.
To say the least, I have had quite an interesting life, both in the positive and the negative. But people notice I am pretty passive in social situations. They wonder how I’m able to keep a strait head when times are rough. For a great deal of my life, I wondered the same thing. How did I always keep my head in line when my environment became so hectic?

On a not-so-separate topic, there are points in my life when I stopped playing guitar for a period of roughly two or more weeks. Sometimes I just felt burnt out. Other times an event prevented me access to a guitar for some time. But here’s the interesting part. When I finally did get back to it, I seemed to play with incredible passion. I found myself free-styling guitar riffs that simply sounded brilliant. It seemed they just came out of nowhere.

I often questioned why this was and as time passed I finally figured it out, thankfully to a point I was able to explain it.

During extended breaks, life just happened. Life took over and its events seemed to fill up something inside of me. Whether stressful or exciting, these events simply charged me in some way.

A few years ago I came up with a name for what this was. I called it my “battery”. I discovered a connection between the stress of life and my ability to play. As much as it weighed me down, it was also filling up a part of my conscious that my guitar playing seemed to feed from the next time I’d go to play.

Later on, reading on martial arts (I’m an info-holic, what can I say?), I finally found a more appropriate word: Chi. Different disciplines have different names for this, such as “Ki” in Aikedo, but it’s the same idea. I chose “Chi” because it’s more recognized than “Ki” is. You can call it whatever you want.

After a point, I noticed something bigger. There was a pattern across virtually every artist, every genre, and every song that I’ve ever heard (and I’m not including rap songs about bitches and 40’s). Every developed musician has this Chi. You can detect it within lyrics, rhythm structures, tempos, change-ups. The whole picture paints it. There are artists that seem to shape their behaviors and environments around them to charge this Chi intensely.

In fact, those who don’t even play have it. You have it, I have it, your neighbors even have it. The more I learned about this Chi, the more a whole picture was put together.

Controlled Stress

Virtually every chronically stressed person I’ve asked “Do you have a hobby right now?”, says “no”. Every musician I’ve ever met has had problems in life just as much as the chronically stressed person. But the musician has more control over their reaction to stress. They maintain it through a consistent building to, and feeding from, this Chi. Many of them don’t even know it. They figure it’s just how they are period. But if you ever ask them what they would do if they didn’t have their instrument to play, they’ll say, “I’d go crazy!”

As a musician, it’s important you acknowledge and use this Chi. Every time you experience something stressful, it’s sent and collected inside, waiting to be burnt up as fuel for your playing. This goes just the same for every positive experience. The more of each experience you have, the more charged up you become.

Wielding Chi

If you don’t have access to play your instrument, fret not. Don’t assume you won’t have the spark to play after the recess is over. Instead, keep in mind that everything that has happened in other parts of your life has collected inside. The next time you play, don’t worry about whether or not you still have it. Focus your mind and energy on how you feel toward these outer-events. This triggers your Chi and purges it out into your playing. Notice how much better you sound then the last time you played.

If you’re just learning the art of being a musician, this is something you should learn now. You’ll gain more value from learning it and using it early in the game than later on. In this way, you’ll have conscious experience in building and harnessing this chi to use.

Chi can build in small quantities or in large quantities. It can build rapidly or slowly. It takes consistent mental practice and experience with the ups and downs with life to really control these factors. I haven’t even mastered it myself – far from it. But I didn’t even have much knowledge of it until a few years ago.

Collecting Stress

Every time you experience a moment of great stress, create a new conscious reaction. You may want to scream and punch, destroy things, burn buildings, take a squeaking of a plate and fork to someone’s ears. But don’t. Instead of venting it out right then and there, say nothing and do nothing. Close your eyes and imagine a glass. Imagine the feeling you have during this moment as an amount of liquid. Imagine this liquid pouring into the glass. The greater your feelings, the more volume this liquid may take up inside this glass. Now that these feelings are stored away in your glass, put the glass up and forget about it for the moment. It’s taken care of. Feel free to create any metaphor in your imagination you’d like, just as long as it behaves in the manner of taking what you feel, and storing it up inside of you to use later during your play.

A lot of people say “It’s bad to bottle your feelings up inside”. And in the general scheme of things, it is… if you don’t create a conscious system of managing it. Reality proves everybody has stress built up inside of them, in one form or another. Everybody has it collected in different amounts, even if it’s in single grains of salt. The important thing is to be conscious of it. Take advantage of conserving it to channel it out through your playing.

Let Life Happen

If you feel you’re burning out on your playing, that’s okay. Take a break for a set period of time, be it one day or a whole month. Let life happen. Let its events collect inside. You’ll be surprised how much power it’s granted you once you pick your weapon back up.

At this point, I don’t have any special number of readers here. But to those of you who do read my entries, I want you to know a little more about me. There’s not a lot mentioned on the Author page, but what is mentioned is still very important in summary. Now, outside of what my perception is of being a musician, I figured it’s only fair to let you know a bit more about the person your subscribing to.

Know the Name

My full name is George Ethan Marrs. My family calls me by my first name, friends call me by my middle. I usually tend to use my middle name over some of the places on the web. I’ve never gone by my first here, though. The interesting thing is that I’ve been considering it lately. With a blog that I have pretty serious ambitions for, it’s only necessary. So for a new clean record, call me George.

A Taste of Irony

You’ve noticed that I write with some pretty intuitive information about being a musician. Sometimes it might seem to some of you like I’ve seriously been places and brought up some solid weight under my time. But here’s what you probably don’t know.

I’ve only ever been in one official band since the day I began playing guitar. We were called The Unfortunate. It was very short-lived, only a few months. It was 2003. We played one gig at a coffee shop and soon after, we split up due to calls from other parts of our lives.

I’ve taught guitar to friends and some family since ‘95. Most of my tutoring was free, just to have something to do and gain some reputation. I’ve rarely been paid to teach. However, that is something I’m currently changing due to needs and plans. Either way, the people I have taught have all complimented me saying I was the only one who could explain most of the lessons with language they could understand and really work with. It was obvious I had a calling not only in playing, but in teaching (and I can’t verbalize how much I enjoyed it).

Right now, where I currently live, I don’t own any fancy equipment. I don’t even have an amplifier on hand. I have one esp ec-50, and a Martin acoustic. I have a couple amps at a relatives house across the country right now, and I’m in the process of rebuilding a satisfactory computer system for home-recording.

I’ve owned 9 guitars since my first day in 1991, a black and white Harmony electric, a generic classical, a Jackson Charvelle electric, a Jackson Kelly JK-20 pro, a B. C. Rich Warlock, a Mako electric, a Fender Stagemaster electric, and now this Martin acoustic and ESP EC-50. I have owned only 3 amps to myself including a Crate travel amp, a Kustom digital combo, and a Kustom half-stack system. I have owned no drums or basses of my own. I have played them plenty though throughout the last half of my time as a musician.

So why exactly am I blogging like this when I have such inexperience?

The Beauty of Dynamic

The truth is, I’m not blogging under some image that I already know all the ins and outs of being a musician. I’ve never stepped foot into a studio. I’ve never been on stage in front of more than 100 people. I’ve never recorded an official demo tape of any kind. I’ve lived a very minimal life when it comes to being a musician. On top of that, life throws many things at you that simply make it very difficult to jump on these kinds of bandwagons. But that doesn’t mean I never will.

I don’t like the idea of blogging as an aged expert, even if I were one. The reason I am blogging here is to share what I have experienced and learned, am experiencing and learning right now, and what I will be experiencing and learning as time passes. I want to invite you along this ride and share everything as it’s coming. In this way, I like to think that I’m giving this blog more of a real life, one that is breathing and growing. It’s much more dynamic in this way, no?

Personal Development for Musicians

When I began this blog, I was at a time in my life that had called me to rediscover various aspects of myself. I started what was to be a project that would last the rest of my life – personal development. After successfully finding meaningful results from this calling, I had a longing to share my new-found views in some way. Then somebody coined a term toward my blog saying its like “personal development for musicians” That sparked an idea as to how my blog can differ from the usual musician blog. Instead of posting technical tutorials for guitar techniques and the such, I wanted to touch on a much different, much more important level of it all. After hearing the term “personal development for musicians”, it just made sense, and so you have “Musicians Dojo”, dedicated to teaching not guitar method, or drumming method, or how to have the ultimate studio setup, but a world of how to prepare and optimize yourself personally for being the best musician you can be.

So there you have it.

I do want to be strait here about all of this though. If you believe that my inexperience means you can’t confide in what I write about here, or that you’ll already know the majority of what I’m currently writing, then that’s just fine. There are plenty of other blogs out there that are already full of experienced information. But only this blog can give you more than just static information. It can give you a living, breathing dynamic example of growing as a musician and as a person in general.

Are you down?

In the next few days, I will be making some adjustments to the site. I’ve been putting it off for a bit and it’s just overdue. But there’s always a time sooner or later to make it happen. There’ s not a whole lot to this place at the moment, but every bit counts to me. These are some updates that I’m working on.

- Front page
As you can see, the front page is going through some changes. They now display excerpts instead of full posts. I wanted to do some things to clean up the layout a bit and give a more glance-friendly first impression.

- Categories
The categories page was a bit underdeveloped one point, so I’ve updated it with a legitimate php script to show them properly. I also added new categories and shifted some posts among them accordingly. There may be a good number of categories listed there that have no posts yet. Don’t worry, they’re coming.

New Categories Soon to be Filled
There are a number of categories that I have set up which are currently empty. There is a particular group of categories that I want to let you in on known as “Musician Profiles”. These are categories about different types of musicians (ie. guitarists, drummers, pianists, singers, etc). The posts within each category will pertain to each type of musician. For example, a past post I’ve written called Fast Guitarists vs. Authentic Guitarists has been categorized under “The Guitarist” (inside it’s parent category “Musician Profiles“) since it pertains to guitarists.

- Archives
I will also be updating the archives page in the near future too for a more comfortable look to match the rest of the site.

These are just some of the updates that I’ve done and more that I have in mind. Just stick around and you’ll start seeing ‘em.

I tend to read a number of personal development blogs. They give me a whole world of insight into ways I can improve my day to day life. But the other day, I stumbled upon the blog ZenHabits.net. I read on a number of topics all hitting on tips as to how to simplify your life to create more room for what you love doing. As I read, it became clear, this is an excellent approach to a subject that I have tapped on in a couple of past posts: Finding time to practice. After some great insight from my reading, I would like to transpose this idea just for you, the aspiring musician, to help you create a stable, enjoyable practice routine.

Quality and quantity of practice depends on you.

One of the most important things about your practice isn’t even concerning your practice. It’s actually concerning everything else you do through your days, weeks, and months. It’s your mourning, noon, and evening routines (or lack thereof). It’s the events and occasions that happen to you and around you. It’s the people you’re connected to and the places you dwell. It’s every major aspect of your environment.

A cluttered schedule = Fail

If you can’t find time to practice, I have a question for you. What is your day schedule like? How many things do you have going on through your day? How many tasks have you already packed into the time your awake? It’s no wonder you can’t seem to get the most out of your practice. I’m surprised you get anything substantial out of any of the other things you are busy with throughout the day if this is you.

This is my suggestion to you. Take a good look at everything you have packed into your day, and clean it up. What tasks are the least important? What kinds of things can you put off for another day, or another week? What kinds of things do you not even need at all? A daily/weekly schedule is much like a bedroom. It gets very cluttered and messy and if we want to move in another piece of furniture, we need to rearrange some things and take out somethings to keep in another room. If you’re serious about musical improvement, clean up your time and make room for your practice. It’ll be one of the most important links in the chain reaction to better practicing.

A cluttered mind = Fail

Another thing I got from Zen Habits is how to clear out your thoughts. I have anxiety a little bit more than the average person. I grew up in an environment that constantly had me on my feet worrying about what I’m going to do tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. I didn’t realize it, but it became chronic and built up stress. This stress limited my ability to think clearly for myself and to get out and do the things I had to do. Some anxiety is not bad. We need a healthy amount to keep us aware of surviving and bettering ourselves, but too much of it will ultimately result in the opposite effect. The stress from anxiety can greatly affect your mood, and therefore your ability to effectively practice. Even when you have mastered something, it can sometimes even hamper your overall performance.

Before your next practice session, take a walk and during your walk, turn your attention to what is going on inside of your head. Talk to yourself and get the major issues and how you feel about them out of the way. Afterward, bring your mind out of the subject and settle it on the trees, the wind, everything that is going on around you at that moment. The point is to start being present. The ability to be present now is one of the most important things anyone with an abundance of anxiety can do to keep the mind clean and in order. Keep the RAM free so you can dedicate it to your practice. Once you’ve done this regularly for about a week, you will notice a significant amount of improvement in the attention you are able to give to practicing your instrument. When you have more attention toward it, you are able to concentrate with less frustration, and with more enjoyment.

A cluttered environment = Fail

When practicing, its all about concentration – focus, focus, focus. You want 0 distractions. The kind of things that can bring distractions include TV, radio (unless you are playing along with it), chattering people, vacuum cleaners, low flying b52’s, nuclear holocausts, computer desktops with a bunch of distracting elements (in the case you are practicing in front of the computer with tab or software)… you get the picture.

You want to be in a room that is as quiet and simple as possible. It’s probably also good for the room to be clean, as a very messy room can create obstacles and eye catching elements that steal your focus away from your playing. Turn any TV in the room off. Unless your playing along with something on the radio, turn it off too. If you usually use your computer to hook up to for software and sheet music, make sure all other applications are closed. Turn off email notifications, RSS programs, alarms, and any other things that could make noises or steal focus away from what you are using. Use ONLY the programs that are essentially necessary for your practice. Close all other applications.

If there is any pattern you see here, it should be one of simplifying every aspect of your day to day life. The less you have cluttering your life, the more room you will have for improving your practice. Of course this takes compromise, but actually wanting to become a great musician should require such a compromise to properly and completely focus on this passion. It’s a very important one after all. It is your stress reliever, it is your personal time for expression, it is the one thing that makes you feel most worth the effort of art in this world should it not?

There are plenty of other things you can do to improve your opportunity to play consistently and consciously. These are just some that I’ve realized myself. Share your own methods of keeping your routine together here.

Lyrics have always been a very picky subject with me. Everybody has their own perception of what constitutes as “good lyrics” in terms of what the subject matter is. But subject matter is not the only thing, and especially not the most important thing to consider when deciding what makes a song’s lyrics work well with the music.

It’s good to fit in.

As a musician, you need to understand the relationship and cooperation between all the instruments being played. For instance, the bass guitar usually conforms to the rhythm of the bass drums, or simply its basic rhythmic tempo. The guitars have a relationship too. Lead guitars either double the rhythm guitar, or create a harmony with them. In this same way, the vocals should find the best fit into the music when they form a cooperation with one or more elements to the overall rhythm of a song.

Harmony isn’t just for hippies.

Just like the rhythm guitar, lead guitar, and bass, the human voice is a tonal instrument that must participate in the musical shaping of a song. Because of this, you should consider the vocal scale of tones and notes you use. If you use a scale that isn’t compatible with what the guitars are doing, for instance, it can easily ruin the song’s overall feel.

Patience is more than a virtue.

After recently listening to certain artists such as Megadeth, I’ve been reminded of another aspect of lyrical development. Dave Mustaine is a magnificent vocalist. He’s very unique in many ways. But, personally, I have fallen disappointed in his method of lyrical writing. In the past he was known for generating lyrics through clever, metaphorical (and thus more artistic) means. However, during the past three albums, he sounds more like he’s reading his lyrics strait out of a political magazine. In effect, he sounds incompatible with the rest of the music. This not only makes his vocals lack artistic word-usage, but it also flattens his use of vocal rhythm with the rest of the instruments. Compare vocal material from the album “Countdown to Extinction” (1993) to “Endgame” (2009). This usually results from a lack of patience in the development of lyrics. It can happen when there’s a close deadline in the release of an album. As a result, song writing becomes hurried.

Your signature style is where it’s at.

Make sure you have your method of lyrical structure developed and mastered. You’ll know when you have it down when you can transpose any topic written in any form to your own lyrical form without using the same words. A good singer/vocalist develops the mental skill of creating their own template(s) of word structuring, using them on command during song writing.

When you consider writing and singing lyrics as much a work of art as writing and performing guitar riffs and drum rhythms, the skill of creating your own signature vocal style becomes very important. Much the same should go toward the consideration for how your lyrics will rhythmically conform to the rest of your band’s music. Consider this entry a simple introduction into the world of lyrical usage. In later entries, I’ll be going into more specific detail on forming your vocal style.