Greetings readers and followers,
This has been an intersting last several weeks and has warranted much time meditating both with the instrument and without...
...To the point...
The whole point of this blog is to talk about change, on and off the musical field, on and off the pencil-thin line between cerebral musical growth and emotional centeredness. Experiencing and taming the balance between personal growth as a musician and the furnance of personal human growth that catapults us into uncharted waters in our career, both as a musician, and the inherent need to fulfill our obligatory artistic sense to purvey emotional meaning behind tonal mediums accurately. So now that Webster's Dictionary had a shit-fit spell checking these words. I'll kindly translate.
We all have moments where we plataeu in our development, and we experience the ever-growing frustration that comes from the yearing to push forward, and the inability to correlate appropriately. But let us ponder for a second, how we react when we have our breakthroughs. Do we spend a moment reveling in our small victory, or do we analyze twenty steps down the road before even realizing and appreciating the days, weeks, months, and maybe even years that it took us to experience the proverbial lightbulb moment? I can bet several quid that most people are experiencing the latter.
As musicians and perfectionists (because we can't be one without the other), we don't ever take a moment to embrace and fully become concious of what we achieved. If you learned Jaco's bassline on, "Teen Town," did you automatically starting thinking that, "Portrait of Tracy" was next? Did you think about all the diatonic and substituted chord changes you just had painstakenlylearned to improvise earlier, or did you thinking about buying, Russell's "Lydian Chromatic Concept"? Redundant points aside, the point is that we never really enjoy our personal victories. So how can we?
Embracing the change that you made comes in two steps; Awareness of Effort, and Awareness of Application.
Awareness of effort refers to pinpointing every element or fundamental desire it required of you to acheive your goal.
... More Specifically...
What technical inabilities did you overcome?
Where did this rank on your overall list of development, was it something that you needed to accomplish for an audition, gig, etc, or could you have been spending your time somewhere a little bit more productive in your practice?
What was your motivation? Your reason why? Was the motivation to become a better musician, or to show off at a future NAMM show?
What was your approach, the how? How you do is almost more important than what you do.
There are several other questions that could be asked, but I'm sure these are sufficient enough to get you thinking outside of your box!
Now onto the second part...
Awareness of Application
This is probably the most important part to help you continue on your path to greatness. You might at this point be asking yourself why? It's simple.
Do you know exactly what the lasting effects of what you learned are on your continual development?
Is your knowledge of working harmony, or improvisatory ideas augmented to allow you the chance at knowing "Exactly what to say" when that one moment comes? Etc.
This is a relatively short and dry post, however, I thought it might be somewhat beneficial to share as I have been spending so much time analyzing my playing, but more importantly, giving myself a pat on the back for some of the small developments I've made in the last month or so...
In other news, Nostros will be doing a small tour over in Europe towards the beginning of April, and new tracks are to be posted soon!
As always, like, tweet, comment, and follow!!
Connect!
Best,
A