The ancient Egyptians knew a thing or two about magic

 The ancient Egyptians knew a thing or two about magic. In Jewish lore, when God gave magic to the world, he gave one part to the Jews but the rest to the Egyptians.

The God Ra would travel on a barge attended by the priests and fed milk. Ra's earthly form was in a small statue less than a foot high.

The priest took the said statue and inspirited it with Ra's essence. Hence the story in the Bible of not having effigy of the gods etc. in other words, don't be like an Egyptian.

Inspiriting was achieved by breathing the spirit into the statue. To breath is to inspire; here, we have a link between inspiration and inspiriting with a work or an object.

To be inspired also alludes to being possessed by an idea, muse or faerie that works through you.

In yoga, breath or prana is the link to the cosmic deity. In the Far East, chi is very similar.

The motion of waves, the flow of the seasons, the observable movement of the planets from the earth, life and death all have this signature of breath. It seems unavoidable in the universe; it is the very nature of things. We have it in the boom and bust cycles in economics and patterns of plagues, pandemics, and war if we look close enough.

So be inspired; know that to be inspired also requires you to have a period of no inspiration.

So take a deep breath.

Vic Hyland www.vichyland.com

Ripples in a pool

Ripples in a pool

I took a small stone and turned to one of the children and said ‘I’m going to show you something of how the universe works, in fact it is most definitely how nature works’. I threw the stone into the water and we watched the ripples radiate out. ‘You see the ripples are caused by something that is not the same as the ripples,  the action itself is not the same as the effect of that action, that is something important  to notice and if you look carefully you can see it everywhere. The bee when it is feeding doesn’t know that it’s pollinating a plant, in fact the benefit that it brings to all life is not his actual intention and this is true of most things. The skill is to be able to work out what effect you can have in the world by doing something completely different. That my dear is Magic’.

I have been fascinated for some time in the unexpected consequence and situations where something is happening but it is difficult to work out the causative effect of it.

Why is it for instance that some people with the same amount of practice could learn much quicker than others, and then slow down?

How is it that other people learn slowly and then for no apparent reason suddenly become very good almost overnight?  I have seen this over and over again,

I have had a number of experiences where somebody who could not sing, who is struggling to pitch a note and who was make slow progress, could one day turn up to a lesson; sit down and this amazing voice came out.

 In a previous post I said that progress is not linear, I had spoken more of the framework of revelation and some sort of tipping point event but this time I want to look at what we could do to create change in an indirect lateral fashion.

 I was always interested in the work of Edward De Bono who coined the phrase lateral thinking, in his numerous books on the subject there are lots of examples of stimulating thought by coming in laterally. He uses various examples one of them was an American museum looking for extra funding and using a dictionary as the reference source. At random they chose words from the dictionary and then brainstormed what it made them think. One word was mattress and that led to the idea of sleepovers in the museum, children’s parties then business conferences etc. This apparently led to an increase in the funds for the museum leading to their financial survival and course a couple of Hollywood films such as Night in the Museum, I’m joking as I don’t know whether that’s true or not!

Sometimes we see this in our own life where a situation which may have been unpleasant leads to an improvement in one’s life, a fulcrum point in the way that gave you leverage for change.

Instead of waiting for events we create the opportunity for them to happen,  him I’m thinking of the idea explored in the book the ‘The Dice Man’ where his decisions based on the throw a dice. I have already mentioned Bowie and Brian Eno use of cards in their case the oblique strategy cards that Eno had created. Brian Eno was also a collector of Tarot packs and therefore I would assume that the the oblique strategy cards that he created we’re just an extension to that idea. If  it worked for Brian Eno and David Bowie it might be worth considering it yourself.

So what about ritualistic behaviour?  Of course we do this all the time, cleaning our teeth, who goes to the bathroom first in the morning,  how we order our lives; these patterns are the same, day in, day out often, so let us create some that have an intention for change.

Remember that I have a creative experiment going on which is available through my Patreon site which is the Magical Song Writing, where we are creating lyrics and music that has some intention to change ourselves and our surroundings. Check that out by visiting www.Patreon.com/vichyland

What happens when a song casts a spell?

Ok, what if a song actually changes reality? I think that these songs actually exist, for instance ‘All You Need is Love’ by the Beatles may not been the cause of the ‘summer of love’ but probably increased its potency as it rode the crest of that wave in 1967.

Heroes by David Bowie was released in 1977, with its references to the Berlin Wall and its ultimate failure along with Bowie’s Berlin concert, leading  to the sudden taking down of the wall in 1989? Ripples in the pool caused by art? Who can really say?  

I am particularly interested in the songs written by people that hint at their ultimate demise. For instance ‘Son of a Gun’ by Kurt Cobain and ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ by John Lennon, are good examples of this but there are many others.

Tim Buckley’s ‘Song to the Siren’ foretells of the death of his son by drowning many years later and it gets much weirder than that, Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins recorded the song, she also recorded with Tim’s son Jeff Buckley, the two became lovers and Jeff became the character in the song who drowns in the Mississippi in a freak accident.

What about the song that takes us back in our memory or makes us cry or laugh? We all have examples of that I am sure. What is this mysterious power that music has?

In folk music there are lots of examples of songs that have some sort of magical intent. There are songs that seem to be intended as curses and others that contain the impossible task which was popular amongst the cunning folk as they went about their business. A song such as Scarborough Fair contains many impossible tasks asked of an ex-lover,such as making a shirt with no seem and no needlework, and then to wash it in a dry well. There is also a list of protective herbs such as sage rosemary and thyme which was to be believed to be particularly useful against witchcraft. So does this mean that the ex-lover was a witch? Also within the British folk music tradition were references to trees and birds and enchanted people who had met with the fairy folk, in some traditions they were gifted to learn a skill such as playing music, or as a warning that is might not go well dealing with the Realm of the Fay.

Within the blues there is a rich tradition of magical practice which is most evident in the songs of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. In fact many of the Muddy Waters songs viewed through the lens of NLP or magical thinking, look like some form of hypnotic suggestion, such as ‘I’ve got my Mojo Working (but it sure don’t work on you). Take out the negative and there you have a magical love spell being cast on anyone who Muddy Waters fancies in the audience.

So I thought it was about time that we explored the possibilities of song-writing using phrases that intend an outcome. This can be done in many ways such as;

All you need is love, 

All you need is love, 

All you need is love, love, 

Love is all you need.

I think this last line is particularly clever in that it is a reworking of the first phrase, and then of course the end of the song is a mantra; Love is All You Need.

In the outro the song references other songs that include love, like She Loves You.

Make a song that changes your life…….

So if you’re interested in this project and want to go down that rabbit hole visit me at my Patreon site www.Patreon.com/vichyland 

where you will see details of how you could be part of this experiment.

Or send me an email to vichyland@msn.com

Vic Hyland 

Guitars are almost indestructible, and there is a little goldmine out there

 Guitars are almost indestructible, and there is a little goldmine out there 

Have you got an old electric guitar that has been hanging around, or maybe an old acoustic with a couple of strings missing? They may be repairable, in fact electric guitars and pretty much indestructible, so why not get it fixed?

One of the problem areas on the guitar is the fretboard or the neck. Sometimes the neck can warp, but on a well-made guitar you can adjust this by tensioning or relaxing the truss rod that runs through the middle of the neck. Now this is a job for somebody who knows what they are doing, so I would suggest that you find a guitar repairer who could do this for you, they will also be able to restring the guitar and maybe change the tuning pegs if required.

I was always amazed as a teenager that when you spoke to people about playing the guitar they always had one knocking around the house somewhere. It always surprised me how many people didn’t play but they seemed to have a guitar and as I was getting into teaching at the time I would often get them to pass my name around.

A good friend of mine who is an architect keeps a guitar and amp in his office. He says it is a good talking point when people come in to discuss a new project, getting the conversation off to a relaxed start.

In the years that I’ve been teaching I’ve known a number of occasions where old guitar has been found in the loft and it’s turned out to be quite a  find. The most extreme and for example of this was somebody found an original Gretsch White Falcon that came in the original Gretsch case and this was worth a few thousand pounds 20+ years ago. Although this is unusual there often finds of classic less well-known guitars such as Hofner, and EKO and even the odd Fender Stratocaster.

A few years ago I put the word out for some old guitars to be donated for charity, I had given to me around about 20 guitars that I was able to repair and get into a number of schools that were short on musical instruments. Even in that number there are a couple of Fender Squire’s that were literally given to me for nothing. So this might be a little bit of a goldmine if you are willing and able to do a little bit of repair work and TLC on the instrument.

I am personally keen on the whole idea of recycling and therefore the idea of an old guitar just being thrown away to me is quite abhorrent. Guitars have their own character, even the cheap ones, and with some attention can be made into something quite special. I have an old Ibanez Road Star that I had rebuilt. The guitar actually cost me nothing because it had been left in a school by an ex pupil for a few years and as he had gone back to some exotic country he was very unlikely to come back to retrieve the instrument. The basic build quality of the guitar was very good so I just stripped down and repainted it but then spent some money on pickups and a nice scratch plate. This is one of the guitars that I used to gig, playing in a different tuning and using it for bottleneck blues playing.

I mentioned earlier that electric guitars are pretty much indestructible, so what about the acoustic guitars. The obvious weakness on the acoustic guitar is the acoustic body which is basically a hollow box, and if this gets damaged it might be difficult to repair. It’s not impossible but it is something that you would have to do because the cost of taking it to a professional unless the instrument is a high quality would really not be worth it. However that does not stop the instrument being useful for parts and the same goes for the electric guitar of course. You might fancy building something yourself but using the hardware from an old instrument.

Now if you have an artistic bent then and unplayable instrument might be made into a work of art or even dare I say this into some sort of container; which takes me to a story of an old classical guitar teacher of mine who was horrified that one of his pupils had old guitars with plants growing out of them hanging on their wall.

So with all these guitars knocking around, by the law of averages some of them could be valuable and a good guitar keeps its value not necessarily from the point of view of sale as that is market dependant, but certainly from the point of view of its usefulness.

So if you are keen on salvaging and repairing a guitar but do not know how to play I have a free course that can help

So until next time

Vic

Visit www.bluescampuk.co.uk for links to the free course

for news on the Creative podcast if you want to learn to create and be successful visit my Patreon https://www.patreon.com/vichyland 

 

 

Music competition

Music competition

Here is a chance to win a free space at next years Bluescampuk by writing a song.

You can work at it in conjunction with other people but there is only one space up for grabs for next year but you can share.

To give yourself a focus tell us you going to write a song by visiting www.bluescampuk.co.uk and we can keep an eye open for your entry and also keep you motivated.

So give a shot we’re not expecting it to be an amazing quality recording and they will be judged on the merits of the song and whether we like it or not.

We look forward to your compositions

Closing date is 1st January 2021 so hurry along and get writing

For those of you who want some writing tips we are running a song writing session on Zoom details available if you go to our website look for Song writing Alchemy or if you join our list we will send you the details.

How music can change your world

I think it’s fair to say that most people would be able to tell you anecdotal evidence to point to the fact that music is of great benefit to her health and her state of well-being but how about it being true the transformation where it can rebuild your life, prolong your life and change the world that you inhabit?

For me I’ve been teaching and playing music now for over 45 years and I am very interested in music from an artistic and psychological point of view and have used NLP alongside music to transform my life and other people’s lives as a teacher.

 My search into a deeper aspect of music started many years ago and being intrigued and just basically nosy about what made successful musicians achieve and create and wanting to know how they did it, I started the ‘Creative’ podcast, interviewing musicians and artists and getting them to tell their stories to see if I could find any clues.  One of the lines of thought that I picked up on is where idea that there were no limits to possibilities and this is evident in people who are highly successful.

I was in a conversation with Ben Thomas who plays guitar for Adele. Ben has been her guitarist right from the beginning, meeting her at Brit School. He was telling me about being invited over to her birthday party in America and he describes all the crazy things that are going on within this mansion. people doing magic tricks and stuff like that and he was saying that when you meet these high performing and high achieving people they don’t have any limits to what they believe, they can do anything, anything is possible, like there are no rules.

For us, hearing this initially might make us slightly concerned and conflicted but in actual fact that tells us something about why we are stuck, because there are limits to what we think is possible.

Prince obviously later on his life had some dealings with Mormonism but Prince’s artwork and the way that he presented himself had blatant magical overtones such as the use of sigils (remember the logo and the odd shaped guitar that he played)

On the surface that all seemed ridiculous however these people are achieving unbelievable things with this mind-set so if we come from a scientific process to test things out you can’t test something out with the belief that it’s not going to work you have to be open-minded and then if something works then that is all that you are really concerned with.

A number of years ago I became involved in NLP and I was fortunate enough to do the training with Richard Bandler, Paul McKenna and Michael Breen, but it was Richard Bandler’s story about how he arrived with the idea of NLP was fascinating.

He tells the story about as a young man being enthusiastic about martial arts trained for many hours a day, however he is diagnosed with cancer and he is so angry and distraught about this he says that he went AWOL and then in his words ‘I woke up in Mexico’ he said that he discovered later that tequila was a great way of destroying cancer cells as it obviously destroyed his tumour, but reading deeper into this story I think he was talking about his pilgrimage to Mexico to meet a shaman following in the footsteps of Carlos Castaneda and book The Teachings of Don Juan.

I am guessing here but I am assuming that Bandler took copious amounts of peyote in the Mexican desert and ‘woke up’, much of NLP is based on shamanic practice just like the work of Carl Jung being deeply indebted to the mystical Christianity and Gnostic traditions which was only evident after the red book was published only recently.

For both of these people they needed to ‘science up’ the work, which speaks a lot about the situation that we find ourselves in with the current thought paradigm which is, if something that doesn’t fit it cannot be spoken, to do so is a form of heresy; science has become a religion. We have situations where people will not dispute ideas from their teachers until those teachers have died and then somebody else can put forward a new hypothesis. This happens in all sorts of areas from science to archaeology, medicine, to psychology and even research into the areas of ESP.

So let’s look at what music can do let’s start with what we think it can do. I believe the power of the arts can literally change the world,

Change the context and that will change the detail, at the moment music and the arts are very much of a commodity but it never used to be it was powerful and change the conscious of people (trance dance in shamanic traditions but also raves, discos rock concerts etc) the details can also change the context one can influence the other if we start approaching music, dance, drama, poetry etc in a way that it has real power it can start to really change your life.

How?

Come to Bluescamp and we will show you ……..

Ways to make music in these hard times

Ways to make music in these hard times

The experience of lockdown and its effect on live music has been significant and it doesn’t look as if there is any change on the horizon, it is therefore up to us to look for opportunities in these rather chaotic times. It is safe to say that there are always opportunities in a crisis but they may not be obvious, and they certainly will require us to think very differently about what we have to offer.

Often in these situations the answer is found elsewhere, so for instance if you are looking for an answer to your gigging the answer might be found in something other than concerts, it might be found in sports coaching for instance.

If we are waiting for a return to what we did before, we going to have a long wait, we’ll have to think about how we can perform to maybe a few people and go and stream the performance as well, or maybe a ‘drive in’ concert like drive-in cinema might be an idea.

They are relevant answers out there, but we’ve got to use our creativity to work out how we can transfer techniques from other areas if life and business. In song writing when somebody is stuck I often ask them what’s the song about? Maybe the song is just a bunch of chords at that point in time and the lyrics have not been written, when they reply that they don’t know, my standard response is ‘what is it not about’ and interestingly people know; if you know what it is not, you must know what it is; it is probably its opposite.

This happens a lot when we think because our language frames things, so when we are stuck and we can’t think of an idea it’s because we’ve got into a cul-de-sac in that way of thinking. Language creates the context and landscape that the ideas live, and the way we talk and think about music creates a framework which often becomes a cage.

We need to step back and take another turning further up the road, there is always an answer because there are many possibilities in any situation, if you think that it’s more about the question and not about a conclusive answer then you get a flow of ideas.

Questions that give forward momentum are good, remember just like meeting people, the person that you want often need to meet isn’t the person that you first meet, it is the friend that they know that can really change your life; a bit like questions and answers, the first question isn’t the one that’s going to lead you in the direction that you need, but it’s what it stimulates. So going back to our problem, what are you going to do about music in this brave new world, what ideas are thrown up by looking at other businesses and how do they do things?

Viewing things through a different perspective can give you great ideas, look at things outside of your work in this particular period of time, online sales for instance, clothing, things that have to be delivered. Is there anything we can do from that perspective? Can you deliver your music? Serenading for instance?

What is it that you can do for people that’s original and interesting?

I’ve always been successful in getting people turning up to gigs because I involve people in the concerts. Is there any way that you can do something to involve people in your creative processes? Write songs in collaboration with clients for example.

What little niche markets do you know?

It’s all about friendship groups;

Engage with information to broaden what we are doing. It is important and many musicians are already doing this, take for instance the singer songwriter and guitar player who has been doing gigs from his kitchen and his back garden during the worst times of lockdown, being funded online by donations. He was on this from day one; we need that proactive ability now more than ever to deal with what is coming, not just what we are experiencing at the moment.

So here are some ideas

1.       Gigs streamed (RSC productions streamed into cinemas)

2.       Gigs in a drive in situation like the old American drive in movies

3.       Personal gigs in someone’s garden ( got this idea from Chris Difford of Squeeze)

4.       Collaborations with businesses for musicians in residence (like artist in residence) this could also be like the Beatles playing on a rooftop in London.

5.       Find places that have social distancing ideas already in operation such as churches that you can play.

6.       The silent disco but for live bands where the audience have headphones and can dance in a large area such as a field or large marquee.

7.        Go back to the rave culture with a secret gig somewhere that nobody knows about till the last moment

8.       Read up on the East German Punk movement and see how they managed to get gigs happening in a communist regime (that was really tough and illegal)

So to add a little bit of focus, develop areas in your art that may be week like song writing and arranging or recording.

We are running a completion for next year’s Bluescampuk in Tonbridge all you need to do is record your song on your phone and send it to us here the winner gets a free place at next year’s camp.

Get writing ..

Vic and the team  

The received wisdom is wrong and expensive.

The received wisdom is wrong and expensive.

The received wisdom states that to be a good musician you need go to Music College, learning what someone tells you is right. Learn what others do in such a way that you sound like them. In the past that is not how the great players learned, they did refer to other players by studying recordings and working  it out for themselves, and that is an important difference.

If you work music out from a recording, you often get it slightly wrong and in that way one starts to sound like yourself, and not like somebody else. Think of Jimi Hendrix, he was a consummate guitar player who took from all styles and other peoples playing, however, when Hendrix played an idea taken from someone it always sounded like Jimi.

 Now I’m not saying that a modern approach doesn’t work technically, but there is an unintended consequence to the way that we learned in the past, we do not make the type of mistakes that create our personality within the music if we learn by rote.

 Our education system has created a clone factory that might be fine if you want to play in the tribute band, playing exactly like Jimmy Page or Steve Vai, but the drawback to this is these people still exist and therefore you are only a copy, and like any impersonator you can never be better than the original. If you take their ideas and deconstruct them, then reassemble you are able, with your own skills, abilities and personality, to create something that is for want of a better word, unique!

Teaching within a framework of a lesson plan is restricting and uncreative.

It is difficult to teach creativity because it’s so hard to define, whereas teaching something note for note is easy to measure and therefore mark. So the system itself causes a distortion in our approach, and this is as true for other subjects as it is for music.

Saying to a bunch of musicians ‘I’m going to give you five little tricks and tips which will transform the way you play and it will only take me half an hour’ doesn’t make for a good two year college course, and would be almost impossible to mark. However, from a transformative point of view that is the quickest route and the most effective way of teaching.

I have said it is important to have lessons BUT

My last point is the real killer, many music tutors think that teaching is showing a pupil what they (the teacher) can do, it isn’t, it’s finding out where the student is on their journey and helping them to achieve their potential. This I think is the mark of really good teaching, and you can see this in your own work if you are producing different types of musical personalities from your pupils.

 If you find that your pupils are becoming bass players, guitarists, singers, songwriters, actors or music therapists you are a good teacher. All of these people are expressing their desires and their abilities and not trying to copy yours; you have no control over what they become.

Finally, how much is a college course now? £10K per year? What you need is time to practice and people to play along with and then the contacts………….

Vic 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk