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:

Beyond Bass Camp starts this Saturday

The popularity of the idea means I’ll probably run a few one-offs, and/or 2 day weekend classes over the summer. Please feel free to post in the comments which of those you’d be most interested in, and which days of the week would work best.

For those of you that are booked in, see you on the boat on Saturday!

As for B*B*C progress, there’s one space left, thanks to a cancellation, on the course – Given that all the other 4 places are taken by people that are coming to all 5 classes, the deal for this last place is that you can come to as many of them as you want (for £70 each) but they have to be from the beginning. So you can come to June 20th, or June+July, or June, July, Aug etc… It means that the continuity will remain for those involved, and you won’t feel like you’ve jumped in and missed a load of stuff. It still stands that if you book for all 5, it’s only £60 for the whole thing.

But, fear not, if you were planning on coming to just one of the classes, I will be running at least one more one-off, probably in August. There may be one in September as well…

I’m also happy to travel to other places and do B*B*C-style one day bass sessions. If you’re interested in hosting one where you are and know of 5 or 6 other bassists that would be interested, please do get in touch.

It’s also worth checking out my recent blog post on stevelawson.net entitled “House Consulting – Like A House Concert, But With Less Tunes And More Talking” – about this very topic.

One of the points I keep stressing to my students is to take 5 or 10 minutes at the beginning of a practice session to decide what’s important for that day –

• Are there obviously technical or theoretical obstacles that have been getting in the way of you playing the music you want to play of late?
• If there are, can you think of a useful exercise that’ll help you focus on those elements, rather than just playing the offending song in question over and over again, entraining your brain and muscles to remember the mistake as part of the song?
• Or are there perhaps ideas about what’s ‘ok’ to do as a musician that are holding you back?
• Are you crippled by other people’s expectations of what you should be doing with your music?
• Are you playing the things you ‘ought’ to know, rather than the music you love? (this is most evident amongst bassists in their tendency to try and learn bebop melodies before learning to play walking bass, or without having any real interest in listening to jazz, or playing in a jazz setting… It’s just one of those things you ‘ought’ to do – a pox be upon whoever it was who transcribed the Charlie Parker Omnibook in bass-clef! )

So making up your mind about the things that matter to you, deciding what you REALLY want to play and what the skills are that will get you there, and regularly revisiting them, even keeping a diary or a blog of where you’re up to can make all the difference to your satisfaction with your musical journey.

Beyond Bass Camp will be a place were those kind of questions are encouraged and explored, where goals can be refined, and bespoke musical paths defined and resourced.

Q: So, what are you working on at the moment? What are the obstacles? What are the lessons you’ve learned along the way?

I have certain pre-arranged responses to some of the questions and comments I get about my music.

One of my favourites to throw out is to comments like “hey, Steve, you should do a whole ambient record” or “I really like the funky tunes, you should do more of that“, or any other ‘you should‘-type comments. My response is invariably “no, YOU should, cos it’s you that wants to hear it!”

The implication is not that the other person’s desire for something other than what I’ve released is invalid, just that I can’t possibly be expected to be able to make music to order for my audience. It’s a recipe for really banal music.

See, the only person whose taste I really know is my own. Even my wife surprises me with what she likes and doesn’t like. The better I get to know her, the more I can guess whether or not she’ll like something I’ve played, but even then, I’m listening back to it and guessing, rather than futilely trying to meet her expectations.

The initial comment also belies the notion that every bit of music should conform to my preconceived notions of what it ought to be, rather than me being open to those preconceptions being wrong, and finding in the work of artists I respect new avenues for musical appreciation.

So for me as an artist, it means I’m constantly in a process of refining my own vision for what my music should be. There are LOADS of influences on the way I perceive music. Here’s a partial list:

• Music I already love
• New music I hear (and my reaction to it)
• The opinion of those who’ve demonstrated that they “get” what I do (I have an unofficial ‘council of reference’ who act as ad-hoc producers when I need it)
• Music as soundtrack
• Beautiful noise
• Other art forms (sometimes painting or architecture can imply a creative process that I’d not previously thought about exploring in music)
• Audience feedback*

This last one seems to be at odds with what I’ve said at the beginning, so I guess I should qualify it. The way that my audience’s feedback influences me is

• understanding the *effect* of music, and the shape of a set
• the times when someone tells me what my music means to them, and it contains accidental insight.

I’m not closed off to the influence of anyone, but I am well aware that the final arbiter of value when I’m making my music has to be my own taste. I’m aware of my limitations, of the things I don’t understand, and know that my understanding of music is still growing, as is my ability to take that understand and turn it into the music I hear in my head.

As a teacher, these observations influence everything I do. Almost everyone I’ve ever met has grown up surrounded by music. It may have been a specific kind of music, but it’s there, front and centre in all of our lives (I had a friend at school who didn’t discover pop music til well into their teens, and so despite having a really nuanced knowledge of orchestral music, gravitated towards the saccharin sounds of Stock Aitken and Waterman, having none of the historical perspective on what makes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ pop music…)

So I try to take that knowledge and awareness that we all have of the music around us, and harness it, label it, describe it and channel it into a way of thinking about and playing music. If you have ‘taste’ (not ‘good’ taste, just taste) you have an ear for music, you have things that make sense to you and things that don’t. That’s musical, and can be turned into a desire to play, and a path to creating your own music, your own soundtrack, your own expression. That is what Beyond Bass Camp is all about.