MUSIC MUSCLE: USE IT OR LOSE IT

Where is the music muscle? In your fingertips? In your ear? In your voice?

No wrong answer here. It’s all three, but there’s still something missing.

Whether it’s ambient noise, sounds, notes, or whether it’s so important you buy tickets and make travel plans, there’s something about music I still don’t get.

On one hand it’s so ignored in an elevator, on the other it’s the primary life force, the driving element, and not just for Dead Heads.

For example, two guys might be roommates for a while and come away with nothing more than sharing space and animosity.

If you’ve ever had a roommate, ever been a roommate, you know the drill: Don’t add to the mess, reduce it.

If two teen roommates are also bandmates, you might get The Beatles.

A decade later two back-up band guys shared a room on the road and ended up being The Eagles.

Beatles, Eagles, and Stones, oh my.

 

Rock Star Dreams, Basement Room

If you haven’t already, find a way to exercise your music muscle.

Listen to old music, new music, instrumental and a cappella music.

I know what you’re thinking: Yeah, I do. I did. I’m too tired. It reminds me of the time I tried to play a guitar, a clarinet, a piano, a trumpet. Add your own.

Your past failed attempts belong right where they are, in the past.

Start anew.

I remember seeing an Art Appreciation class, a Music Appreciation class, and thinking, ‘easy A.’

Except you have to learn and remember an extensive vocabulary, historical references, and the professors were serious as hell that they weren’t wasting their professional lives spreading cheese whizz on white bread.

Out of respect for their zealotry, I dropped both classes on the last drop day to absorb as much freshman year knowledge as possible before bailing.

What I’m left with is fascination in things that go beyond passing attention, like ‘oh, that’s nice.’

 

 

Sound and color are the tools, we are the medium.

It’s that simple, and that hard.

What to do?

 

One Music Muscle Exercise For Youths And The Youthful Enough Not To Chop Themselves 

Buy an axe and start sharpening up.

Tune it up on an amp, don’t forget to buy an amplifier, and thump that thick string on top.

That’s the E string and it’s strong enough that you won’t break it.

The string on the bottom is also an E string, but it’s the thinnest one and you’ll break it eventually.

But not today.

Pull a pick across the big E and let it ring out. Now comes the hard part.

Press the same string down above the fifth fret, the lines across the long piece of wood, the neck.

Give it one pluck and do the same at the third fret.

Now give the big E three plucks before going back to one on the five, one on the third, three on the E. Repeat for three hours.

Now you’re ZZ Top and you’ve done your first concert.

Find a guy with drums and a van, drummers always have vans, another guitar player with a PA, and hit the road.

It’ll be a slow slog at first with people quitting on you, people not paying you, people not buying your merch, but you keep going.

You. Keep. Going.

I’m looking at you.

You’re looking at me.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

 

 

PS:

Whether you’re the master of your medium, or a baby boomer blogger, persistence is the main ingredient in the mix.

To the slumbering painter, the musician, the writer in all of us, wake that stuff up.

“Oh, I tried once?”

Then try again.

 

PSS:

Live with the process instead of the failure of not painting a masterpiece like Rothko, not making a song like Let It Be, or not writing an epic like Hemingway.

The secret is calling every step, every attempt, a win because you engaged.

So be engaging already. Go ahead and flex.

Go on now.

Pick up a paint brush, a pencil, a crayon and draw a line; shake a rattle and keep a beat; write a two line poem that rhymes.

Show your work.