It's Sloppy Out There

The coolest thing I find right now about the music industry is that I haven’t yet invested in it. I’m not going to sit back and play armchair general in this round, its complicated and I’m not really in any position to point fingers or call idiocy. However, at the moment it seems like the industry is composed of people primarily motivated to maintain a current profit-seeking model without regard to its  practicalities (or lack of) and have too heavily invested themselves in the current system to want to radicalize and change it.

There is a name for this apparently. It’s called the entrenched player’s dilemma, and a guy I read a lot has talked about this many times – although I’m the kind of person who needs things repeated a lot before I get them. Until I was actually flailing around today trying to think of a concise way to explain what I thought was going on in the industry, this concept and its meaning weren’t really clear. Now they are.

That being said, I can’t really blame the current group of “entrenched players” for behaving the way they do. Especially if they want to milk every last drop out of the current model. To radicalize, they would have to forgo obvious money-making opportunities.Sure they weren’t yielding as much money as before, but still, they’re there. What, not capitalize? Fuck you, go write on your blog.

And as wonderful and beautiful and brilliant as it sounds to suddenly drop everything you’re doing in favor of some insanely attractive and nebulous “no business model is the future!!!” rhetoric – for the existing companies out there that are dealing with this transition – the reality is far more unpleasant than what the rhetoric eludes to. There is a reason the record companies have taken so long to die.

However, I can blame this current group of “entrenched players” for being idiots if they honestly believe that not only  will the current model continue to sustain itself, but ought to, for the alleged sake of everyone involved, artist and all. In other words, its okay to be fucked, as long as you know you’re fucked, because only then can you begin to hope to unfuck yourself.

Rather than get involved in a constantly shifting industry whereby as an artist I become dependent on X group and Y group doing their thing and scurrying to capitalize on new trend after trend in an effort to squeeze every lessening pile of money from increasingly alienated and pissed off fans….I opt to…opt out.

In a way, it seems to make more sense to sit out and focus on making some really good fucking art, and finding small ways to connect with the very people that might love and appreciate it. A “marketing strategy” doesn’t necessarily have to be about inundating people with the message – they’ll get around to it if its good enough. But if you’re a) not patient enough to deal with this reality, and b) don’t make art that is good enough on its own merits, then you’re fucked.

Good. Its about time the prospect of one day making $30,000-40,000 a year working as an artist making possibly marginal art is actually a somewhat plausible scenario. Why not?? Cut out the bullshit and leave me be. I don’t need to be rich, just let me work.

http://www.mediafuturist.com/2008/12/2009-the-year-o.html

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/01/davos_discussing_a_depression.html

Finally Figuring Some Things Out

Okay, so I’m new at the whole ‘writing-cohesive-pieces’ sort of thing.

I’m a jazz trained pianist, and I’ve been doing quite a lot of classical work in the last two years. This means my primary music education involves strictly technical work sitting at the piano. The most involved I got with the technology side of things was recording a couple times in my friend’s basement, using his recording equipment. This was back in 2002, and we used a Fostex tape deck. Joy.

I own four keyboards, including a Wurlitzer electric piano from the 1960’s and a Roland synth from the mid 1980’s. That’s about it though. I own no software, nor do I currently even own a computer that may run that kind of software.

I’m the nerd among the other nerds that just played lots of scales and actually did what the teacher asked. In high school, rather than occupying my time trying to imagine what “blowjob parties” would be like, I spent that time trying to figure out why a major 6th chord voiced a certain way sounded so powerful. Not to say I didn’t love blowjobs, but I’d rather miss out now and end up getting more of them while on tour doing something awesome – like playing the major 6th chords.

In a jazz setting, people get together and literally improvise over the chord structures of a tune. There is a culture, a mentality, and a set of particular methods of practicing that accompany this. I was exposed to this in high school and much more during college. As happens a lot in college, your tastes and assumptions about the world and yourself change pretty frequently. For whatever reason, they weren’t headed in the same direction as the jazz-heads, so rather than try to assimilate, I made the decision to try something different. I had no real impetus for making the decision, except that I noticed myself becoming far more frustrated than I usually did every time I left a jam session.

“We get in the room, and play a few tunes, jerk off over them, and occasionally they go somewhere. We stop, congratulate ourselves. and leave the room with nothing for posterity.”

I just got kind of tired of it. There had to be more options available musically that I could fall into and love.

After trying a bunch of other failed ideas, I came to the conclusion that maybe there wasn’t any “scene” or whatever that could make me happy enough to feel good about myself. Maybe I had to invent one.

Great. That sounds naively romantic and legendary, and like a completely fucking endless amount of work. Inventing a scene. Or genre. Or whatever.

It could SUCK for all I know, and from what I’ve produced already, it is just barely escaping the void of suck. But I don’t care. I love doing it. And I love thinking about it and thinking about getting better about it. And I love the feeling that one day I’ll be good and free enough to do precisely the things I want to do. Its just some work I have to take care of in the meantime.

Government Funding for Artists is Idiotic and Irresponsible – Part 1

I keep reading about how the federal government wants to slash funds for arts and entertainment in the USA, and how horrible this is, and how insensitive and stupid this is, and how important the arts are to society, etc. etc.

Am I the only one that thinks this is actually a good fucking idea?

“But you’re an artist Brett, and one who makes very little money, at that. How can you say this with a conscience??!!!

Let’s say I produce some awesome art in the next decade. That’s a decade of hard-earned work at something questionably remunerative at best, and financially crippling at worst. Let’s say that my “reward,” that being a given number of fans or other artists willing to pay me for the product of my output, is something like $500,000 per year.

I’m going to be taxed on that money, to fund other artists who MAY OR MAY NOT produce artistic works that are valuable enough for the public to want to pay for on their own. The art produced by these subsidized artists could turn out to be shit. It may turn out to be great too, but then if its that good why do we need a government to get involved?

“WHO CARES, ART IS BEAUTIFUL AND BLAH BLA…!!!???” – say politicians that are more interested in getting elected and looking benevolent than actually doing anything worthwhile.

Why is it the government’s job to hand out money to artists? Why is it MY job once I have money, to hand the government money to then filter through an inefficient and ridiculous bureaucracy, to then hand it over to artists that might end up producing shit that people might not find valuable enough to pay for on their own?

Beyond all that, who CARES IF YOU SUCCEED AT YOUR ART? In reality, no one. Its a creative and spiritual pursuit that’s been around since humans lived in trees. Before we got “funding,” and all sorts of other bullshit. So why do we build up government infrastructure in this stupidly vain attempt to put a price on the “priceless?” If it can’t succeed on its own merits, then why the fuck should everyone be forced to pay for it anyway?

On the contrary, what if I make art that doesn’t sell? Well, presumably the reason it didn’t sell was because it a) sucked and therefore didn’t deserve to be financially rewarded (sort of similar to say, um, a badly run business) or b) nobody knew about it/marketing efforts failed/the Republicans didn’t help (sort of similar to the qualities of, um, a badly run business). Why are the arts treated differently than a fucking business in this context?

I know, I know. “HOW DARE YOU COMPARE SOMETHING AS INVALUABLE AS ART TO A BUSINESS ENTERPRISE. ART IS PRICELESS AND UPLIFTING AND ESSENTIAL TO A FUNCTIONING SOCIETY…”

No, its not. Its sexy and cool and some of the most profoundly gratifying hard work you’ll ever put into something. It IS priceless in a sense, by then why trivialize it further by giving a bunch of idiots in Congress the power to meddle with it?

Teacher Brett Pt. 1

I gave some of my first piano lessons last month to some kids on the Upper East Side. I had gotten the gig through my private teacher who mentioned that a colleague of his was leaving the country, and needed someone to take over for her teaching duties. I had figured this would be a one on one setup, I teach a couple 30 minute lessons to two young kids, and then I’d be done. These lessons turned out to be a bit different.

There are three kids, ages 9, 12, and 14. I give them each 30 minute lessons downstairs on their baby grand, and for the final 30 minutes of the two hour block of time we go upstairs to the other music room, fitted with a drumset, guitars, and a keyboard. Then we work on playing through a couple songs, with the help of two other music teachers, a guitarist and drummer.

Because young kids are, well, young, they don’t really have the capacity or desire to concentrate for more than a few seconds on anything. As far as playing piano goes, a lot of kids have the stereotype of taking lessons as something that is purely impractical, boring, and a waste of time.

What’s funny is that everyone I run in to inevitably finds out I’m a pianist, and then they start off on their own little reminiscence about their own days taking lessons, hating them, giving them up, only to now regret not having stuck with them. Kids don’t have perspective, so they go with what they know, which is not much.

When teaching people, you have to have a pretty healthy ability to empathize and think back to what it was like to not know something. Explaining ‘obvious’ knowledge a certain way, no matter how valid it may seem when articulated, doesn’t mean they’ll get it. This goes for teaching adults AND kids.

Kids don’t have much intellectual baggage to bring to the table when learning new things, so they are rather open-minded and willing to run blind with a given concept without getting defensive or questioning the method you’re showing them. You will often do better showing them something, rather than explaining a concept and hoping they’ll implement it on their own. By showing them, with some smart but brief explanation, they can grasp the internal logic of the exercise, at which point you can choose whether or not to elaborate. Take a scale, for example – for a 9 year old with no prior knowledge of what a scale is, I wouldn’t bother explaining much beyond:

“This is what a scale looks and sounds like.” (play a C major scale slowly)

“A scale can start on different notes, but do you hear how it sort of sounds the same?” (play a Db Major scale or any other scale, pointing out the similarities in sound)

The point of this is to establish some basic sense of internal logic within the concept, so that when the kid comes across other concepts or schemas (a word I’ll discuss in another post, taken from a great book I just read) he’ll be able to apply similar principles to something already familiar.

This is all pretty damn basic stuff, but its explaining it properly that is hard. A lot of people who are brilliant at what they do suck at teaching it. Teaching people is not an easy task and it involves a very different set of skills. I was fortunate to have had (and still have) some excellent teachers pass through my life, so whatever I end up writing will be a synthesized version of their wisdom and my riding their coattails of wisdom.

I Am Depressed, therefore Full of Unique and Profound Things To Say

Sometimes I wonder why the fuck I’m doing this. I’ve heard successful entrepreneurs reminisce about their times in the beginnings of their ventures – and they typically say something like “If I knew how hard it would end up being before I started, I wouldn’t have started.” Doing as much personally meaningful stuff when I’m young and helplessly ignorant is probably the best the to be doing. That being said, it is frighteningly easy to fall back into the comfortable verbal pat-on-the-backs of good friends and family who support you.

“Everything will be okay, you’ll make it. You’re talented, so you’ll make it.”

The reality is, none of it means anything. I literally doesn’t mean anything – and you have to know that, down to your core, that those words of encouragement, while nice and uplifting, don’t really mean anything. At that point you can decide whether or not to move forward, because if its vague words of encouragement from external personalities and motivations mostly influencing your own drive and fervor to accomplish stuff, then you’re probably fucked.

You can’t fall back on the sympathetic promises of other people, because they aren’t you and definitively do not share your motivations. They don’t care, nor should they necessarily care. They aren’t you.

The only thing left is to take complete personal responsibility for what you want to do. If you’re going to feel truly liberated as a human being then this is essential. You have to take responsibility for who you are, what you are at least attempting to do, and see it through to the end. No bullshit. No “Well, if I had these things, then I could move forward…”

No. That’s horseshit. Either move forward or don’t, and take responsibility for whichever you choose. Its a visceral and unpleasant feeling, but the deeper you explore this the less you want to head back into what you were before.

And its a process. I’m starting to get that making art is not a glamorous or romantic sort of thing. All the audience tends to see is the product, and well, yeah, there is glamor there when it works. But the process of getting good at making it? Making GOOD art? Its a pain in the ass, frankly.

Don’t get me wrong, its a profoundly uplifting process, and there is nothing sweeter than the feeling of having worked on something and being able to contribute it, no matter how shitty – but it also sucks a lot of balls and brings out the most exquisite feelings of worthlessness you’ll ever encounter. Cheers.

Brett

Do You Know The Number of Intervals Between Two Pulses?

Funny but important question I asked somebody during Christmas over beers and Jimi Hendrix: How many intervals are there between two pulses?

The context is musical. The pulses could be, say, quarter notes, but think of it primarily as pulses. How many intervals of time from one pulse to the next?

The answer is: a lot. Infinite, actually.

The answer seems kind of obvious, but there are larger implications to this. What do you do once you know this fact? If you’re a musician, how do you use this to your advantage?

When you listen to some of the best musicians in the world, what makes them good is their ability to hone in on those infinite intervals, and to skillfully play with them. They can tease and prod and stretch the time itself. This is a rhythmic phenomenon. Listen to the Meters or James Brown or any good funk band, they all have one thing in common – that fucking pulse is relentless. Its brutally honest and human, and this is what is lost with digital drums and some recording software. More importantly, the musicians themselves have practiced their ability to feel these pulses, and all the space between them, so that they are free to imagine the larger musical image they are trying to convey.

To think of it another way – close your eyes, take a tennis ball, toss it in the air, and try to clap your hands precisely when the ball hits the floor. Its surprisingly easy right? Which leads to another question – where is this intuition coming from that allows you to determine accurately when a ball hits the ground, despite having your eyes closed?

Answer: gravity.

No fucking shit, right? But that is, once again, what makes some excellent music excellent. We derive the concept of pulse based on our sense of gravity, and our sense of gravity is innate (or particular to this planet).

Watch somebody hit a home run – even before the ball clears the infield it feels pretty obvious when they’ve hit one. Even before that, you can tell by the way the bat is swung that it will connect beautifully with the ball. That’s gravity. That’s having a honed relationship with it.

Take a caveman – one day he sees a bird feather fall from a tree and float back and forth in the air until it hits the ground. The naturally fluttering movement of the feather strikes him as funny, so he runs to his cavewife and shows her, using his hand to demonstrate the motion he saw the feather make. The cavewife intuits the hilarity of the movement without him having to explain it.

Or take basketball – you just somehow fucking know when somebody is going to make a shot, the moment the ball leaves the athlete’s hand.

So this is a cool concept, and not foreign to music. Its all the same. Take a guy like Thelonious Monk, by all standards NOT a great pianist. And yet listen to his sense of rhythm – it more than makes up for his lack of pianistic command and expertise.

Our sense of gravity informs everything. Fucked up, right?

Being a Know-it-all is great, if all you want to do is know things

When you’ve committed yourself to researching a particular field, the most important thing to remember is that its not really about who did what. Being able to recall dates and people is helpful when trying find factual data to support your case or argument, but its not the same as being aware of and understanding the long-term principles that have either been transgressed or used competently.

Take music-marketing, something I’ve gotten interested in and knew next to nothing about about 6 months ago. I’ve subscribed to lots of blogs, and some of them, the blog posts themselves are literally “link dumps” with a brief, if any, extrapolation on the content of the links. And there are many links. Hypebot.com is a great example of this.

I read as much as I can of Hypebot.com – its like an hourly updated newspaper that appeals to the micro-universe of music and marketing. However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely overwhelmed at times. A night or two ago, I was reading through his archive because I had missed about a week of his posts. Because of this, I had a shit load of posts to catch up on.

In scrolling through them all, clicking on the links and reading through them all, I felt really uneasy and insecure – no matter how much time I spend on this stuff, I’ll never be able to know and recall everything. I’ll never be able to keep up with all this information and still get all the work done I need to get done in my life. I stopped reading and sat back in my chair. Why was I working on this then? Why am I spending time doing or worrying about something that is impossible?

Because what I was doing and worrying about was ultimately impossible. And unnecessary. In order to do what I need to do successfully, its not required that I recite facts and what particular move company x did then or whenever. I was reading this blog and others under the false and stupidly held assumption that in order to be successful, it required knowing these things and also understanding all the larger concepts. So I wised up and came to this conclusion:

Success in this career is dependent on my ability to absorb as much raw information as possible, try to follow the logic and patterns behind decisions that companies, artists, labels etc., make, and then to gradually infer some conclusions and place them in the context of what ought to operate well in the particular economic environment that I’ll be working in.

And even then success is not assured. I still have to execute all these wonderful ideas. That takes balls. It also takes, I’m slowly learning, a mild insanity and occasionally irrational belief in the purpose behind undertaking the entire operation.

Conclusion: the point is not to know everything. Because you can’t. So stop trying. However, you can learn how to think and process information, and that is what you ought to do, because then you can actively apply it to what you really love to do. Leave the details for someone else, like a lawyer.
(Also, having music that doesn’t suck and that people actually want to listen to helps a lot too)

I'm a baby and my ideas suck – but I'll be back tomorrow

What I find utterly baffling, and at this point in my music career, I really still shouldn’t, is how fucking difficult it is to simply play or put down on record the ideas in your head. I can imagine all sorts of awesome shit, multiple melodies going everywhere, rhythmically inventive phrasing, and yet when I sit down to work the things out, what I end of conveying is a laughably botched version of what’s in my head.

The magic going on in your head ends up becoming banal and unexciting in reality. What’s worse, is the  ideas are often just okay.

I would be fine with finding out an idea itself sucked a fatty. Great, at least I know I can get rid of the thing. But if it turns out so-so? When you finally have it recorded, and basically the whole idea in its entirety ends up sounding, well, ‘alright I guess,’ what the fuck do you do? I know what I do.

I stare at the computer and slouch in my chair, depressed and disgusted, listening to the idea over and over again, hoping there is some further genius hidden in my crappy tracks.

There is hardly any further genius hidden in those crappy tracks.

However, the only responsibility I have is to keep working on this stuff. Every damn day. I’ve sacrificed a lot already to get to this point where I can comfortably spend the time to work out these ideas, and I plan on sacrificing more. Why? Because I’ll be fucking miserable if I don’t. Being miserable and working out this stuff beats being miserable and not working out this stuff. Easy. Its not really the most romantic and compelling way to frame the decision to work on the things you love, but then every true artist* needs to learn not to take the pussy route and assume you’re climb to success will entail sunshine and handjobs from beautiful girls. No. Its the kind of thing that gnaws at you, and you either relent and do your work, or you take some other route and let it fester inside.

Either way, its up to you. I know I’ll be back tomorrow.

*My definition of a ‘true artist’ is not a successful one, nor an unsuccessful one, but one who works on their craft as much as possible, almost every day. Read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield if you want to get good at this.

New Music Strategies

If you’re currently exploring the far reaches of the internet and have stumbled upon this strange little blog, and you like music, and you like marketing, and you like music marketing, then I want to point you to Andrew Dubber of New Music Strategies.

As a new student to understanding the disruptive effects of the internet and what this means for the future, I’ve been highly impressed by his ideas, most notably his e-Book, 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online. This is literally one of the most helpful and concise pieces on music marketing out there. He really strips down the general tenets of music consumption and examines their underlying principles and how they could potentially operate within the new available technology. Using historical examples of how disruptive technology has consistently changed society, he embodies the idea that “if you want to know the future, look to the past.”

Without some sort of basis or understanding of what came before, its very difficult to make any prospective analysis on whats to come.

He also writes on Music Think Tank.

Making Music with Clusters

This post is aimed particularly towards pianists, but can be applied to any chordal instrument.

Every time I sit down to play a head (a ‘head’ is the term for a piece of music with a standard melody accompanied by chord changes), especially if its bebop influenced, I don’t feel like I’m really using the instrument and all its capabilities. I used to learn heads by playing left hand Bill Evans voicings with the melody in the right hand. Then I wanted to develop my left hand, so I played the melody with both hands. Its great to do both, but there is a better way to REALLY learn a head and feel like you know the thing. I cluster my melodies.

Take “Blues for Alice” by Charlie Parker – the first 26 notes, all within the span of four bars. If you were to play this melody regularly, it would go [F...C.A.E...C.A.D.E.B.C.C#.Bb.G.G#.A...F.D.G.A.F.E.EbGBbD.C#....]. Instead, using a slow tempo, play the notes stacked, using a half note for each row [read:dyad or triad].

F E D C# A G G D

C C B G F F Eb C#

A A

(If you have no idea how the tune goes, the way I’ve laid out the melody and example is atrocious) If you were able to intuit what I’ve done, or are familiar enough with the tune to guess correctly, you’ll notice that I’ve skipped notes in the example. This is okay, and I’m going to explain why:

As long as the piece is rhythmically humming along, no matter how slow, the ear will pick up the general movement of the melody. So you’ve missed notes – that’s fine – as long as there is some consistency in what rhythms you choose to play the clusters, those notes will take care of themselves after you do this exercise enough.

Play the clusters on the downbeat of 1 and 3.

Play clusters on each quarter note, encompassing all those missing notes that you were concerned about before.

Play the first and last notes of each bar – all while keeping time. Count 1,2,3,4 when this gets easy.

As long as you’re establishing some rhythmic ‘checkpoint’ for each set of notes, it could be just two notes of your choosing per bar, the piece will begin to come alive and the ear will respond to these checkpoints. Get the gist of what the melody is doing in a harmonic sense – the passing notes will end up taking care of themselves.

Its actually a pretty simple concept, but you’ll find that if you work out melodies this way you’ll really get a deeper appreciation and understanding of where the composer was trying to go with his developing ideas. When you play a melody in clusters, more tonal realities are represented, and helps to establish in the ear real meaning and emotion behind the notes. Suddenly a linear and jagged piece like Blues for Alice can become a thick impressionistic piece – all using the same notes. Being able to play these different ways with the same starting point makes the prospect of vigorously incorporating different styles profoundly simple. It makes learning melodies extremely fast. Do it in different keys too, the transposition process using this approach makes a HUGE difference. It still takes a lot of work but there is an awesome emotional impact in this. You’ll acquire a level of depth and meaning that goes way beyond note-by-note practicing.

(If any real jazz heads are reading this and get pissed off because the notes I used in the Blues for Alice example are different from the new Real Book edition – I know they are different. No one cares but you.)