Tag: blues
A Public Library Is a Musician’s Friend, pt 2
by Ari Koinuma on Jan.21, 2010, under Ari's Diary, Musicianship, Practice Journal, Self Sufficient Musician, The Joy of Being on the Way, Thoughtful Guitarist
I’ve said this before and I’m sure this won’t be the last time, but I can’t believe how many people don’t really use their public libraries.
It’s free, people! Your tax dollars are actually doing something good for you.
As a person who listens more than he reads, I love to browse through the CD section of the library. Some days I don’t find much I’m interested in, but today I found a good load. They are:
- The Derek Trucks Band: Already Free
- Chicago Blues Reunion: Buried Alive in the Blues
- The Rolling Stones: Hot rocks 1964-1971
- Bruce Springsteen: Magic
- Staind: 14 Shades of Grey
- The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live at Monterey
- SlipKnot: All Hope Is Gone
- Sleater-Kinney: The Woods
- Sonny Landreth: From the Reach
- Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Son House
- Gary Moore: Bad for You Baby
So they include a health doze of blues. Being primarily a modern rock guy, I tend not to discover any blues records I like, unless I can check them out and live with them for a while, and the library is the perfect place for that. I discovered some albums there that I would have never encountered otherwise.
Plus, I just put a hold on Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod. It’s book that my hero Derek Sivers is enthralled in right now.
So, what are you waiting for? Go hit your local library, see what you can dig up!
Music Theory: The True Cost of Not Knowing
by Ari Koinuma on Feb.16, 2009, under Songwriting
I know that among some musicians — particularly rock musicians — it’s glamorous to say that you don’t know much about music theory. Knowing too much will spoil it, they say. It ruins the mystery and stifles creativity.
In response to that, let me tell you a little story. I once heard a man who is a famous speaker designer, well-established in the high-end audio circles. He said that when he was little, he used to take apart everything: radios, TVs, typewriters. And tried to put them back together. Some of them he couldn’t put back, but this activity gave him great insights into how electronics worked. I don’t know when and what kind of education/training he received, but it sounded like that came after this era of taking things apart.
How We Learn and Understand
Among guitar players, we encourage beginning to intermediate players to learn from their heros. Copy them, actually — learn to play what they played, by ear, preferably. We all have to start from imitating — like little kids do with speech — and this gives us insights about how things work, even if they don’t know the system behind it. Little kids don’t know grammer or spelling, but during the course of acquiring language skills, sooner or later they realize that there are systems and there are rules. Learning these guidelines help them figure out what to do, for example, when they encounter words that they hadn’t heard before. (continue reading…)
