What does age have to do with live gigs? Age shouldn't have anything to do with musical playing ability, image, or friendship, should it? Maybe not, but playing in a band is usually no different than any other tight knit group of people involved in the same activity.

Way back in 1975, Robert Hilburn, the major music critic for the LA Times was writing a story entitled "Rockers Turning 30". Up until then, just about everyone in a rock band, famous or not, was still under 30, so he wanted opinions about when "the end" would come for these players. Reader feedback (letters to the editor) told him they foresaw "no end" and I believe time has proven his readers correct!

When a band of players all in their 40's seek a new member, chances are they will pick someone close to their age. Do they think a guy who is just 25 can't play as well? No, it's simply because they feel they have more in common with another 40 year old. But thankfully, there are exceptions to this.

It's refreshing to see a band feature an 18 year old singer, her dad playing bass, and the sax player is her grandfather. You see this more in Midwest groups - it seems rare on the coasts, where bands seem to be around the same age for their "image". But why can't their "image" be having members of completely different ages?

Remember the band Spirit? (I Got a Line on You). The drummer, Ed Cassidy, used our service several times. He was the guitarist's father, completely bald, when the other members, all in their 20's, had long hair. Years ago, this was very weird. Trouble is, most would still consider it weird today. But why? How cool would it be to see a group of 25 year olds fronted by a 55 year old singer, or a group of 60 year olds backing a teenage vocalist?

Would this be considered a gimmick? I don't think so, I think the public would perceive it as unique, not weird. Moral of the story: Be adventurous, be different! Age CAN work as an advantage, and in this day, bands need all the advantages they can use..........

It seems that many musicians think a lot of the current music they hear today pales in comparison to what they heard at some point before. We had an office in Hollywood from 1969 to 1995 and I spoke to thousands of musicians in person over those 26 years. Here's what I remember many of them said:

Musicians in the 70's told me that the music currently on the radio was crap, and they thought 50's tunes were better. Musicians in the 80's said the current hits sucked, and longed for 60's instead. Musicians in the 90's told me the present music was stale and that 70's music was great. And in the early 2000's people said tunes on the radio were terrible and that 80's songs were much better! Do you see a pattern here?

As people age, they clearly remember their fond memories of the "good old days" but tend to forget the bad stuff that happened. Naturally they are more prone to remember the songs they loved, as opposed to the ones they disliked, just like any other memory from their distant past.

So, is today's music worse than in previous generations? Isn't "good music" or "bad music" your opinion, not a fact, much like the old adage "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"??

Rock on!

Greetings fellow MMX® musicians. We are CLOSED during the summer. That is from the last meeting in June until the first meeting in September.  In 2014, that meant, June 20th to September 20th.

During these THREE Months, all members are supposed to be dedicating themselves to New and old bands alike - but hey, screw that, it's SUMMER :-) 

A few have toured, some have and will play street festivals, a few summer garage jams have taken place and we even have one member catching up with a summer session at Concordia. Best wishes to everyone and we'll "See you in September."

NOTE: A special audition is taking place on August 22nd. We are looking for a few metal heads and also a Jimmy Page clone for an upcoming Zep Tribute band.

Fill out the form here: Individual Application for Audition (Q3)

You know how it is. You want to take your music with you wherever you go, but that’s not always practical. Oh sure, you’ve tried the odd mini travel guitar, but you’re so wedded to the joys of a full-size neck that the experience just wasn’t the same. The strings are too close together, the scale is all off. In short, it just didn’t do it for ya.

That’s where Yamaha’s Silent Guitar comes in. Available in nylon-string and steel-string versions, Yamaha’s Silent Guitar is designed to go anywhere you do, and to allow you to practice quietly but with great tone. It’s designed to be easily portable thanks to its partially removable sides, which keep the guitar light, allow it to occupy a smaller footprint, and keep the volume down.

- See more at: http://iheartguitarblog.com/2012/03/review-yamaha-slg110s-silent-guitar.html

Heifetz also indicated that he never believed in practicing too much, and that excessive practice is “just as bad as practicing too little!” He claimed that he practiced no more than three hours per day on average, and that he didn’t practice at all on Sundays. You know, this is not a bad idea – one of my own teachers, Donald Weilerstein, once suggested that I establish a 24-hour period of time every week where I was not allowed to pick up my instrument.

When it comes to understanding expertise and expert performance, psychologist Dr. K. Anders Ericsson is perhaps the world’s leading authority. His research is the basis for the “ten-year rule” and “10,000-hour rule” which suggest that it requires at least ten years and/or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve an expert level of performance in any given domain – and in the case of musicians, often closer to 25 years in order to attain an elite international level. Note that the real key here is not the amount of practice required but the type of practice required to attain an expert level of performance. In other words, just practicing any old way doesn’t cut it.

Have you ever listened to someone practice? Have you ever listened to yourself practice, for that matter? Tape yourself practicing for an hour, take a walk through the practice room area at school and eavesdrop on your fellow students, or ask your students to pretend they are at home and watch them practice during a lesson. What do you notice?

You’ll notice that the majority of folks practice rather mindlessly, either engaging in mere repetition (“practice this passage 10 times” or “practice this piece for 30 minutes”) or practicing on autopilot (that’s when we play through the piece until we hear something we don’t like, stop, repeat the passage again until it sounds better, and resume playing through the piece until we hear the next thing we aren’t satisfied with, at which point we begin this whole process over again).

There are three major problems with the mindless method of practicing.

Why? For one, very little productive learning takes place when we practice this way. This is how we can practice a piece for hours, days, or weeks, and still not feel that we’ve improved all that much. Even worse, you are actually digging yourself a hole by practicing this way, because what this model of practicing does do is strengthen undesirable habits and errors, literally making it more likely that you will screw up more consistently in the future. This makes it more difficult to correct these habits in the future – so you are actually adding to the amount of future practice time you will need in order to eliminate these bad habits and tendencies. I once worked with a saxophone professor who was fond of reminding his students that “Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.”

In addition, practicing this way actually hurts your confidence, as there is a part of you that realizes you don’t really know how to consistently produce the results you are looking for. Even if you establish a fairly high success rate in the most difficult passages via mindless practice, and find that you can nail it 3 or 4 out of every 5 attempts, your confidence won’t grow much from this. Real on-stage confidence comes from (a) being able to nail it 10 out of 10 tries, (b) knowing that this isn’t a coincidence but that you can do it the correct way on demand, because most importantly (c) you know precisely why you nail it or miss it – i.e. you know exactly what you need to do from a technique standpoint in order to play the passage perfectly every time.

You may not be able to play it perfectly every time at first, but this is what repetition is for – to reinforce the correct habits until they are stronger than the bad habits. It’s a little like trying to grow a nice looking lawn. Instead of fighting a never-ending battle against the weeds, your time is better spent trying to cultivate the grass so that over time the grass crowds out the weeds.

And here’s the biggie. We tend to practice unconsciously, and then end up trying to perform consciously – not a great formula for success. Recall from this article that you have a tendency to shift over into hyper-analytical left brain mode when you walk out on stage. Well, if you have done most of your practicing unconsciously, you really don’t know how to play your piece perfectly on demand. When your brain suddenly goes into full-conscious mode, you end up freaking out, because you don’t know what instructions to give your brain.

Practicing mindlessly is a chore. Music may be one of the only skill-based activities where practice goals are measured in units of time. We’ve all had teachers who tell us to go home and practice a certain passage x number of times, or to practice x number of hours, right? What we really need are more specific outcome goals – such as, practice this passage until it sounds like _____, or practice this passage until you can figure out how to make it sound like _____.

After all, it doesn’t really matter how much time we spend practicing something – only that we know how to produce the results we want, and can do so consistently, on demand.

So what is deliberate, or mindful practice? Deliberate practice is a systematic and highly structured activity, which is, for lack of a better word, scientific. Instead of mindless trial and error, it is an active and thoughtful process of experimentation with clear goals and hypotheses. Violinist Paul Kantor once said that the practice room should be like a laboratory, where one can freely tinker with different ideas, both musical and technical, to see what combination of ingredients produces the result you are looking for.

Deliberate practice is often slow, and involves repetition of small and very specific sections of your repertoire instead of just playing through (e.g. working on just the opening note of your solo to make sure that it “speaks” exactly the way you want, instead of playing the entire opening phrase).

Deliberate practice involves monitoring one’s performance (in real-time, but also via recordings), continually looking for new ways to improve. This means really listening to what happens, so that you can tell yourself exactly what went wrong. For instance, was the first note note sharp? Flat? Too loud? Too soft? Too harsh? Too short? Too long?

Let’s say that the note was too sharp and too long with not enough of an attack to begin the note. Well, how sharp was it? A little? A lot? How much longer was the note than you wanted it to be? How much more of an attack did you want?

Ok, the note was a little sharp, just a hair too long, and required a much clearer attack in order to be consistent with the marked articulation and dynamics. So, why was the note sharp? What did you do? What do you need to do to make sure the note is perfectly in tune every time? How do you ensure that the length is just as you want it to be, and how do you get a consistently clean and clear attack to begin the note so it begins in the right character?

Now, let’s imagine you recorded all of this and could listen to how this last attempt sounded. Does that combination of ingredients give you the desired result? In other words, does that combination of ingredients convey the mood or character you want to communicate to the listener as effectively as you thought it would?

Few musicians take the time to stop, analyze what went wrong, why it happened, and how they can correct the error permanently.

You will find that deliberate practice is very draining, given the tremendous amount of energy required to keep one’s full attentional resources on the task at hand. Practicing more than one hour at a time is likely to be unproductive and in all honesty, probably not even mentally or emotionally possible. Even the most dedicated individuals will find it difficult to practice more than four hours a day.

Studies have varied the length of daily practice from 1 hour to 8 hours, and the results suggest that there is often little benefit from practicing more than 4 hours per day, and that gains actually begin to decline after the 2-hour mark.  The key is to keep tabs on the level of concentration you are able to sustain.

Source: http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-hours-a-day-should-you-practice/

You might also find these helpful:

1. The Best Time of Day to Practice
2. Should One Practice Very Much on the Day of a Concert?
3. Does Mental Practice Work?
4. Yes Practice? No Practice? Why You Must Decide
5. What to Practice When You Practice