School is out. According to California State University, Fullerton, I have earned a Bachelors of Music degree in Commercial Music with a concentration in Jazz Guitar. Next year I will most likely start a Master’s program, but I’m still working out what I want to do with that. I have a couple of interesting options…
Not sure what to do with myself guitar-wise at the moment. I had a giant list of stuff I wanted to work on once I was out from under the dictates of my “official” studies. After a week of being sick, playing gigs and then catching up on stuff that I had put off because I was too busy to do, I am getting back to the idea that I need to start working on guitar stuff that is important to me as a player and/or will also be useful to me as a working guitarist. In addition, I also (potentially) have a new gig that starts in a couple of months that I should do a little preparation for. And drum up some new teaching business and maybe some new gigs. I’m in a strange place, but not a bad one.
While I have been bumming around the last few weeks I rewatched this great video of Julian Lage giving a clinic at some school somewhere. At the 29:50 mark, Julian begins to discuss how he learns certain things and what really caught my interest was when he begins to speak about “kinesthetic learning” on the guitar:
Wikipedia tells me this about the topic:
Kinesthetic learning (American English), kinaesthetic learning (British English), or tactile learning is a learning style in which learning takes place by the students carrying out physical activities, rather than listening to a lecture or watching demonstrations. As cited by Favre (2009), Dunn and Dunn define kinesthetic learners as students who require whole-body movement to process new and difficult information.[1]
After I thought about what he had to say I tried some of what he describes in the video and then this past week made up a few of my own exercises. I am so happy with the nearly-immediate results in my playing that I think that I will explore this topic a bit with the first batch of new lessons that I am going to start producing this month.
THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID IT. I have time now to start producing new content here on the blog. So watch this space 🙂
In the meantime, watch the video above.