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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?