10 Best Online Vocal Training

Best Online Vocal Training in 2023

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When I Think Back to All the Crap I Learned at High School

When Paul Simon penned the lyrics above, he could easily have been talking about the music lessons I endured at school. Back then, such lessons were a skive and a welcome break from maths, physics and French...

When Paul Simon penned the lyrics above, he could easily have been talking about the music lessons I endured at school. Back then, such lessons were a skive and a welcome break from maths, physics and French. We didn't learn much, either - unless you can call the caterwauling fallout from learning the recorder anything that could possibly prove useful in later life. Mind you, I've never used calculus or trigonometry since either, so maybe school for me was just a job lot of useless information...

It does make me wonder about the music education business today, though. It's changed a lot in the past few years, with school music classes embracing modern pop and rock and teachers actively encouraging their charges to form groups and perform in assembly or in 'battle of the bands' competitions. It's healthier, for sure; but only if it's done right.

You see, the problem as I see it is something I call 'compound error' where music teachers who have attended college display a tendency to teach the way they themselves were taught. Somebody said recently that all music theory started off as just some guy's opinion, and over the years that opinion has been allowed to become fact. If those facts are taught dogmatically enough then how are the 'keepers of the lore' ever going to encourage someone to try something new?

As an example, Frank Zappa told me in an interview that he once opened a book on music and on the first page it said, 'you may never do this...' and gave an example. So Zappa went to the piano, played the example, liked it, and shut the book, striking a blow for liberated thought.

The past 20 years or so have seen dedicated guitar schools popping up all over the place and so it's now possible to go to college and major in rock guitar, in theory at least. Most of the guys I know who teach in such institutions are broad-minded enough to guide students towards their individual goals rather than corral them into a kind of 'group mindedness'. But I have seen evidence of a worrying trend where a default of learning 'music by numbers' is positively encouraged. Here, a student is taught to match a chord arrangement to a scale or mode and blast furiously away at around 180 beats per minute without any concern for playing an actual melody. It's seductive, because it appears to work; it looks and sounds impressive - and it will definitely get you a girlfriend - but it's not really anything that could be mistaken for creativity, in my opinion. Making music is far too organic a process to allow itself to be lampooned in this way - and furthermore, it's not the way the pros do it. It's not real, it's pretend - and once you submit to being fitted with your musical straightjacket in this way, it's very difficult to escape from. So no matter how passionately some musical process is introduced to you, it's always advisable to make like Sinatra and ask yourself if it just might be better to do it your way...