music – Impact Guitar

15th Jan 2021

Why Creativity is Messy (And How You Can Master it!)

Photo by Free Creative Stuff on Pexels.com

We imagine a creative person as a messy genius, with paint splashed everywhere, dishevelled hair and wild emotions. But in reality, creative people are like two sides of a coin: willing to experience temporarily chaos, but only for a long term vision; messy, but also very organised. After all, a painter needs to ensure their brushes are readily available when they need them.

The misconception comes from the initial spark of creativity, which often is messy, unpredictable and chaotic. Musicians, painters and writers learn to navigate their way through the first foggy stage by using their taste, instincts and experience until they have something that resembles their initial idea. The initial stage is like being a gardener – planting the seeds, waiting for them to grow and then nurturing them; falling in love with process. The second stage is more like being an architect, using logic, structure and order, and falling in love with the outcome.

I have a friend who is an astrophysicist and I often wish I could do the things he can do. Recently I was talking to him about my writing and he said, “I have no idea how you do that”. And that was when I realised that being creative is not something everyone feels comfortable with. Some people are more comfortable with numbers and a definite, concrete outcome. The messy initial stages of creativity are unbearable for some people, as they haven’t developed their internal compass to navigate through it. If you sit down to write a song, there are no guarantees or tangible truths to guide you there.

However intangible, creativity is also something that can be practised. There is no need to wait for “inspiration”, you only need to sit down and start. See what comes out. It may be mediocre, but that’s okay – just learn from it and know that the next thing you create will be a little bit better. You need to write 100 bad songs before you write your first good song. Before writing this post, I felt stuck and didn’t know what to write, so-called “writer’s block”. After much procrastination, I realised I just needed to write down the first few words and the rest would eventually come.

Creativity takes time, reflection and patience, but it is easy to lose these virtues with so many distractions readily available to absorb our senses. So whatever you want to create, just make a start right now, even if it is just the first twenty words of your novel, the first three chords of your song, or the initial pencil sketch for your oil painting. Make a start. And then do the same tomorrow.

My latest book “Guitar Gymnasium” is available on Amazon:

5th May 2020

Focus vs Exploration

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.
– Steve Jobs

Someone once asked me what makes ‘Jump’ by Van Halen such a good song. I really didn’t know how to answer that. There are so many elements that combine to make it great: the intro keyboard riff, the guitar playing, the singing, the backing vocals, the way the bass and drums interact. Then there are the recording techniques, the tempo of the song, and the personality of the musicians. So many elements that could have gone badly wrong come together to make a great song.

As musicians we spend a lot of time taking leaps into the dark, and that takes faith and trust. We have to trust that our skills will improve, otherwise we wouldn’t practice; when we write a song we are connecting dots (sometimes literally on manuscript), but each note can feel like a blind man in an unfamiliar room, arms extended, trying to get a sense of its shape. It is only when we finish writing the piece that we see the totality of it and how each note seems to “inevitably” lead to the next. We can only connect the dots looking backwards and we have to initially explore in the blindness before we arrive at the destination. We have to trust it will lead somewhere.

It is important to allow time for cross-pollination between different fields of interest or areas of our lives. Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class in college which later played a part in the typography on the Apple mac. If he was too focussed solely on computers he might have missed that opportunity for cross-pollination. Sometimes it is our side-interests which have the greatest impact on our main passions.

But what about focus?

I have noticed, however, that the times in my life where I have really excelled are when I have solely focussed on one thing for an extended period.

Arnold Schwarzenegger said “knowing how to focus on one thing at a time has made me better at everything I did”, and he has certainly achieved a lot in his life across a diverse range of fields such as bodybuilding, real estate, acting and politics. But he did them one at a time.

This means that every day we have to make a decision – we have to choose to either focus or explore.

Focussing on one thing logically means that you must remove all the other things that are distracting you. The idea of “via negativa” means to improve something by deducting, rather than adding. For instance, to improve your health you may be better off by removing all the sugary drinks from your diet before you add a new workout routine. Deducting is often easier to do (and sustain) compared to adding a new habit.

The times when I have focused on one thing are like meditation: the outside world slows down and every action seems to flow into the next. By sustaining that focus over an extended period of weeks or months, my motivation increases as I can see myself improving, and the habit starts to form, making it easier to continue the upward spiral.

On the other hand, my explorations into different fields make my main passions richer and deeper. For instance, learning about the different energy levels of pencil strokes in art has given me a greater appreciation for the different energy levels that emotion can bring to a musical line on the guitar.

Ultimately, I think the only way to balance these two approaches is to spend extended periods of time doing deep learning, but allow shorter periods of exploration between these extended blocks. This will create a depth of knowledge and understanding within a narrow passion, which will then be enriched by other diverse and seemingly disconnected interests.

16th Dec 2019

Do you hear the silence between songs?

“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”
Claude Debussy

As a teenager I used to buy all my music on cassette tape, partly because they were much cheaper than CDs but also because they were small and portable, meaning I could listen to them in my mum’s car or easily take them to my friend’s house. There were also other benefits to cassettes which were less obvious at the time, but are now clearer with hindsight.

Firstly, songs on cassettes were not easily skippable. This meant I would usually listen to a whole album from start to finish (with the occasional rewind to repeat an epic guitar solo) and even the songs I didn’t initially like would work their way into my playlist until they became favourites. These days I hardly ever listen to a whole song, let alone a whole album, and this song-hopping seems to be encouraged by services like Spotify, whether intentionally or not.

More importantly, I never listen to the silence between the songs any more. That little space gave me some breathing room to digest what I had just heard, and sometimes that space was playfully manipulated by the artist: Def Leppard’s ‘Animal’ has a false ending before the chorus comes back in a final time; Extreme’s song ‘Li’l Jack Horny’ gradually fades out, but then fades back in before coming to a definite end. If you listen to ‘Never Ending Story’ by Giorgio Moroder, you can hear it starts with a fade-in and ends with a fade-out, so the song really is never ending as it has no definite start or finish.

The space between songs has now been replaced by adverts, but that is the trade-off for listening to free music. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to discover new music on digital platforms – I can’t tell you how much money I wasted as a kid on bad albums where the artist only had one good song. Being able to listen for free before I buy their work creates an incentive for the artist to give 100% effort into their output, rather than having an album of filler.

By listening to whole albums, I could appreciate the way the songs were ordered on the album. There was also thought given to the start and end of an album. For instance Steve Vai’s ‘Sex and Religion’ album starts with a piece called ‘An Earth Dweller’s Return‘. This music is then reprised when it fades in at the end of the final song ‘Rescue Me or Bury Me’, giving the whole album a ‘book end’ effect.

‘Sgt. Pepper’ by the Beatles was the first album to feature continuous music, using cross-fades to remove the silence between the songs. Albums such as Tubular Bells II by Mike Oldfield carried on this tradition and this approach doesn’t lessen each song. Oldfield gave great thought to determine whether a song abruptly switches into the next (‘Red Dawn’ into ‘The Bell’), or gently fades into the next (‘Sunjammer’ into ‘Red Dawn’), or gradually morphs into the next (‘Dark Star’ to ‘Clear Light’).

The silence between songs gives a resonance to the musical statement, a moment for our ears to hear total silence.

“…THE IDEAL WAY I’D HOPE A LISTENER EXPERIENCE MY MUSIC IS TO GRAB A GREAT SET OF HEADPHONES, SIT WITH THE VINYL, DROP THE NEEDLE, HOLD THE JACKET IN YOUR HANDS LOOKING AT THE ARTWORK (WITH YOUR FUCKING PHONE TURNED OFF) AND GO ON A JOURNEY WITH ME“
Trent Reznor

The resonance and reflection of silence is also applicable to our daily lives. Drinking a morning coffee in silence or quietly walking on our own creates moments of active silence, allowing us to appreciate music even more, as we get to temporarily experience the absence of music.

19th Nov 2019

Use Limitations to Write a Song Today

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self.. “
Igor Stravinsky

The blank page, the empty canvas and the silent guitar are the most difficult starting points, yet that is where we must all begin. When our options are infinite it is difficult to make creative decisions, but we can channel and focus our creativity by setting restrictions and limitations.

Below are some limitations you can use to write a song today. These are only starting points which we can always change later:

Limit yourself to some simple chords: C, Am, F, G. You might change these later, but they will serve as a good starting point.
Think of a rhythm you can use for the melody – don’t worry about what pitches will be sung, just the rhythm. You can keep it simple and use a rhythm similar to the word “coff-ee” on each beat, or do something like:

Now play the chords whilst you hum the rhythm you previously made. Start by using one pitch for the whole rhythm, and then make some notes higher and some notes lower. There are lots of good melodies which are based on only one or two pitches, such as the verse of “I Am The Walrus” by the Beatles, the verse of “Manic Monday” written by Prince, and the verse of “Champagne Supernova” by Oasis.
After a bit of experimenting you will have a basic structure which you can start to sculpt. Try changing the chords, switching the order of the chords, or change chords at a quicker pace (harmonic rhythm”).
When you’re ready to create the next section, repeat the process above, perhaps starting with different chords.

The tips above are for when you feel stuck and uninspired. In his great book ‘On Writing’, Stephen King says “Writing equals ass in chair”. If your inspiration is flowing, then grab it and seize the moment without over-analysing it.

Following the process above doesn’t guarantee you’ll write a great song, but you will write a song of some sort. Many legendary musicians have lots of songs that have never seen the light of day: Prince’s famous ‘vault’ contains thousands of unreleased songs; Adele’s initial songs for the hit album ‘25’ were shelved after legendary producer Rick Rubin thought they could be better.

If you write a hundred songs, most will be mediocre, but a handful will be good; and the more you write, the better you will become.

No one in existence has lived the same life as you, and no one except you can write the songs of your life.