www.stevelawson.net

The state of contemporary music teaching in the UK is terrible. Actually, the state of music teaching across the board is pretty awful. But at least with the classical stuff, the method makes sense, even if so many of the teachers are failing to inspire the students (do a straw poll of the people you know, find out how many played an instrument as a kid, and how many quit in their late teens. The percentages should be 90% keeping it up. In reality, well under 5% of the people I know have stuck with it…)

The huge problem with the way that pop/rock/jazz/punk/funk etc. is taught in the UK is that most of the methods are still based around the classical idea that you’re learning repertoire. If you’re learning an orchestral instrument to play orchestral music, there is an expectation that you’ll play your instrument a certain way, learn how to take direction from a conductor and play the way other people want you to. That’s what orchestral musicians get hired to do. Because of this, a set of graded exams that measure how far along that widely recognised scale you are is a great way of providing benchmarks on your journey towards proficiency.

I think I’m on fairly safe ground stating that pretty much no-one takes up the electric bass (or guitar, or drums) in order to play in an orchestra. People play bass for a couple of different reasons - MOST (not all, but most) people take up bass to a) play the music they love listening to and b) form a band with some mates. (Despite bass being the greatest solo instrument on God’s green earth, those are the primary reasons people play it )

I think it’s fairly obvious to anyone who stops to think about it that there’s no set path to aims as nebulous as ‘playing the music you love’ - what is the music you love? any stylistic boundaries? Any desire to put your own spin on it? At what point does writing your own music become important in the journey?

There are a million questions that can be asked, and the answers are different for every single person. Sadly, this wasn’t taken into consideration when most of the bass teaching materials I’ve ever come across were prepared - the old model of taking the student through a set course, as though this was the repertoire they’d need, is still the way that instruments are taught in our ‘post-repertoire age’.

I’ve never liked the idea of graded exams, I don’t like the way it says that your ability to play a particular piece, or to sight read (whether or not your area of musical interest requires it), or in the case of the ‘rock school’ grades, to ‘improvise’ in a style are measured against any kind of fixed criteria. It seems to fly completely in the face of what makes music special.

Most of all it ignores the fact that pop music is essentially folk music - music BY the people and FOR the people. It’s not an academic exercise, measurable metrically and verifiable by an examination board, it’s about self-expression, shared language and history, identity, culture, branding, etc. etc.

So what am I saying? That all music teaching is futile? That music colleges are a waste of time? Clearly not. What is vital though is that the skills being taught and how they are measured have to be demonstrably related to the end result.

I have a few rules for myself when teaching, and number one is that Context Is Everything. A huge part of the value of having lessons is learning how to learn - how to extract valuable principles and concepts from whatever the actual material is that’s being looked at. Whether it’s a group of notes (key/chord/scale), a rhythmic subdivision, the bassline to a song or an approach to improvising, there are lessons within the material that are found by playing with it in context. Remove the context, and the material becomes sterile.

I refer to this distinction in lessons as ‘active learning‘ and ‘passive learning‘ - passive learning is about learning the material as is, ticking a box and moving on. ‘active learning’ looks at what’s there and says ‘what can I deduce from this? What does this tell me about the way music works? what does this tell me about the style I’m exploring? What does this give me in terms of skills needed to write and perform my own music?’

Those are things that are incredibly hard to map out as a mark-scheme for an exam. Incredibly hard, but not impossible. It just relies on the exam board recognising the value in the musical relationship between teacher and student, the shared journey towards the student playing the music they love, and being able to express the music they hear in their head.

How we start to break down those aims is part 2…

Feel free to post your own experiences - good and bad - with music education, in the comments!

My 2nd post is up on the Creative Choices blog.

It’s entitled Kickstarting Creativity, and addresses a misnomer in the way people think about the creative process. Please feel free to comment over there too!

click here to read Kickstarting Creativity

So our internets at home is down. Currently jacking wireless from some thankfully un-security-conscious neighbour, while I delete 150 THOUSAND (YES, THOUSAND) emails off my server. Some spamming bastard has cloned at least one of my domain names, and I’ve got 150,000 replies. Brought my email server to its knees, not surprisingly.

I’m going to have to make some serious changes to my email set-up to stop this from happening again. So if you’re using any email address for me that doesn’t begin ’steve@’ it’s quite possibly not going to work in the near future… worth changing it now…

Normal service should be resumed, after I’ve wasted an entire day sorting this crap out. At least I’m playing some bass while I do it…

DSC00474.JPG

Originally uploaded by solobasssteve

This pic was taken two years ago. Yesterday, my grandad, 98 years old, passed away. My nan was with him.

There are mixed emotions when someone of such advanced years dies. It’s not like he was cut off in his prime… He was ill and in hospital. We saw him last week, and my comment after was ‘well, he could get over this illness and last another few years, or die in his sleep tonight, you just can’t tell’… as it turns out the latter prediction was much closer.

He was a lovely bloke, who mellowed hugely with age. My ‘nan’ is actually my step-nan - he had two 30+ years marriages in his 98 years. Amazing.

When we were kids he’d get very stressed about us breaking nana’s stuff, and we thought he was being gruff and miserable. Actually, he just adored nana and was genuinely really concerned that if we knocked over a vase or something, it would deeply upset her. Truth was, she wouldn’t have cared much. She just loved being around the family - and the two sides of the family have integrated better than almost any step-family situation I’ve ever come across.

The most striking thing about my grandad’s younger years is that he was a music-nut. He never played an instrument seriously, but for a quite a few years, he’d go into Foyles on Charing Cross Road in his lunch hour (this is back in the 40s/50s), listen to ALL the new releases that week, and buy whatever he liked. No real concern for a particular style, just whatever took his fancy. And he sang. Right up until we saw him last week, in hospital on a drip, unable to keep his false teeth in unaided, he was singing, remembering the words to songs when he forgot just about all else. He knew more of the words to Moon River than I did. He had the deepest voice I’ve ever heard. Made Barry White sound like Barry Gibb.

…so my huge and varied music taste, and the thousands of pounds I’ve spend on CDs, records, tapes and gig-going are probably somewhere down the line his fault. I will be eternally grateful. It’s one obsession I’m more than happy to have inherited from John Barker.

A lovely old bloke, who adored his family and food and real ale and a good laugh and traveling (oops, there’s another inherited obsession!) and cars and friends and walks in the country. He was full of crazy stories, having worked loads of jobs and lived through two world wars (born in 1910!). Stories I haven’t got recorded. I really wish I’d got his stories recorded years ago, before his memory started to slip. If you’ve got elderly grandparents, go and document their stories - they won’t be around for ever!

See ya, grandad - this is how I’ll remember you, smiling out the window.

I know, it’s terribly old fashioned, and I’m always complaining about it, but the simple truth is, some people prefer to manage their info all in one place - their email inbox - and that’s fine by me. So here’s the place where you can subscribe to this blog via email, and have each post sent to you automatically. How cool is that?? Just fill in the form below, and each post I upload will be sent to you! Simple as…

(of course, it goes without saying that your email won’t be used for anything else, by me or anyone else.)

This might be fun…

Whaddya think?

Festival season has begun - Glastonbury was this weekend, as well as the ‘Hard Rock Calling’ two day-er in London (went down there to see Eddi Reader play yesterday, and to see KT Tunstall and The Police today - all marvellous).

However, my usual reaction to festivals is *shrug*… I rarely see a festival line-up that really gets me excited, and as a result, I only ever go to one: Greenbelt (which I may or may not be playing at this year, depending on whether they decide to pay me… feel free to email them if you’re going and would like to see Lo and I play there…).

So anyway, who’s your fantasty festival top 5? - I asked this on Twitter yesterday, and got some really great answers. Some people posted twice, listing their ‘mainstage’ and ‘acoustic stage’ which seems like a nice split, so feel free to post those two lists. The only rules are that a) you’re not booking for a particular audience, this is about who YOU want to see play. and b) if you’re
a musician, it’s taken as red that you’d want to book yourself: only list people who aren’t you.

Comment away…!

I was recently invited to contribute to a blog on a site called Creative Choices - the focus of the site is resourcing and encouraging people either in or looking to transition to employment in the creative sector. So a few us social media monkeys have been co-opted to blog about creative things. It’s a fantastic remit, and I rather like the look of the site. I’m also in great company, as the other contributors include some of my favourite thinkers in the social media world - Christian Payne, Lloyd Davis and Mike Atherton, amongst others.

Anyway, it’s just gone live Here, and you can read my first post over there, entitled Employ Yourself. It’s one idea that I’ve used in the past to try and get round the feeling that I’m not up to the job of managing the non-bass-playing part of my career… You may find it useful, and there’s a question at the end you can answer in the comments, if you like

Just a quick one: I’ve just seen that my number of listeners on Last.fm this week jumped up to 33, from 17 last week - see the list of weekly listeners here, and add yourself to it for next week by listening here.

So, in statistical terms, that’s a success, I guess, though this year, I think it’s telling that my highest level of listeners on last.fm was when I was on tour in the US in Jan/Feb…

Don’t miss yesterday’s post which brings together some thoughts on measuring the value of these interactions - read it here

(and don’t worry, I’ll be back to writing annoyingly long essays tomorrow )

The other day I wrote my first post for MusicThinkTank.com - a really great collaborative blog with contributors from across the spectrum of ‘what’s happening in the music industry these days?’ - I was really excited to be asked to blog for them, as there are some fantastic thinkers writing for the site that I’ve learned a lot from over the years. (please feel free to read the post and comment over there)

One of the really nice things about writing for them is the brief to be brief. So my first post is just that - short and to the point. But it does mean that I get to expand on the thoughts over here

So, as I say over there, one of the things that the buzz exercises are making me think about and be more aware of is the whole area of ‘level of connection’ or ‘depth of impact’. There are two vague levels on which this stuff can be measured - abstract and metric. The abstract level is probably best summed up as ‘your own perception of the level of ambient awareness’ - or just the sense that more people seem to be clocking who you are and what you do.

The metric level is actually a whole series of interlocking metrics measuring LOADS of different ways that people engage with what you do: from audience attendance at gigs, CD and download sales, free download hits, web page hits, return visits, RSS feed subscribers, mentions on other people’s blogs and web forums, quantity of email interactions… etc. etc.

What’s vitally important to remember here is that what you’re dealing with is not a set of statistics that need improving, but a number of unique individuals who are all engaging what an aspect or aspects of ‘that thing you do’ in subtle and unique ways, and are all in a position to be drawn closer into what you do, if only it is presented to them in a way that is relevant and of value.

But in order to understand and quantify where each of those people are in their relationship with you, we first need to come up with some vague staging posts along the way, from no knowledge of even the area you work in to becoming a patron/sponsor/financier of what you do.

Let’s have a look at a few of those introductory stages:

Notice that a person’s level of connection with you begins before they even know who you are: knowing something about your field is a level of connection - it’s latent, but can prove vital to them a) finding you and b) understanding what you do. So for me, it really helps whenever anyone else is successful as a solo bassist and/or musician using looping. Every time KT Tunstall or Imogen Heap does some live looping on TV, it expands my pool of latent connection. Every time Victor Wooten plays a solo spot in a Flecktones gig, and a bunch of non-bassists see how cool solo bass can be, my pool of latent connection expands.

As and when those people are drawn into my orbit, they’ll have some frame of reference for what it is that I do, something to relate it to, a peg on which to hang their labels for it, beyond ‘nice music’. They’ll see it as a cool hip thing, and I’ll piggy-back on the residual level of cool that solo bass or looping has for them. This, in my experience, has way more real-world lasting value than the pretense that what you’re doing is utterly unique and groundbreaking. The majority of people connect better with familiarity than they do with ‘extreme novelty’…

The first level of actualised connection is name recognition. How many times have you had a conversation with someone who says ‘do you know ******’ and you say ‘I’ve heard the name’… and often you have. You know precious little about them, if anything, but their name is there, in your sphere somewhere.

If that happens 2 or 3 times with the same person, your curiosity is tweaked and you may google them, especially if you’re sat in front of a computer when it happens. And name recognition turns to first level engagement with what you do - finding whichever web-presence ranks highest in google for you and checking it out… So they’ve found you, and have done so based on the feeling that they might be missing out by not knowing about you…

The obvious point to make here is that this relies on them meeting 2 or 3 people who are inspired to talk about what you do - something that is latent in a lot of your audience, most likely. There’ll be a whole load of people who like what you do who don’t think to talk about it, cos they don’t realise you need it. As I’ve said many times, and will keep saying til people realise it’s true, I’m utterly reliant on word of mouth to get people to hear about what I do - both because I can’t afford broadcast ad-space and because I dip under the radar of most mainstream music media channels… the occasional play on Radio 3 or 6Music and the very occasional article in the national press can’t sustain any level of buzz enough to help support a career - though it’s great to have listeners now who first heard me on Late Junction or read about me in a mag (I’ve been interviewed by, reviewed by or featured in The Sunday Times, Jazzwise, Bassist, Guitarist, Bass Player, Bass Frontiers, Total Guitar… etc. etc. and lots of music related websites. Sounds a lot bunched together like that, but means precious little when spread out over 9 years in the context of building a career… …more on the real importance of reviews and interviews coming soon!)

But how is that measured? We as musicians need to make ourselves available for feedback - whether it be email, forums, tweets, myspace comments, blog comments, last.fm shout-box comments… Encouraging a culture of “letting artists know that we’ve found them and we like them” is a huge part of making music ’sticky’, so that it pollenates beyond our ‘primary reach’.

So, comment thread: other than me (though if you’ve just discovered me, you can tell me where too!), who was the last independent artist you heard that got you excited? Feel free to video comment and play some of the music in the background