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Being human is pretty cool. I’m able to make and use tools, I’ve got opposable thumbs, and I’m able to contemplate my own existence. Although being human is totally awesome most of the time, there are some drawbacks. One of which is that I can only concentrate on one thing at a time. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that the concentration thing is great for taking math tests and escaping from 500 pound gorillas, but when I first started trying to play guitar and sing at the same time, I’ll be darned if it didn’t take away a bit of the magic.

If you are human like me and you want to learn to sing and play your guitar at the same time, you will have to use repetition in order to attain the muscle memory necessary to achieve the task. Believe it or not, it’s just like walking and chewing bubble gum. In other words, once you’ve done something enough times, you no longer have to use your concentration to do that task. You can walk and chew gum at the same time because you’ve been doing both of those things since you were very small. You’ve got it mastered. You no longer have to think about it. Playing guitar and singing at the same time is just like that.

If you are having a hard time playing and singing try this: First, learn the part you want to play on the guitar or bass or drum or whatever instrument you want to play it on, and then memorize it. Play it more. Repeat. Play it until you can tell someone your address out loud while playing it. If you can talk to someone while you’re playing the instrumental part, you are ready to start singing along. Memorize the lyrics. Know what beat each line starts and ends on. Repeat.

If it sounds like a lot of work, you’re right. Teaching yourself to do new stuff is difficult. Especially when it involves the movement of small body parts like fingers and vocal chords. It can be fun, though, if you want. If you start out with easy songs that you like to listen to and work up to the more difficult stuff, you just may enjoy the work.

While at this point in time it doesn’t seem like it will be too far off before we’re able to plug in to the matrix to learn new skills, the truth is that us humans are not able to do so currently. It turns out that if we want to learn how to sing and play, we’ve got to sing and play. A lot. The key words being “want” and “a lot”. If you want it, you will do it a lot and it won’t seem like work. Have some fun. After all, you don’t work music, you play music.

Right from the start it became very clear that the kids were alright and I was at least half wrong. I was –and am- still writing, recording, and performing my little heart out, but through the years of mean club owners not wanting me around, door guys who seem like they never learned to smile and think of patrons as the bloodsucking parasites that cause them to have to go to a job they clearly despise, and all the drunks who’ve loved my band until they found out we don’t know their favorite Molly Hatchet song, at which time my band becomes the worst band ever and they leave, presumably to drive off drunk in to the night swerving and killing all the way home, I may have become a slight bit cynical.

The kids were alright. In fact, they were better than alright, they were great. First up to be judged was a band to which Simon Cowell would have been mean. I think Simon Cowell is a dolt, however, and that he makes a great living by doing mean things that were probably done to him as a child – things that will probably get cleared up after some time in therapy, and I think that the earnestness of the two lead singers was great and that just like everyone at the beginning, with some practice, the talent will come to match the desire. The rest of the band, who ably backed up the leaders were like flies on the wall, so in the comments field of the judging form I was dutifully filling out as if they would be given to the bands later as a helpful bit of critique, I wrote something that I tell myself and my band members and anyone else who’ll listen all the time because I have faith in its validity. “There is seldom much difference between an audience’s reaction to you and its reflection of you.”

One down, five to go. I was becoming more comfortable with my lot and eager to hear what the future of the evening had in store.

A band came up with a couple members I’d known before. They had once been part of Rock ‘n’ More’s Rockology class and, after a few quarters, decided to go out on their own. I can’t blame anyone for that. That’s our goal at the school. I’m sure it’s much more difficult but, hopefully, more rewarding to know that you can book a gig without Dace’s help.

This particular band had its earnestness knob up to ten. The singer sang songs about love gone bad and about love gone right and about cruising the strip with his buddies looking to pick up on chicks. I didn’t know there was a strip around Maple Valley where a group of friends could drive and pick up on chicks, but then again, I didn’t grow up around here. I grew up on the Eastside where cruising down the street adjacent to Lake Washington had been outlawed. I had heard that the rule was that if a cop saw your car on that street more than twice in one night, you’d get a ticket. It was all pure hearsay, but I believed it. I only went cruising once. I went with my friends Pat and Geoff in Pat’s 60-something-or-other Chevy muscle car. There were so many cars that it felt like we were stuck in a traffic jam. I thought it was boring. Didn’t pick up on a single chick. The singer of this band clearly did not share a history of cruising with me. Whether or not there was a strip to cruise; that he did or did not cruise it; or that he did or did not pick up on chicks simply did not matter. When he threw his mic wielding arm high above himself and cocked his head to the left where the guitar player was throwing down sermons on his Les Paul, I believed that he believed it, and that made the audience believe it, and who was I to do anything but to believe it myself?

To be continued next week…

I could have competed at the local “Battle of the Bands” a couple weeks ago. Even though I’m too old for the competition, the rest of my band is not, so we were told we could compete if we wanted to. There’s no way you could have gotten me to ever do that though. There was no way I could have won. If I were to have done well in the voting then, me, the President of a music school, has just beaten a bunch of kids. I’d look like a total jerk.  If I didn’t do well in the voting then all my credibility as a professional musician would be out the window because I just lost to a bunch of kids. So I judged instead. That felt right. I’ve been teaching for close to a decade now and have been studying rock music in one way or another for virtually my entire life.

Even before walking into the venue at which the event was held –The Den Teen Center- I knew that this was not my kind of place. High school aged kids were hanging around the entrance and wandering about the parking lot, sending text messages, and doing their best to be cool. The way any high schooler should. A band was unpacking their gear and staging it just outside the front entrance all perfectly windswept banged and tight clothed. No, this place was not for me. This place belonged to the kids. They owned it. It was their world and I was invited just for the evening. I was clearly an outsider and almost felt like I was travelling back in time back to high school where I spent a lot of my time just trying to not be the butt of someone’s joke. It’s weird. I’ve spent most of my adult life overcoming my self-confidence issues –I thought- successfully but, for the first several minutes of my experience that night, I thought I had fallen off the wagon. Just as I later found out at my high school reunion, there was no real malice intended upon me. It was all in my head; A figment of my imagination; I made it up; both in high school and at The Den.

By the time the music started at six o’clock sharp, I had made my acquaintance with the staff members on hand, been shown to the judging table and been told what it is that I was supposed to do there. I met the other judges –that part’s not totally true, I’ve known one of the judges, Arielle, pretty well for a while now- and settled in for a night of hormone fueled rock star hopefuls pouring their guts out all over the stage.

Right from the start it became very clear that the kids were alright and I was at least half wrong… I’ll tell you what I mean next week in Part II of this saga.

How To Get Along

Since it’s a subject that comes up time and time again at Dace’s Rock ‘n’ More Music Academy, I think we should have a great conversation about it and I’d like to start the conversation by communicating to you what my thoughts are on this very complex, and not always fun, subject. Notice this blog is quite lengthy. It’s only the tip of the iceberg. Just the fundamentals of my “getting along” philosophy. If I keep writing about this topic, I may end up with a book. As with any well communicated conversation, I would love to listen to your thoughts on the subject so please feel free to respond.

The truth is that getting along is really complicated. In one my previous blogs, titled “The Greatest Band in the World Cuts a Record”, I mentioned several legendary bands that couldn’t keep it together. The rift between John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles is legendary. Aerosmith broke up in the early 80s only to get back together a couple years later and now, twenty odd years after that, Joe Perry and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith are currently bad-mouthing each other in public. Even the one band I could think of that has kept its members in tact the longest –U2- has had its share of knock-down-drag-outs. The point here being; if anybody in your band is having difficulties getting along with anybody else in your band, then you are in good company. Congratulations!

Quite often, when dealing with creative types, rational thinking and reasoning jump hand-in-hand out the back window when the ugly heads of emotion knock on the front door. With musicians, sometimes keeping the band together can get really complicated. Sometimes to the point where they can’t see why they should even keep trying. Because of its complicatiativity, (kom-pluh-kay-sha-tih-vih-tee) I think the title we should use to get ourselves in the right frame of mind for this conversation is:

The Process Through Which a Musical Group Productively Journeys In Order To Achieve a Unanimously Satisfying End.

I feel a little better already. Now that we’re all in the correct frame of mind for this subject –that is, one in which we accept unnecessarily complicated and not necessarily helpful or correct advice- let’s begin…

In order to draw you a full-color, 11 x 17 poster hung up on a Seattle telephone pole of the topic at hand, I’d like you to meet my friend Norm. Norm is a guitar player for the local grunge band “Norm and the Stormin’”. All through middle school and high school Norm played his guitar every chance he got. He idolized his heroes who were/are great, legendary guitar players and, as any adolescent kid is wont to do, Norm modeled his own personal behavior after what he believed was the behavior of those guitars players that influenced his playing.

Although Norm truly loved the hard rock, blues, and heavy metal music of his heroes, he also kinda’ had an ear for some other types of music too. Types of music that the other dudes in his band didn’t think were too cool. You see, the other dudes in the band had had similar musical upbringings as Norm. They all had their own heroes in various rock ‘n’ roll subgenres and they also modeled much of their behavior on what they believed was the behavior of the musicians they idolized.

The problem with modeling your behavior after what you see in other people is that you’re not getting the whole picture. Norm’s favorite guitar players looked really cool on stage and talked about stuff that was cool but that was all he knew of them. Norm and the other guys in the band only saw one dimension of their heroes’ lives, and in modeling their own behavior after what they saw, created rather one-dimensional lives for themselves. In fact, Norm and the Stormin’ is part of an entire community of like-minded individuals who pattern their own character after their perception of their musical heroes’ lives. They are a tight-knit group of musicians and music lovers who think that pop music is the work of evil because the singers sometimes lip sync in concert and often don’t write the songs they sing. This particular group of musicians and music lovers, within which Norm and his band run, believe that in order for music to be respectable it must have been written, recorded, and performed by the people in the band. Unless, of course, they are paying tribute to one of their heroes’ bands, like when Aerosmith covered The Beatles or when Zeppelin ripped off those old blues songs.

One day while Norm was stopped at a stop light in his really cool panel van that he used to haul his gear and his band to and fro gigs, his whole head turned red when he realized that he had been singing along with Miss LaLa’s “Adoration Match”, which was being played on the radio for what seemed like the bojillionth time that day. The song got so much airplay that you couldn’t get away from it. Norm knew every word of that song even though he would reluctantly turn the station every time he heard it. He couldn’t admit to himself that he liked the song. This is a song which his friends and band mates would not approve. Norm was quite confused about it, too. He was a dude who liked metal and other awesome, guitar music. It just didn’t make sense that he could also like pop music. Norm had a reputation to uphold so he never admitted to himself or to his band mates that even though he still was a really cool guitar playing metal head, he liked pop music too. He found the fast, pulsing beats to be exhilarating and yet, rather guilt inducing.

It’s easy to see by reading Norm’s story that Norm is setting himself up for sadness by closing down a whole department of his personality. People are not like what you see on TV, on stage, in pictures, or in the movies, ever. In order for the story to get across in the short period of time that the viewers or listeners have to give them, characters in the entertainment field have to be one-dimensional. There is simply not enough time to get into every character’s back-story. In old westerns you knew who the bad guy was because he was the guy in the black hat. That made it easy for the viewers/listeners to figure out who the Lone Ranger was going to get.

In real life you are allowed to be as complex as you want. Even if all your friends think that Miss LaLa is horrible, you can love her music and still hang out with your friends. If your friends don’t want to hang out with you because of something as small as the music you listen to, you probably shouldn’t be friends with them at all. I know you’ve heard your parents say that a million times, but, let’s face it, it makes sense. There is no reason for you to be unhappy. If you have to hide the things that make you happy from your friends, then you should have different friends.

Here is a little step-by-step procedure that I’ve come up with that I feel would have saved Norm some grief and caused him to be a happier, more fulfilled rocker. Feel free to integrate some of these ideas into your own musical journey.

1.       You need to know what you want.

Lots of people want lots of different things. It doesn’t matter what you want as long as you know what you want. It also doesn’t matter what other people want. We’re talking about what it is that you want. You get to be as selfish as you want with this one. We’re not taking any action, we’re just figuring out what we want. A lot of people, like Norm, have a tendency to “see” themselves as a certain type of person and sometimes what that person wants in life and/or in a band is inconsistent with that image they have created of themselves. That’s why it sometimes takes a lot of courage to admit to yourself what it is that you actually want. For instance, you can probably imagine that it might take a lot of courage for a guitar player in a grunge band to admit to himself that he loves the song “Adoration Match” by Miss LaLa.

2.       You need to clearly communicate what is that you want.

Nobody can know what you want unless you tell them. Sometimes it takes a lot of courage to say what you want. If you are a guitar player in a grunge band and you really want to play “Affection Match” by Miss LaLa but you don’t mention it to your band mates because you think they’ll make fun of you then you shouldn’t get mad at anyone but yourself when they decide to write a song called “We All Hate ‘Adoration Match’ by Miss LaLa”. Once you’ve mustered up the courage to tell yourself of your infatuation with Miss LaLa, you now should move on to the next level of courageousness which is to express yourself in that manner. Norm should tell his band mates that he loves Miss LaLa and that he wants to do a cover of “Adoration Match” and that he also wants to incorporate more aspects of pop music –such as electronic beats and synthesizers- into his band’s grunge music.

3.       If there are people involved with contradictory goals to yours, move on.

If the other dudes in Norm’s band think that’s a stupid idea, Norm will have some thinking to do. Does this mean that his band will never play any of the pop music that up until recently Norm was not willing to divulge he loved, even to himself? If so, this might be a good time for Norm to find some other folks to play with; some folks that love fast guitars and pop music. Being with a group of people with more similar, or congruent, goals will make for a happier, more satisfying musical experience.

4.       Once you find people with a congruent set of goals as you, set in motion that pragmatic series of steps that will allow you to systematically achieve those goals.

In other words, full speed ahead. A group of people with a singular goal and the drive, ability, persistence, courage, and tools to achieve that goal, will achieve that goal. Luck is what you make of it.

If Norm finds that his band mates also secretly like pop music and want to add elements of that genre into their music, then Norm is set to go. If, on the other hand, he finds that his band thinks he’s a dork and ostracize Norm for liking Miss LaLa’s music, Norm is going to move on to greener pastures. He’s going to find people who have the same goals as him and, although it may take a while to get there, he’s going to be happy and fulfilled by the knowledge that he stayed true to himself and stuck to his guns long enough to find the people with whom he could build a future.

Are your eyes beginning to tear up yet?

Think about that for a while and I’ll tell you how that may apply to the Rockology class where you are stuck with a set of musicians –like them or not- for three months at a time.

When I started playing gigs I thought it was cool to go on stage in t-shirt and jeans. I didn’t want to dress up in spandex and makeup or some sort of costume like a lot of the bands on MTV. My favorite bands went up onstage wearing the same thing they were wearing during lunch.

Fast forward a few years and I’ve realized that the t-shirts and jeans that Metallica, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden were wearing were costumes. It’s all part of the image. The image of those bands is that they don’t have an image and that attracts people who think that bands shouldn’t have an image. Sounds twisted, huh? Twisted or not, the world of entertainment is all a mirage. Once I really got that into my head, I stopped taking myself so seriously and had some fun instead.

So now the rule of thumb I tell my Rockology students to use is to look different than the audience. Make sure that people can tell you’re a performer and not just a face in the crowd. Over the years we’ve had bands that have dressed in themes like when all the members of Sumo Nightclub wore suit jackets or when The Fire Extinguishers all wore firemen’s helmets. I’ve noticed a bit of eyeliner on a few dudes besides me. Sunglasses, kilts, furry jackets, crazy hats, formal wear, and even hot pants (by that I mean Doug Geiger in his flame-print pajamas) and loafers have all taken turns onstage at Rockcitals.

In my band, Sealth, we become caricatures of ourselves onstage. Anything we do offstage we do times 10 onstage. Why? Because when you play music in public, you are generally trying to get peoples’ attention and make them experience something beyond just the sound of the band. By the time you’ve put together a band and started playing gigs, you’ve hopefully got the music down, but if all you had to give to the audience was music, why wouldn’t they stay home and listen to their iPods? Music is pretty much free these days, and really easy to get. If people are getting up and leaving their homes, sans iPod, to go see you perform, you should be flattered and work to make it worth their while. Therefore, a live show has to be about more than just the music, it’s also got to be about the experience. At a Madonna show, it’s about the dancing and costume changes. At a Metallica show, it’s about headbanging, moshing, fist-pumping, and other manly things. Besides the music, why should people come to see your band? What kind of one-of-a-kind, personal experience are you going to give to your audience?

There are elements of movement and emotion that should certainly be part of your live repertoire and we’ll get into those topics in the future. Cool explosions and drum risers that go upside down over the audience and huge laser shows may be cost-prohibitive for your band right now so we’ll talk about those way later. First off, try being creative with the way you present yourself visually. Become a caricature of yourself. Have some fun. Here’s the equation (Me + fun) × 10 = me onstage. Good luck