Applying Theory To Everyday Life: A Musician's Perspective

[Liam Johnson]

@Salvijus That's awesome, hey there fellow musician! Glad you love improvisations too. Such a great way to experience raw creativity. I'm of the belief perfect pitch can be trained as I feel I trained myself around a specific time period during school. However, some people may take longer to develop it and some people can be tone deaf. But I reckon you'd have a good chance of developing it yourself if you haven't already!

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 382 | Neglected But Never Forgotten

Hello. Gosh it's been a while! So much has changed since I last updated this journal entry. As much as the notification on my neglected journal would have me start a new thread rather than reviving this one, this was me documenting my life. As such, this is a continuation of what I set out to do since my very first journal entry.

The farther along the journey I go, the more there seems to be left to venture. Since my last entry, I have moved to Sheffield in my very first home. Finally, the many struggles I faced starting out as a freelance musician and guitar teacher have started to pay off. I'm living on my own but my boyfriend since 2017 is still very much with me in everything I do. Our relationship has gone deeper than I could have ever imagined possible. Secrets and insecurities about myself that I thought I would never share with another human being have now been shared. I've learned so much about myself being with him and I love every second of it.

My life purpose is on the verge of evolving into something truly unique. I love creating new music. It gives me so much joy. This is coming from literally a full day of playing music and nothing else (except eating). The music I've been writing seems to finally be coming from a deep place within me as opposed to inspiration from others. The many different types of music I've fell in love with in my life are all starting to blend together like different colours merging together in a painting. The resulting colours are something that I don't see other players making.

I still have many weaknesses. One of which being lack of belief in myself. This has factored in me not eating properly, exercising properly, meditating and journalling regularly etc. But after a couple of weeks dedicating my time to making this album (which I've also procrastinated on), I can see the growth and improvement that has shaped my playing into the most expressive art form that I've ever been able to produce. While I do have many flaws, the one thing that keeps me strong is playing music. Now more than ever have I felt a close connection with my inner Muse. I've discovered what it means to know the sound of one hand clapping.

While I feel sad that I've neglected this journal, I can also feel compassionate. Last year was the most traumatic of my life, having to deal with the aftermath of a near life-threatening car crash and an almost life-changing operation. I felt very down and not myself at all. Therapy managed to set me on the course to recovery and now I feel I've reached the point where I can start building once again. The universe is the canvas. Now I'm ready to paint.

 

Pick of the day:

 

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 383 | How Environment Shapes Your Actions

Theory: As much as we may be willing to create things and make changes, the environment we exist in can have a huge impact on what you are able to achieve.

Applying it: Realise how your current environment is influencing everything you do, right down to how it makes you feel and what it makes you believe.

 

Right now, the space I occupy feels so alive. After countless hours of practicing the same piece over and over again, I have finally recorded one of the most difficult compositions for my album. This is a huge hurdle that I've been putting off jumping for over a year now. This piece is one of the main reasons why I procrastinated in the first place. Not only was it so difficult, I also felt that I was never in the right environment to practice it properly. At home with my parents, I felt too relaxed to attempt the endeavour. When I did move to Sheffield, I was going through one of the busiest winters of my life with gigs and teaching.

My environment now is very different. Thanks to lockdown, I'm working from home on my own and have a lot more time on my hands. I think these particular circumstances have provided me with the motivation to do my real work in the world. For the last 6 weeks, I've been exclusively practicing this one piece to perfection. Of course perfection never comes but that doesn't mean it's not worth striving for. Tonight has finally brought this chapter to a close as I can say not only did I record the piece, but I treated it with as much love and energy as I could muster.

But here's an interesting thing to think about. Before today, I've made many attempts to record this tune but all of them ultimately didn't feel right. What was different about today? It just so happened that today was the first day I changed my recording environment. Before, I would set up my microphone and stand in front of it with no technical enhancement of any kind (no headphones). Today, I set up my microphone so that I could sit down and wear headphones with technical enhancement. Specifically, I could hear my guitar for how it would sound for the album itself.

This simple change of environment to accommodate another approach to recording has undoubtedly changed the way I will record forever. Just being able to hear my guitar through a really nice reverb effect helped transform my playing into something else. Here's another neat observation. Upon testing different reverb settings, I found myself playing the composition in different ways. Dry reverb would influence me to play the piece faster, louder and more rhythmical. Wet reverb (eg. cathedral reverb) would inspire me to play the notes incredibly softly, slowly and with more freedom of movement in the rhythm.

Not only did my composition change with the environment that I provided for my guitar digitally, but me as a creative being had also adapted to this new environment and found peace in it. And this made me realise just how messy my home is with clutter! It is certainly reflective of my flawed nature to put things off. But hopefully the lesson I've learned today will help me to realise the importance of maintaining a healthy environment to live in.

 

Pick of the day:

The piece in question! Hearing this back has made me realise just how much I've grown as a musician since recording this video. This performance is very loud, naively fast and doesn't allow the musical ideas to breathe. The technique is definitely sloppier than I remembered it being at the time! But still I feel proud to have uploaded it when I did. Enjoy...

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 384 |Duality Of Success And Failure

At the end of another day, I noticed that I tend to judge my actions based on success or failure. Have I succeeded or failed today? What did I succeed and fail in? I don't suppose it really matters either way. Yesterday provided some great success but I should acknowledge that it contained its failures too. Likewise, today I haven't really done that much in the way of success so my brain would like to be judgmental and say I failed. The truth of it is that I did fail, but I did succeed.

Then my brain starts to say "well how many successes versus how many failures?" I've just realised how judgmental I've been towards myself. Sure enough I may consider today to have a higher tally of fails than successes but what does it actually mean? My brain would like to make it mean that I'm a failure. Naturally, it wishes to repeat the same thought process that has been fuelling many of my actions through my life. I could also imagine my brain setting me up to fail today after such a great day yesterday. Of course, that's what's going to happen. But does it mean that I'm a failure?

Could it just mean that I'm a human being like the rest of us mortals? Could it mean that a success is just around the corner? The answers to these questions don't really matter. The most important thing is that I recognise my brain trying to think along these lines. My brain wrestles with black and white subjects when the truth of it is in greyscale.

With enough awareness, I will be able to see that there is no such thing as success and failure. It's a duality created by my brain to categorise between good and bad. Actions are never just one thing or the other. Often they are both things at once. It all depends on how I frame it. Even the very act of categorising between this and that can be both success and failure. Creating categories in our brains can be useful and pragmatic whilst also being unhelpful and destructive. Regardless which we choose to focus on, the truth of life is that none of these categories exist.

To paraphrase a great book I finished reading called Zen Guitar, we were all born with one sense. One wholesome experience of life. But as we grow older we distinguish light from sound, taste from touch, mother from father. Making dualities is part of our human instinct. We can't not do it. But there comes a time in everyone's lives where we long for our youth, our childhood. We long for that wholesome experience of the world that we once knew. The reason we do that is because we have overloaded our brains with categories in our old age. We race to understand the world to experience it as a whole yet the power to do so lies in unraveling everything we thought we knew.

Today was a successful day as well as a failure of a day. And most importantly, it was neither. It's all the same thing in the end. It is what it is.

 

Pick of the day:

 

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 385 | Music Theory Taught Me Something Deep About Life

Today I spent literally most of my day doing chord theory. Theory of any kind is often attributed to dullness and feelings of boredom but for some reason I've been so fascinated by it today. I didn't think I'd ever reach such a point but there we go.

In my OneNote Journal, I've been writing out tables of all the possible key signatures in music and all the different chord combinations and extensions you can create within a key. This is mostly theory that I already know but I decided to go as deep as I could possibly go in one day. Musical terms are going to be all over this entry but I'll try and keep it easy to understand. I've made many connections including that chord extensions and inversions are functionally the same thing and that you can play very complex chords in seconds by playing other chords by changing the bass note. This all is centred around the guitar.

On the subject of playing chords and changing the bass around, I came across some chord types that initially sounded unpleasant. For example if you play an F major chord and put an E note in the bass (especially with a larger gap between the bass note and the chord), the sound it produces might cause a reaction of mild shock and discomfort. It feels wrong. Yet when you sit and figure out all the chords and extensions within the key of C major, this chord fits perfectly fine within the key.

This I found very interesting. A chord that seems to feel irregular and uncomfortable can fit perfectly well in a given key signature. The question of course would be "how?" Having been a musician for well over a decade and having had to play many chords for musicals that seemed ugly and harsh sounding, I feel very open-minded in my approach to search for the right context to make wrong chords sound right. After all, that's what compelled me to spend the day at it. And in no time at all I found a very obvious (to me) way to make it sound good. If you play an F major chord, then the chord in question, then a D minor 7th chord, you can make the chord in question seem like the most obviously beautiful sounding chord in that tiny chord progression. Not only that but if on guitar you play an E major chord and move the shape up a fret, you can play the chord in question and make it sound like Spanish flamenco guitar music.

Context is everything. With the right context, the most out-of-place chord can seem like the most ordinary chord in the world.

This little nugget of wisdom applies so clearly to the way our minds have worked in the past. It made me think of the slave trading in America around 100+ years ago. My history isn't the best but I do happen to know that blues and jazz music originated from Africans who were imported into America as slaves. But the reason why they became slaves in the first place is because a load of powerful white men took one look at them and thought that they looked ugly and wrong. Of course, there's a lot more to it than that.

But it's amazing and disgusting how our brains react in horror to something that doesn't fit our worldview. To them, black men didn't fit in their whitewashed worldview. I feel so thankful that I've been raised to see people for who they are, not what they look like. Focusing on music, there are some chords that won't fit my belief systems (which I share with pretty much everyone in the western world) and therefore sound disgusting. Only when we properly contextualise the thing in question do we realise that there's nothing to be disgusted about. And in fact, they can be the most beautiful things on the planet.

 

Pick of the day:

 

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 386 | Time For Self-Talk

I've never looked up methods of self-talk. But I know very intimately what it means to relate with myself. In the playground at primary school, I would often use my imagination to play by myself. In secondary school, I was a loner and had only myself to talk to. Whenever things get low, I would find comfort in talking to myself and figuring things out for myself. Today has ended on a low note and I feel like doing just that. So I'm going to sit and let my thoughts run wild onto the page until I find peace.

Earlier today I had a therapy session that I've been taking to combat my low mood. This wasn't because of the lockdown for the record. It's more a continuation of my therapy from PTSD except it's on the milder side. My mood has been very low since the crash and the operation and I haven't felt like myself all that much. I've lied and pretended to myself and others that I would be getting on just fine. Cards on the table, things aren't just fine. I do have lows that reach a very low point.

Feelings of depression to the point of self-harm at its worst have been part of my life since secondary school. Perhaps even earlier. When my half-sister died when I was young, I definitely felt very low. I remember going on holiday to Tenerife with my family soon afterwards and at one of the zoos I got a tiger teddy that I called Chunky. He would be a great comfort to me and would remind me to this day (I still have him today) of who I had lost. He grew his own personality and became my best friend during my childhood. Over the years, I would collect a good few other teddies to give him and me company. Each with their own names and personalities. Wild cats were my favourite to get, especially tigers! Just now as I reflect, I can see how they helped me process the death of my half-sister, who felt like a sister to me regardless. No matter how sad I got, I would always have my gang to support me.

Then when I met my boyfriend, I told him about my collection of fellas and he loved me for it. I feel like so many people would be eager to point out that I'm "too old for that crap" or something. But they are a part of me, and I see a part of myself in them. They allow me to express myself in imaginative ways that my adult self would not be able to get away with. Chunky seems to have even written a few songs, which are all awful to be honest. After my crash and operation, me and my bf went to Twycross Zoo and I brought home another fella. A snow leopard. One of the few female fellas, she grew her own personality too. Upon hearing many names, she seemed very keen to be called Strawberry. As much as I thought the name was silly, it's the name she wanted so who am I to argue?

It must come across as pretty crazy to anyone who isn't me the way I behave sometimes. It doesn't matter really. In the same way Chunky helped me deal with the trauma of losing a loved one, Strawberry has helped me overcome my most recent traumas. They all serve as reminders to be myself and to be self-expressive with everything I do. They remind me who I am when I don't feel like myself. Sure I don't need to go telling everyone I know that I have these fellas so that they know who I am. For now, that little insight about me will remain in this journal. All that matters is that I give myself the chance to be my most expressive self.

I feel really happy to be living where I'm living right now and super grateful to be alive. In a place of my own, without needing to do extreme traveling, able to work from home, with my fellas to keep me company. The fact that I've persevered with my life purpose and am now working as a musician. It's the most honourable thing I could have done with my career. The thing that I love most in this life. Music. At its core, it is such an innocent art form. You have to be a particularly callous kind of person to not be moved by some form of music. While there may well be corruptions in the business, there is nothing more pure to me than playing music for its own sake. Money is a bonus. Getting paid to make music and teach it is such a cause to die for. Doing what I love most to help spread the love around. Finally, I feel like I'm doing some good in this world.

 

Pick of the day:

 

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 387 | The Sound Of One Hand Clapping

Theory: As a creative person and especially as a musician, it is important to tune into the sound (or muse) that lies within you in order to produce the deepest work.

Applying it: Before you begin creating, take a moment to search inside yourself for the sound of one hand clapping. Instead of focusing too heavily on what your hands may be doing, let them do what they need to do as you focus 100% on the music that's inside you.

 

The sound of one hand clapping. This is a term taken from a book that I've read called Zen Guitar. It's such a brilliant concept that perfectly describes the sensation I have many times when I'm dealing with music. This applies to every creative field but imagine yourself a musician. Inside every person, there is a 'sound' that we long to create. Our own sound unique to us. We as individuals can feel its presence. It makes no sound in the physical world yet we can still hear it. To us, it's clear that the sound wants to be released in the physical world. There are those of us who choose not to listen and end up squandering their time. But there are also those of us who hear it and honour its request to become real.

For a while now, I've always believed I'd had this sixth sense when it comes to music. Through my whole life I've always heard music playing through me. Not every waking moment but regular as clockwork. Reading this book and coming across this term described what I had been feeling perfectly. The knee-jerk response to this phrase would naturally be "you need two hands to clap." Of course. But just like a friend raising their hand for a high-five, you can sense the clap before it has even happened yet. You imagine the clap following. And if it doesn't, who is to say that the sound of one-hand clapping never happened instead?

This morning, I watched a short clip of Victor Wooten teaching some students. One of his biggest points to student was to never focus on the instrument. He asked students to demonstrate their playing by having them focus on the drummer instead. But of course, there was no drummer. The drummer in their mind, however, was always there. As soon as they started playing their bass whilst focusing on the drummer in their mind, their playing transformed into something groovier. What happened? They no longer were focussed on what their hands were doing and instead shifted their attention inside. They listened to the drummer within themselves.

I tried this idea with my next piece for the album. Instead of treating it as a guitar piece, I started looking inward to see what kind of sound was waiting for me. This particular piece presented itself to me as a piece for a jazz trio consisting of piano, upright bass and drum kit. Once I started focusing on the type of sounds that I would imagine them producing instead of myself, the piece that I played suddenly breathed new life. It had a different groove to it that better suited the song on the whole.

It doesn't matter so much what art form you choose to master in the end. What's important is to have the ability to look inwards and get in tune with your muse, or your 'sound,' the sound of one hand clapping. Realise what it's asking of you to do and focus your heart on that. What your hands or feet do doesn't matter.

I've found myself focusing on all kinds of different things when playing pieces of music. Sometimes it's very simple like thinking of a jazz trio playing in a club, or thinking of a big band playing on the street, or thinking of a classical pianist playing in a chasm. But also, I find myself thinking on complete other realms of possibility outside of music. Sometimes I feel like I'm bringing the apocalypse upon the world, sometimes I'll be thinking of a loved one, sometimes I'll be thinking about how good my meal was. All of this is to focus away from what I'm doing and more on what I'm saying. It doesn't mean I'm actually going to bring about the end of the world. But if it's the right moment in the music for it, I'll give everything I've got to resurrect the devil and blow up the planet with the sheer power of the music.

We've all got music inside of us in some form or other. The more we feel it, the more it becomes real.

 

Pick of the day:

 

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 388 | Expanding Imagination During Practice

Following on from yesterday's entry, I've been working further on my next album piece trying to develop the character of it. In my mind's eye, I picture a jazz trio of piano, bass and drum kit playing this particular piece. But not only that, there's a whole aesthetic to it. Everything is in greyscale like an old movie, the performers are all suited and booted as you would expect from pre-50s jazz musicians, and every detail right down to the position that they are seated inside the smoke-filled, dimly-lit jazz club feels alive within me the more I tune into it.

Obviously, I wouldn't expect the average listener to conjure up these images whenever they hear the piece. It's just a powerful image that allows the music to breathe and expand to its full potential. Also it allows me to decide which player performs which parts of the music. I see mostly the piano player taking the leading role while the bass and drums follow, and now and again the piano player breaks into a solo where the others drop out.

These decisions change the way I perform the piece, sometimes minimally and sometimes drastically. Today I realised in order to create the kind of sound I wanted out of the piano player, I had to dramatically alter the way I played one of the scales at the end of the piece. It's only a couple of seconds long and most players would argue that there would be no point in making things difficult. But the realisation is that the technique is not the focus. Never mould the composition to fit the technique. Always mould the technique to fit the composition.

 

Pick of the day:

Here is a good (but not fully accurate) representation of what I see in my mind now I play this piece of music...

 

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 389 | Soup

Good grief, I sit down to write about something for the day and all I can think about is this soup I made today! It's taken from The Immune System Recovery Plan and contains fairly few bass ingredients including lentils, onions, garlic and carrots. There's something so satisfying about it. The taste of it feels so earthy and alive compared to the kind of soups you can pick up ready-made from the supermarket. Even today when I realised I hadn't bought garnish from the shop, the taste of the other ingredients work so well together.

Food is really important to our health obviously. The quality of food correlates to the quality of health. Also the sense of achievement you feel from making a batch meal is a great feeling. Food is definitely not a "sad" thing to talk about. And that's exactly what I plan to do. You ought to know it's pretty fantastic! Many of the recipes in that book are to be fair. Eating such tasty and healthy food really helps me to feel inspired for the day and I think I need to do it more often.

My diet isn't what it used to be. I think I've put on a fair bit of weight since 10 entries ago in this journal. I used to have very little body fat and now it feels like I've got a fair amount of it, though I wouldn't say I'm overweight. Maybe just out of shape. Which makes me realise how much I miss going to the gym during lockdown. But as easily as I could blame a number of things for letting go of my diet, the fact remains that I don't cook healthy food as often as I used to. My diet isn't completely terrible however. I still have salads most days of the week, but I also have biscuits, crisps and chocolate where I could have spent the time making a healthier dessert.

I do love me some good food. And I think it's time I started getting more decisive about what food I put in my body. I used to be very strict in what I allowed myself to eat 2 years ago. The balance was far to one side and now it's got far in the other direction. Time I started finding a middle ground between the two. A place where I wouldn't mind having crappy food now and again but am committed to keeping a regular diet plan. Cutting out gluten and dairy are definitely worth doing for my main diet but if the (now rare) occasion comes where I'm eating out or fancy a takeaway, I won't beat myself up too much about eating unhealthily. That would merit more eating unhealthily.

 

Pick of the day:

 

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 390 | Reflection

It's the moment we've all been waiting for. All one of us, or perhaps none of us. It's time to talk about life since a year ago until coronavirus lockdown. YAAAAAAY.

2019 was a difficult year for me emotionally. PTSD was such a struggle to cope with for many months until I finally got some therapy for it. For most of the year I felt like I wasn't being myself despite everything career-wise seeming to work out. I'd bagged a full-time position in a tribute band and a teaching slot in a music school in Sheffield. My finances have never looked so promising. I was finally earning enough as a musician to move to Sheffield into a place that I adore.

Yet it felt so difficult to return to being myself. The kind of person I saw in my Youtube videos. Bouncy and playful, taking life as it comes with whatever challenges it had to throw at me. Suffice to say I wasn't expecting what it did decide to throw at me. And now after that difficult year, things were looking the most promising that they've been since then and we have ourselves an outbreak of a virus that we know next to nothing about. A virus that looks like we'll all get in the end without a cure for it potentially. Life as we knew it came to an end. No more hopes and dreams of gigging. No more financial security. No more seeing people I love.

It's been difficult as I'm sure it will have been for everybody. But the one thing that keeps me going is my music. The world can consume me and spit me back out into a fiery pit of annihilation and armageddon and I'll wield my axe and play my way through the whole thing. It doesn't matter that I won't be gigging. It doesn't matter what happens to me. I live for music. And so long as I live, it will flow through me body and soul. For all of life's impermanence, there is nothing temporary about music's grip on me and mine on it. Everything I could ever have to learn about life is concealed within the instrument I hold close to my heart. And when my fingers eventually weaken, I'll sing. And when my voice goes, I'll clap. And when I can't find the strength to clap, I'll dream.

Music may as well be the equivalent of unconditional love. No matter how dire things get, it will find me at the heart of the storm and shroud me from the fire. It's truer to me than all of my senses combined. For every atom that was created and combined to build a universe for which to live in, this life couldn't have been any other way. I love being a music maker. And so long as I continue to do that, nothing can go wrong. And when this body and mind dies, music will live on through someone or something else just as it has done through history already.

Nothing is perfect. Certainly not my life at the moment. But Music is perfect. What better way to celebrate life before it ends.

 

Pick of the day:

 

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 391| Flashy Technique

Theory: The best musicians aren't the ones who wow you with technique. They're the ones who can move you whilst making technique invisible.

Applying it: Practice until you're so good that even your own technique is no longer impressive to you. Then you can truly play from the heart.

 

As I was practicing some difficult techniques for one of my pieces, I was reminded of this piece of wisdom. I learned it from Tommy Emmanuel at his guitar camp in Scotland. One of the biggest takeaways from the whole thing was this philosophy. It applies to all musicians but I'll focus it on guitar. If you watch someone perform and the first thing you notice and appreciate is the technique, then there's something wrong. That player hasn't yet practiced enough to make his technique so good that it becomes invisible to everyone.

The best players play from the heart. And to play from the heart, you need to detach from what your fingers are doing. If you're too focused on hitting the right strings or playing with the right techniques, you haven't practiced enough. How can you hope to move anyone with your music if all that's in you is concentration on technique? Whatever you feel during a performance, that's what's going to come through it. Your audience will see your technique and may very well be impressed. But it's not deep enough to move them. To take their breath away with sheer musicality, your focus must be on the music inside you.

If you can get to the point where you are playing the piece all the way through and you are no longer thinking about the technique, it probably means it's time to start thinking about what you want to convey with the music. How does it present itself to you? What parts do you want to highlight to the audience? Two piano players will play through the same Bach piece and if they are professionals, they will play it in two very unique ways. This would still be true for 100 players, or 1000. Your individuality and soul must be expressed within the music whether it's yours or not. Once you've learned how to play the notes, you need to learn how to play with them.

 

Pick of the day:

 

 

[Liam Johnson]

Entry 392 | Diving Deeper Into Chord Theory Again

I've just been experimenting with chord again on the guitar. The focus has been on 4-note chords using the same bass note and moving the other notes around. What I had discovered previously is that in order to play extended chords, you have to move a finger on each string according to a very regular pattern. Tonight, I wondered what would happen if you tried using a different string pattern to create new chords.

What I've discovered is that by changing the regular pattern, I can make various other exotic chords seemingly forever. Thought obviously not forever because we only use finite notes on the guitar and the octaves are repetitive. But the point is that it feels more chaotic in the results that it produces. Sometimes it produces an easy chord to figure out and other times very difficult. It's easy to play a bunch of notes at once.

It's much harder to come up with the right names for each of those chords. And I understand that this might well come across as some serious waffle. But I feel by sharing my thought processes would take too long to explain because it requires not only musical knowledge but fretboard knowledge too, and I doubt the majority of viewers (or myself after a while) would wonder what the hell I was on about.

In summary, if you dare to think outside of the box you'll be surprised at what you'll find.

 

Pick of the day: