Jazz Education

How To Write a Song – (Reprise – A la Seth Godin)

You can have the best mics, preamps and converters.
You can have Logic Pro.
You can have all the plug ins.
You can have the samples.

You can have the look.
You can have the groove.
You can have the online presence.
You can have 100 bazillion youtube hits.

You can have the lyrics.
You can have the dance moves.
You can have the sex appeal.
You can have the “gigs” in the hip spots.

You can have the intellectual explanation.
You can have the university teaching position.
You can have the “chops.”
You can have the harmonic know-how.

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All of that is fine and good and adds tremendously to a musical experience.

I’m not dissing any of that. It’s all very good and excellent stuff!!!

However in the end, after all of that….

Sing me the melody.

How to Write a Song

By Adam Rafferty 28 Comments

I know this is a very bold title to a post, but after reading some horrifying information online yesterday on the topic of songwriting, I felt like I had to throw my hat in the ring on this subject.

On a portal “expert answer” site I saw an article that looked like “well, you have written some words, and some chords, and now you need to find a good melody.”

Editorial opinion: you have not written a song yet if you have “chords in search of a melody.”
[Read more…] about How to Write a Song

Music: There’s More Than One Way to Do It

By Adam Rafferty 43 Comments

Greets friends. I am riding the train across Germany on a gorgeous August morning. Now I’m just passing Bonn – Beethoven’s hometown.

This past week I taught a small workshop with 6 attendees. A few of the students were semi-pro players. Over dinner one night, a very interesting discussion arose with the students. [Read more…] about Music: There’s More Than One Way to Do It

Everyone Needs a Coach

By Adam Rafferty 6 Comments

A few days ago I walked out of my apartment, on the way for a Starbucks coffee and lo! I saw 2 young fellows and one of them was stringing an acoustic guitar.

He was winding the pegs slowly by hand, so I had to pre-empt the Starbucks trip.

“Hold on, let me help you.” I went back upstairs, snagged a pegwinder (with clippers) and an extra set of strings, and a CD as a gift.

“Gimme that” I said. I showed him how to wind strings on quickly using this tool. I offered him the strings as a backup, and the CD was simply to inspire him.

I asked the guys their plan.

“We’re gonna play in the subway and see if we can make some money.”

“Cool, kick ass!” I told ’em.

On the way back from Starbucks, they were still in front of my building, rehearsing.

“Hey do you guys have a postcard or something to give out to people?” I asked.

“Um, no.”

“What if you draw a crowd and people dig it? You gotta hand them something otherwise they’ll have no idea who you were. They’ll forget about you in 10 minutes.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

We went on with a few other topics, but my point is that these guys needed a coach.

My years of experience allowed me to call up “bullet points” in seconds, and quickly identify the “holes” in their strategy.

That made me think “Heck, I am no different. I need a coach, since there are probably things slipping past me too!” (In fact, I’d love to still be taking guitar lessons…)

I went home immediately and called Rick Goetz – (https://musiciancoaching.com/) a well respected music coach – to set up a session for myself. I meet him at 4:30 today.

With a the new “I Remember Michael” CD out – I bet there’s something that Rick can teach me strategically.

I’ll let you know how the meeting goes, I am excited.

Nerves and Gigs: Particles or Waves?

By Adam Rafferty 4 Comments

Greets Gang! I’ve just returned from an uplifting week teaching at the Swannanoa Gathering in Asheville, North Carolina.

It was exhausting, but it feels great to inspire students and be around a large group of people all fired up and excited about music.

The topic of how to deal with nerves in performance up in a few conversations, and somehow I found corollary to quantum physics.

People asked me if I got nervous. Sometimes I do – but these days it’s less and less. I myself wondered, “why am I less nervous than I used to be?”

In quantum physics, there’s a nifty experiment called “the double slit” experiment.

Physicists became awestruck at the fact that when light was shot at photograhic paper one photon particle at a time, it still printed on the paper as if it were a wave, not individual light particles.

[youtube=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1YqgPAtzho”]

What this raised in my mind was the idea that any singular event in our life may look like a “particle” but is really part of a larger “wave.”

If you don’t perform on stage very often, it may feel like a very important singular event (a particle) of your life.

You want everything to be perfect – the sound, your performance, and so on. There’s a lot of pressure there for that one particle of time to be perfect!

When you perform on stage 100 times, you naturally encounter things such as:

the sound wasn’t perfect
the monitors were not loud enough
the guitar was out of tune, the lights blinded me
I botched a few notes

But on the positive side you will experience things like:

wow that was a great performance
they loved it
the soundman did a great job
everything fell into place just right
man it felt really good, etc.
I got offered another gig at this one

I am illustrating the following – that over the course of 100 gigs (or any semi large number) you will experience a host of scenarios, ups, downs, good, bad – and by gig number 101 you feel all the gigs to be a “wave” of events.

Each gig is still important, but now each gig is part of of a whole, and you can actually enjoy yourself more because there is less pressure on any single gig “particle” for everything to be perfect.

The same holds true for anything you do regularly whether it’s practicing your instrument, exercising, meditating, eating right, and so on.

The more you do it, the easier it gets because the behavior becomes a “wave” of activity in your life rather than a singular “particle.”