, CA called “Henflings”. Yep, I scoured the net for venues in the area I knew I’d be…lo and behold they gave me a gig….thanks guys!

One of the tricky things about playing solo is the anticipation of a gig right before load-in, (although I am getting better at anticipating only the best!) When I showed up it was a happy-hour, beer drinkin biker type crowd and I basically hoped they’d dig the music. Ben Lomand is a quiet place so I just hung out on a bench in the great outdoors and warmed the fingers up.

As an audience started to collect and the sun went down it felt more and more like a gig. Here are some of the highlights:

A good friend and fabulous blues player named David Crane stopped by to sit in and play a few tunes. Dave and I were childhood best friends and he came to Cali at age 12….serendipitously he became a guitar player, and it was special to connect with him on a musical level.

Go ahead youtube!!! I was encouraged and delighted by how receptive the audience was. A fellow named John introduced himself and said he’d seen my youtube vids and was excited that I would be in his area! Yeah!

“Billie Jean” had people in the back movin’ & groovin’….I even had a die hard fan on crutches up and dancing during “I Wish”…yes my fans will dance even with broken ankles…that’s dedication!!!

I got to test the waters with some new songs as well…Gershwins “Someone To Watch Over Me” is brand new. I am working on balancing out the firey songs with lush ballads…

The sound system was great. There’s no better feeling for me than to look out and see smiles. Ahh, the curse of the musician! 🙂

And, just when I found myself questioning my own sanity as to why I am shlepping across the country to play there, driving and flying endless hours, John told me that years ago he saw Tommy Emmanuel play there for a small audience.

Cool! I must be doing something right!!! 🙂

P.S. Gig pictures will be up on https://www.myspace.com/adamraffertytrio – just go to pics & look for Henflings…

Steep into the Blues and then Jazz is Easy – 2008 Bay Area Guitar Workshop

By Adam Rafferty 1 Comment

Hey y’all. This week has been really a blast. I have been doing a small guitar workshop with a few students on “blues and jazz”.

I was not quite sure what my students were requesting when they asked for a blues meets jazz type workshop,but we managed to strike gold about 2/3 of the way through the week.

Most guitar players can get a pretty good blues feel happening but experience a “disconnect” when they switch into what they “think” is playing on jazz chord changes.

Here’s what we re-discovered:

What’s getting lost is the basic notion of what a key is. A key is a “central tone around which the others revolve” , not a scale. So, “D Blues” has D as it’s central tone. “D Blues” can be a major or minor key blues.

Now, if you have a ii-v-i in D Major, D major or minor blues could work. In the minor key, D minor blues will work.

Here’s what is important though, and here is the essence of the experience rather than the book smarts – you can get the depth, the nuance and the magic in your blues going and then plop it onto jazz changes.

Doing this and only this is limited – but spiritually, it is more correct than running scales and licks.

Once I was able to get the students into this “place”, or “zone”, or get their playing into the behavior of grooving, soulful blues, I had them play over me playing chord changes to tunes like “Autumn leaves”.

With ear to ear smiles and in a state of utter disbelief, here’s what they said:

“This feels too easy.”
“This feels like cheating.”
“I’m not even thinking.”
“I feel so relaxed.”
“I am not even trying.”

And so while I strongly advocate music school and becoming literate with reading, scales and theory, there is a BIG difference between learning vocabulary and learning how to speak or write with a “flow”. Essentially it’s “book smarts” and “street smarts” on a musical level…

Unless a teacher can take you into that “flow” all the scales and licks (book smarts) don’t mean squat!!!

Until next time…. keep swingin’