Recently I’ve made a few small decisions where I really didn’t know the outcome. I didn’t know if what I was doing was pointless, boring, good, worth something, whatever. But I just figured, sod it, I’ll do it. What was interesting to me was not looking for feedback in the expected places by asking ‘how did I do?’ or something. The interesting thing was how I felt afterward. It reminded me of feeling 8 years old and the smell of summer holidays; of walking to my friend’s house to go fishing.

Sometimes we carry little dilemmas around for far too long. Waiting for the right time to take action or procrastinating because we don’t know which way to go. Especially if you’re your own boss and no-one is around to give you a deadline, or tell you what to do. Remind yourself that you’re in charge. Do you need a badge? Ok, here’s your badge, put it on and make a decision. Find a line and cross it.

Feel better?

How do you develop a sound, a style? It could be by chance; it could be by eliminating all the things you do that come from things you’ve seen or heard; it could be by evolving things you already do into areas you haven’t thought about before; it could be by combining new things. Sometimes, though, we look to others for the answers of what to do, where to go, where to start.

Try this.

Where were you born?
What do you like to do?
Describe your day
Describe your first memory
Where do you like to be?
Who are your friends?
How’s your hair?
Any aches and pains?
Your favourite sensation?
What do you like to taste?
A good story you’ve heard?
What happened when you were five?
Who’s not here?
When did you hit your head?
What would you like your last thought to be?
Ever been high up?
Ever been underground?
Ever gone fast?
Ever lost it?
What do you have that no-one else has?
How can you do something you do differently?
Imagine something that can’t exist

Do you know anyone else with the same answers as you?

Thought not.

There’s only you that’s you.

Why not let us know about it?

Put it all in.

What do you think about when you play? Oft-heard responses start around, “Nothing, man” and end up approaching misty-eyed ramblings about picking fruit or cooking. Certainly there’s magic and mystery lurking in those improvisatory hills…

Here’s a little diagram to help explain what I think goes on in YOUR HEAD when you’re improvising: The centre-line represents time passing. The dot in the middle represents now. To the left is the past; to the right the future. The diagram in my head is a saw-tooth wave, or possibly a cartoon cat being electrocuted.

In any given moment we have an ever-decreasing awareness of the past and the future. I’m more aware of what happened three seconds ago and less aware of what happened three minutes ago. Likewise, I’m more aware of what might happen in three seconds and less aware of what might happen in three minutes. Awareness gets fuzzier the further away in time you go, in either direction, from the present moment.

You can’t be thinking of ‘nothing’ when you’re playing. If you’re unaware of what just happened, then what you played ‘now’ would have no meaning, no development, because it would always be a new thing. If you’re unaware of where you’re going, then what you just played would have no direction, you wouldn’t feel resolution points, phrase endings and so on.

Where it all goes wrong is when you get seduced by the past or the future: things like, “that was rubbish”, “that was amazing”, “I loved that feel”,  “so and so is in the audience”, “I’m going to mess this up”, “somebody is filming this, what if it gets on YouTube”, etc. If you find yourself thinking thoughts along these lines then you’re not really in the present.

So ideally you want to always be in the present and just playing.

Hi! Welcome to Nirvana.

Trouble is, it’s the stuff of magic. Maybe what’s involved is knowing your stuff cold, or maybe being totally ignorant, or maybe it’s just not giving a flying fuck about anything, maybe it’s just loving what you do. Maybe it’s just giving up holding on to thoughts (!) and just getting on with doing whatever it is you do because it’s just more fun if you do that. Being judgmental or anxious is tiring.

Obviously I’ve got no idea what was going on in Ronnie O’Sullivan’s mind at the time he did this. But I’d suspect there was not a lot of mental chatter about the previous game or the last black, just a lot of doing. But who knows? it could be that while he did this there was a constant internal battle to stay present, and maybe that’s what makes a Ronnie O’Sullivan?

I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any experience in areas where you have to be ‘always on’: Air-Traffic Controller? A Surfer? A Comedian? A High-Wire Walker? A job or an activity where there’s not much room for mind-wandering or coasting. I think those people would have some interesting things to say about focus and being in the present moment. And how to get better at being there.

What do you think? Have you gotten better at this? Do you meditate? How does that affect your focus? When you’re in the moment, can you can mess about with it? Do you do an activity where you can more easily be in the present? Anyone studied Situational Awareness? Feel free to chime in with any thoughts on the matter…

Here are three Live Vault recordings from this year. As always, they are free to download, so please, help yourself; have a listen; come to a gig! The first two are from the London Horns. We recorded a studio album a couple of months ago and that’s almost finished and it is sounding splendid.

Here’s a set from the Tony Woods Project. Our next gig is on 30th Sept in Oxford at The Spin.

You have twenty books you want to read/study, but you’re overwhelmed, you don’t know where to begin, or you keep going over the same material. Here’s something I’m doing at the moment that’s working for me. Try it.

Some rules:

• Go through each book from the start to the finish.
• Make a start! Open a book and turn to page 1.
• When you finish a page or two, don’t close the book. Leave it face-up on the page where you’re at.
• When you reach an impasse or get bored with one thing, move on to another book.
• Keep going. Use little snatches of time to read on, or work on a small idea until you’re ready to move on.

What works for me is seeing the pile of books as an open loop (to coin a phrase from David Allen); a tangible representation of what I’m working on. And, where I am with it. If I were to close a book and put it back on the shelf, then there’s always the possibility that I might let it drift off and forget about it. There’s something about leaving a book open that moves me forward; likewise, turning a page. There’s something about closing a book that allows me to close down to it. So I’m using this as a way of tricking myself into carrying on; keeping going; not giving in.

Kind of a half-finished – actually not finished at all – type post, but as I’ve got 50 unfinished posts lurking around – and an unfinished book… I figure I’ll just get on with it and see what happens. Maybe it’ll be useful to you… So – I need you! We need you! – To come up with amazing ideas for the good of the world. Anyhow, here’s the general idea…

You’re in Gardonyi’s, looking over a piece of music that seems interesting and you want to get the gist of how it goes. Your sight-singing is impeccable so that holds no problems, but what’s that in the corner of the page? – ’120 bpm’.

Can you guess what the tempo of the piece is? One way to do it is to look at a clock and count the rate of the seconds – that’s obviously 60 bpm [beats per minute]. Double it if you need 120 bpm; half it if you want 30 bpm; triplets would move at a rate of 180 bpm. And then, is it a little faster or slower than one of those? Great, but what if there’s no clock?

Well, make a tempo map. Pick some very memorable songs that you can easily imagine and map their tempo. Start vague and get more detailed as you go on. Ideally, they’d be songs that everyone knows, definitive versions, for it to work. And you have to have a pretty accurate mental image of the song at roughly the right tempo.

I started out thinking I’d get a list of ‘the most popular songs of all time’ and work out the BPM. But I think what you really need is:

1. a really memorable song that you know very well and can easily imagine.

2. a way of linking the BPM to some content within the song. Or, any way of memorizing the tempo that’s quick and doesn’t involve rote memorization.

I found this great site http://djbpmstudio.com, which is a list of thousands of songs and their tempos. On that site, you can look at all the songs at, say, 120 bpm and then just choose the song you know best at that speed and then come up with a way of memorising the tempo. For example, it’d be great if ‘When I’m 64′ was actually 64 BPM, or 128. But it isn’t, so forget that. But you get the idea, eh?

Ok, so now you have the problem of memorising which songs go with which tempo but maybe that’s where you can get all creative in service to the common good by somehow linking a tempo to a song, Tony Buzan-style :)

So, maybe you’re a massive Queen fan. Of course you are! If so, I’ll start you off. Here are some Queen tracks and their rough BPM. Can you think of a clever way to memorise the tempo?

40 bpm: Somebody to Love – 40 bpm is from ‘Find’ and ‘Body’ in this song. (I’m allowing this kind of fudging the rules). We Will Rock You and Save Me also work. Maybe you could think, 40 bpm is the first thing on the metronome and the first thing you need in life is Somebody to Love :) That’s a terribly lame example but I am sure you are WAY better at this than I am.

50:

60:

70:

80:

90: Fat Bottomed Girls

100: Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy

110: Another One Bites the Dust

120: You’re My Best Friend

130: Now I’m Here

140:

150:

160:

Use this site to test your tempo memory powers: http://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm Can you nail 90 bpm? Try it…

Other games to try if you’ve got no friends or are pathologically bored: Try and name any tempo and hit the bpm and nail it straight away. Or, try to keep the tempo the same for more than two beats.

So the question is: Are you geek enough to make a tempo map? Do you instantly know the tempo of a particular song? Why? How? Why aren’t you sharing your knowledge here? Or maybe it’s just me…