Inspiration vs Influence

Posted on November 1, 2009 by Phill Gibson

I’ve always used these two terms rather interchangeably. Saying that someone has been an inspiration, and thus has influenced my playing.

Come to think of it though, they aren’t really the same.

If someone is an inspiration, they don’t necessarily have to have musical ideas that you have borrowed. They don’t even have to be much of anything, except that they have some quality about them that, when you think about it, it drives you to make positive changes. If they do have musical ideas, then so much the easier to visualize for what we have here.

On the other hand if someone is an influence, then you may or may not find them, in and of themselves, to be inspiring. You do, however, find their musical ideas well worth pursuing. What they are saying musically (at least as you interpret what you hear they are saying) can be treated two different ways: generally or specifically.

Either this is what you are also generally thinking musically, in which case you (as the ‘influencee’, if you will) try to take what your influencer brings and further add / modify their input. Making the techniques, voicings or overall musical direction your own. Or else you envision what they say musically as being an important component in your overall expressions: then, you find the influence to be more specific so that it’s more a component in what you’re striving for, then you try to see how it fits into your overall musical ideas. Either way, you try to integrate their ideas into your own playing.

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Nine Reasons a Banjo Teacher Should go to NashCamp

Posted on October 29, 2009 by Phill Gibson

When I was at NashCamp two weeks ago, I didn’t hear anyone else mention that they were a banjo teacher. I’m sure several of the people there besides the faculty taught at various levels, but I got to thinking how a forum such as NashCamp is ideally suited not only for students of the banjo, but for teachers of the instrument as well. Here are some reasons I’ve jotted down as I’ve thought of them.

1 – Learn New Techniques. Get out of the rut of playing the same things by swapping some licks with other players. Then teach these to your students when you get back home.

2 – Keep Your Ear to the (Bluegrass) Ground. Want to know who’s doing what? Here’s a good resource in the faculty and other students.

3 – Recharge Your Batteries. This really worked for me! Just the fact of getting together, realizing that everyone in this room you’re in plays the banjo is refreshing. (well, okay, maybe Marcia the cook and her assistant doesn’t play the banjo, but that’s alright!). Also, as a teacher, it’s not good to feel yourself getting staid and dull; doing just the same thing over and over. True, a lot of teaching is just that, but getting chance to look at the same material in a different perspective will work wonders in how you view these mundane teaching tasks.

4 – It’s the Perfect Networking Resource. “That’s above my pay schedule…” you hear someone at work say. Well, not everything is above everyone’s pay schedule. Just find them; and in the banjo world, this is the place to do it.

5 – Make New Friends. Sort of the social equivalent of the point above, this is perhaps the best reason of all to go, whether as a student or as a teacher. I look forward to seeing all the new and old faces (hey, you know what I mean!) again.

6 – See How Other, More Highly Skilled Players Do It. And there will be some folks there that can runs circles around everyone else. Take a hint here and learn from them; you’ll be doing it soon, also. For instance, I got a tip or two on optimizing my right hand; I never would have been aware of anything that needed modifying had I not been here.

7 – No Man is an Island. To quote the famous 17th century preacher John Donne. I know I’ve often just figured out stuff by myself, but there comes a point of diminishing returns with such an approach. It pays, technically as well as socially, to mingle your ideas with others.

“No man is an island, entire of itself … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
John Donne (1572 – 1631)

8 – Increase Your Jamming Skills. This also helps get you out of a rut, and helps you pinpoint areas that need improvement, both for your own playing and for your students. For instance, I had gotten away from diligently using the capo, and this was apparent in jamming with others.

9 – Get Good Advise on Trouble Spots. This was also an important reason for me. Good suggestions on how to help students get over certain stumbling blocks was invaluable.

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Seven Facts About Inspiration

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Phill Gibson

1 – Teachers should provide it for students. Some of it, at least. And remember too, the old saying about leading horses to water; it certainly applies here. We get inspiration from many different sources and our instructor should be one of them. For some students, instructors are their main source of contact with bluegrass music. This ideally leads to getting together with other musicians as time goes on, but teachers should make it easy to be a role model and source of information for newbies.

2- It’s required to be a songwriter. There are a lot of technical details to master in order to wrtie a song, but we won’t get to first base with this if we aren’t inspired by something, anything, to be the basis for what we are songwriting about.

3 – It makes being persistent so much easier. I would never call being persistent easy, but this makes it about as easy and enjoyable as possible.

4 – It can make all the difference between sucess and failure. Not just in music, but anything.

5 – It’s easier to see the results of it in music, IMHO, than in most other areas. Music is so directly tied to inspiration when compared to most other human endeavors.

6 – It can come from the most unlikely sources, as well as the most predictable. When I was 14 or 15, I used to listen to a musical group called Tower of Power; you may have heard of them. Santana did some songs with them that brought them a bit of reknown and so I liked them. I was also very interested in astronomy at that time and was learning a lot about it. So now, when ever I hear these funky old ToP tunes, my mind goes back to very blissful days of dreaming about the stars – not at all in line with what that music sounds like, though!

7 – You can’t force it, but you can develop it. Start by learning all the technical details of your desired area of musical expertise, then as you dwell on the creative processes, you’ll be able to visualize and express your thoughts much easier.

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Day Three of NashCamp

Posted on October 25, 2009 by Phill Gibson

Day three of the NashCamp Fall Banjo Retreat is the last day, so Sunday had a bit of a different feeling to it – like we must do whatever we planned to do today or wait until next year. Getting a photo with someone, asking whatever questions we’ve been collecting over time, making future arrangements.

The weather had cleared out by late Saturday, so the grounds were just about dry again, with cool temps that were a bit advanced for mid-October. A nice day for traveling back home.

But first, there was unfinished business; After the usual excellent breakfast we had more classes (boy, I do miss eating bacon and sausage, but it contains nitrates). Ned Luberecki on playing single string style, Bill Evans on practice strategies for adults. I especially liked Bill’s class, where each student explained what his or her main problems were in practicing. These ranged from not enough time to mental roadblocks to both memorizing and improvising to having too much information from which to pick you strategy. Bill gave some excellent pointers, which I can incorporate into my own lessons for students.

After lunch and one more class was the final faculty concert. It was great getting to watch all of them play ‘Groundspeed’, plus several other bluegrass standards. They closed out with a nodto Sonny Osborne by playing ‘Rocky Top’. Time for goodbyes, packing up and everyone was on the road again. Yes, it was sad to see NashCamp come to a close, but there’s always next year to look forward to!

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Music: A Cure for Modern Day Complexity

Posted on October 22, 2009 by Phill Gibson

Go check your email.

Can’t do it? Maybe the SMTP server is down. Call ’em up and find out. Search for their number and find it if you’re lucky. Go through the voicemail maze and finally leave a message in the cavernous void that is otftimes Tech Support.

Oh, and don’t forget to take the camera with you today. What!? It won’t work? What’s wrong with it? Now you’ll have to figure out what to do with it. Kind of like when your main desktop PC turned belly up last year and left you blue and miserable. Sounds like the making of a good blues song here: “My PC left me disconnected… it don’t love me anymore…”

Modern life, with its’ ever-changing information technology (IT) industry, can be so complex!

How refreshing to have something else like music that isn’t (necessarily) complex. Compared to IT, it’s a very static entity and that can be very inviting; like eating some sour after you’ve had too much sweets. It’s a sure cure for what fails us from time to time in the IT world.

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Five Lessons, Yea Six, from NashCamp

Posted on October 21, 2009 by Phill Gibson

Here are a few items I learned this weekend at NashCamp. Some for me, others for my students.

1) Lighten up. No, not in terms of relationships; here, I mean lightening up with my right hand. I pick pretty hard compared to most folks, and especially with this Stelling Red Fox, which is about the loudest banjo I’ve ever heard, it is pretty plain that I can slack off on the volume and thereby improve my right hand technique. Watching Bill Evans and Ned Luberecki glide along the fretboard was incentive enough to work more towards a lighter right hand touch.

2) Think about the melody. It’s obvious to me that I’m more a technician than an artist, and this shows up in how I think about playing a song. Alan Munde explained this pretty well at NashCamp when he said what he is thinking about as he plays is simply the melody; no tricks or techniques, no finger placements or fretboard logic. And as you practice simple melody lines on the banjo, you’ll get better at thinking along the lines of the melody.

3) Play it till it’s perfect; then and only then, speed it up. The instructors there played at only a moderate speed all the time, even for the evening concerts. Bill Emerson made this point clear.

4) Singers rule. I feel a little angst as I say that. I’m skilled at playing the banjo, but not much so at singing. Nevertheless, singing is such an important part of bluegrass. True, you wouldn’t have bluegrass without a banjo, fiddle, mandolin, etc. But the plain truth is singing adds so much to the song; it’s like adding another dimension to do. So learn to sing!

5) Use the capo. Bill Emerson and Tom Adams ate my lunch Friday night at one of the advanced jam sessions (no, that would be dinner, come to think of it). I’ve simply gotten away from capoing up, and so improvising in B was a limiting experience. It shouldn’t have been.

6) Use those 3rds and 6ths. Alan Munde gave a great class on these impressive-sounding techniques and I’m looking forward to using them more.

I’ll be incorporating these points into my practice, as well as for my students.

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Day Two of NashCamp

Posted on October 20, 2009 by Phill Gibson

Saturday was the second day of my first time at NashCamp, just southwest of Nashville, TN near the small town of Fairview. I got up and headed for the dining hall, where almost all of the activities took place. Still a cool, drizzling day, there was a banjo player or two relaxing on the front porch. This porch is a dream; about 12 or 14 feet deep and 50 or so feet wide, with plenty of rocking chairs. A resident cat, (Isabelle, if I recall correctly) almost identical in looks and temperament to my brother’s old cat named Smokey, was a permanent fixture for those coming and going.

Inside, Marcia was the cook, and she is an excellent one, indeed! Apparently, she was not here at NashCamp last year and she asked everyone if they missed her; a resounding YES was the response. She even cooked up a special batch of baked beans that didn’t have any bacon in them, I suspect just for your truly (I get a headache if I have much nitrates, commonly found in things like bacon and sausage). So, yes, it’s just as advertised; the food is a definite thumbs up!

After breakfast came the session classes, where everyone was divided into four different skill levels. We all had Alan Munde, then Bill Evans for these two great talks.

Elective banjo classes were after lunch on such topics as ‘Figuring out fiddle tunes’, ‘3rds and 6ths’, ‘Set up essentials’ and ‘Right hand tips’.

We all learned much more than we’ll ever need to know about life travelling with Jimmy Martin in the early years of bluegrass. He was a character; he will be, and is, missed.

Then, we all headed out to the front steps to have the group picture made. We should get an email with it soon.

Another excellent dinner followed, then the faculty concert and informal jam sessions till late into the night. Being the early bird that I am, I was probably one of the earlier ones to retire. So much picking, but so little time!

It was a wonderful day.

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The Company Band

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Phill Gibson

I suppose such things happen often enough.

A bunch of folks at work find they have a little (very little? 🙂 common musical ground and so does the department administrator, who puts them all together in front of everyone to entertain at the next luncheon, resulting in a weekly practice session, resulting in a company band!

We had a great time playing for the company pot-luck luncheon last week; even though we had a pretty eclectic mix of acoustic and electric bluegrass / blues / country / pop sounds going on.

I’m looking forward to what we can work out. Next thing on our to-do list – what will we call ourselves?

More later when (if?) it develops…

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Just a Little More

Posted on October 18, 2009 by Phill Gibson

You know, I suspect EVERY banjo / mandolin, etc. player deep down inside wishes he had started ‘just a few years earlier’!

Like the anecdote you hear about when someone asked Warren Buffet (second richest guy in the world, behind Bill Gates) how much more money he would like to make:

 ‘Just a little more!’

Remember that playing the banjo (or anything else)  is, for most of us, a pleasant distraction. Some do it as their chosen profession and so it’s more than just something we like to do. At that point, you are required to do it if you want to get paid and be gainfully employed. Still, professionals do it to begin with because they like it and can do it at the required level of expertise. Either way, unless you have started at a very early age, you may think from time to time about how much more you could have packed in with a few more years head start.

I think that way sometimes, but more often, I tend to think about the wasted time down through the years when I didn’t practice very consistently.

But either way, it’s water under the bridge. Let’s think instead of what we can do today.

We can set aside time for what’s important in life. That includes getting priorities straight, along with the setting aside time for each of them. The banjo probably isn’t your number one priority in life, but make some time for it in there and, most importantly, stick with your time devoted to each priority!

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Day One of NashCamp

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Phill Gibson

Well, I made it here to NashCamp!

I’m sitting in the Dining hall, listening to the cacophony of twangs – barely a guitar or mandolin in sight. Needless to say, it’s rather loud. I see one reason why only banjo pickers are here; no one else could stand it all besides us.

So far, it’s been a great mix of socializing, picking and getting some quite invaluable advice from the likes of Tom Adams, Sonny Osborne, Ned Luberecki, Bill Emerson and Alan Munde. We just got out of a great hour listening to how Ned Luberecki thinks about fretboard logic, and before that, how Bill Emerson approaches playing, banjo tone, strings and bridges. Great stuff!

We’ll have dinner in about half an hour, then after that, we’ll sit around listen while Sonny, Bill and Company talk about the ‘old times’. Right now, I’m going to go grab my banjo, sit on the very spacious front porch and PICK!

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