Some love

In my first 6 months (roughly) of giving private music lessons, I reached my short-term goal of 15 students. This wasn't an arbitrary number--It was the number I needed to make up the income of my former day job.

Now that I no longer have a just-for-money kind of job, I can put a lot more concentration in my lessons. My focus during lessons has improved, and my anticipation of lessons has turned from "Oh crap, time for job #3" to "How can I best help Johnny Student today?" This is a good thing.

But, with the accomplishment of one goal comes the setting of another: I want MORE students! I would love to have 20 students as soon as possible. Unfortunately I'm a little scared to officially set a deadline for myself, as I feel somewhat at the mercy of the season. In the late summer and fall, new students flock. And I harvested. But now I feel somewhat helpless. (Is a blog good marketing?) Hopefully the alleged post-Christmas rush is an actual thing.

So, if you are a student, or the parent, spouse, or otherwise acquainted with a student, please spread a little love for me. In the meantime, I'll keep reading Seth Godin's blog, wishing I could actually apply all the answers he seems to be giving. :)

A warm-up for drummers

Here's a little warm up I use for drumming. For about a minute each, play single strokes, double strokes, triple strokes, and quadruple strokes. The trick is, especially with double strokes, to transition from a purposeful stroke to a controlled bounce as smoothly as possible--make the transition undetectable. It's kind of like a singer going into h/er head-voice.

Here's a little demo of my favorite effect, delay. Actually, 2 of them :)

Using 2 delays simultaneously can add a subtle amount of depth to your sound. In the first example, I'm "playing the delay"--using for a rhythmic effect. The first one is set to a quarter note tempo, the second to a dotted-quarter note. As they fade away, they're bouncing off each other. In the second part, its an eighth note plus dotted-eighth note (essentially the same thing but twice as fast. (can you name the song? heehee.) In this example, the first delay is just adding some depth as it is to fast to really feel a rhythmic effect.



Hope this is helpful for you.

Jesse

A new blog

I'm Jesse VanderWeide, and this is my new blog. My other blog, jessevanderweide.blogspot.com, will still be in operation, but this one will pertain more specifically to music and my new endeavor as a private drum and guitar instructor.

For more info on my lessons, go to Jesse's Music Lessons on Facebook.

Reading Music: A means to an end

I never understood what the phrase "means to an end" meant until I started teaching drum lessons. (Shameless self-plug.) I was with my guitar-slinging brother-in-law one morning having coffee and I was telling him about my new endeavor of music lessons. The inevitable question, "Do you teach your students to read music?" came up, and, without really thinking about it, I said, "yeah, but reading music is really just a means to an end--'The end' being personal expression through music."

For the sake of teaching someone the whacky idea of playing music, we have to speak the same language. But once you've learned the language, you don't need to think about it. You think through the language, without thinking about it. (Like George Orwell taught us in his book 1984.)

A quick aside: This is why I love the aptly named "chord charts" so often used in modern worship music (and also improvised jazz music). They give you the lyrics along with the chords that make up the "foundation" and the "mood" of the piece. The rest you have to figure out on your own--In other words, just feel it. That's what musicianship is: Feeling it.

Reading sheet music does not make you a musician any more than reading words makes you an author. Reading music is nothing more than a stepping stone in the journey towards the next opportunity to express yourself through music. And success happens when each of those opportunities leaves you with nothing more than the desire to do it again.

So, I guess there is no 'end' at all.