Wow, it has been such a cool month dedicating my efforts to my new album in a way I never have before & I am so excited to not just get it done to share with you, but have this process be enjoyable as I share everything. Reverse engineering something to make people feel amazing and just it so happens I will use music to do that- is a totally different way to turn everything upside down.
Yesterday I was in conversation with another musician/student about the difference between beat and rhythm, but what really came of it was the concept of re-wiring the brain through music. I said look, your challenge right now is being constant on the beat, every four beats the musician/student was changing so much there was no pattern, and they knew it! Its not as easy as it looks:) anyways, what I see after 16 years of watching music shape, change and inspire people, especially as I see students return after college, or parents return after students go away, that is a long time to have the privilege of teaching someone while watching them evolve and change. But in the terms of HOW it changes you, this student has a particularly hard time in life being constant in times of difficulty, but is very strong in life in coming from the heart being inspired and feeling it, which is an element we must learn in music, and sometime students are the other way around. But what is amazing is as you dedicate your practice to whatever it is you want to strengthen you will see that strengthen in your life or "in and out of the studio" as I like to call it. Kind of like in yoga when the teacher says to practice your yoga all day. Our brain ends up practicing our music all day. The really really cool thing is that after 16 years I am starting to be on the back end of my experiments and now knowing what is in store for the practitioner before they begin.
In this case, working on having a steady beat will translate and transform this persons life, sometimes the skill to learn is actually how to have fun, letting go, feeling the music, sometimes the skill to learn is how to be kind to the self when you "mess up", sometimes it is how to actually just not give up and allow time to work its magic outside of what you think it should be. All these infinite things can be learned vicariously through music because when the mind is at play it is relaxed and when it is relaxed it receives, and expands, and also it becomes you, instead of efforting to try and change the self, there is no effort, through the playing through the connecting of new neural pathways, through what Einstein knew all along about the mind at play being its best to learn, we go beyond learning and go into the space of doing, of changing all pathways, and of becoming.
It is really quite brilliant and I never get tired of witnessing this and how it never discriminates in age or even in the knowing, a student can have no idea they are learning thru music and it still molds and re-wires their out of class thinking.
For me it has taught me how to be patient, how to accept, how to release, and how to translate my own thoughts into reality to name a few of a million things.
Last Monday was national music day, and I also learned its never to late to do something you really love, so cheers to national music day last week:)
