A Baited Question from Zut.

[Zut8083]

Dear Alembicians,

I was thinking about something over the weekend: what do you do to cross-train your head as a musician?  I know that's maybe a weird way to say it, but it's the best I could come up with.  Sorry.

For instance, I am, have been, and will be again, perhaps forever, a synthetic organic/medicinal chemist, hack pharmacologist, and biologist/biochemist/biosynthetic pathway research scientist. I had found going in to work in these labs to build the molecule(s) du jour for nearly two full decades was my "cross-training" for playing bass or guitar (badly), as doing science helped me to learn songs by ear, probably through the process of inductive and deductive thinking.  I believe this is much the same kind of thinking as in anyone's job, and who takes the job seriously.  Frankly, my two favorite jobs have been in food service.  Once I deep fried an Admiral Akbar action figure in a fit of teenage angst before frying a doughnut made of pizza dough.  I was told I was an idiot, and I said the doughnut wasn't bad, and someone else yelled "It's a TRAP".  It was a fun conversation, even somewhat embued with a musicality.  Then, that night I saw what that action figure was worth and I stopped ruining the pizzeria's fryulator, having accepted the truth as it was presented at face value. 

I think this cross-training is basically being really sucked into what you are doing, or what you are thinking, or if not a job, another hobby, and then doing this activity full bore to the exclusion of all immediately non-essential things.  That is basically, if I recall apocryphally, how a well known virtuoso guitarist once defined what musical "genius" was (can't find the citation, won't give the name).  I am not claiming to be a musical genius by a long shot, nor a virtuoso, except perhaps for being socially awkward, but I am emphasizing that it may be that PUSH that geniuses can manifest and that I think we can also manifest and use to build our intuition and acumen to go down the rabbit hole while playing, or while doing our jobs, if we can for the sake of enjoying hard work.  Thus, I gotta believe that syngergy and cross-training to be a better musician happens where you can find it.

Strangely, I recently had a number of directly personal and familial concerns land on my plate, and working was not commensurate with handling the necessary nuances of these problems.  Thus, I started doing the cooking for my family as any enterprise runs on its stomach.  Am I chef?  No, not even close, it's just the endeavor to learn to provide mostly edible meals to learning to think about how to handle situations that have some rules, have known constraints, and have things that don't always go according to plan, and then, not necessarily due to user error. 

I know I am doing a million things wrong when I am cooking, and I doubt I am very inventive when I cook, but it is the act of doing something wrong or getting hosed in preparing a meal and then isolating what went wrong and finding out which candidates are failures of my own and are not (e.g. too many cooks), but working at it earnestly and also learning which technical mistakes fly in the face of things and do work.  Even stranger, I see that given the time constraints of working these personal concerns out, my ability to play or hear things has not atrophied as quickly as it has in the past, and I can only think that it is the cooking and using the same inductive/deductive tool kit that I used in lab that is keeping me from getting rusty as fast as I otherwise might.

Thus, my question is, what activities do you do that seems to compliment and buff up your playing/chops, but that are not actually playing?  Thank you.  Cheers (again if things are awkwardly constructed, I apologize,  I re-wrote this about 4 times, and bits might not have been cleanly trimmed).

-Zut

[growlypants]

Well, I'll tell you what works for me.  And I find myself doing it all the time.  Just pounding out a beat, quietly... on my pants leg, or on a table top... it comes from my need to re-establish a very good reliable rhythm.  Not many people know this, but I did have a "slight stroke" when I was 42.  It totally destroyed my confidence, my ability to play anything for years...but, HEY!  Now I'm BACK!!  (But, I'm pushing 70...). But that IS what I do, and it helps me.  YMMV!

[5a quilt top]

Physical activity, including weight training, power walking and pilates for the body.


Design work for the mind.


I'm a graphic designer and have recently transitioned to project management and sales duties, but the designer in me still wants to figure out elegant, yet workable design solutions for the various project challenges that cross my desk daily.


IMO, you are looking at it backward - for me, playing music and the discipline required to attempt to master an instrument is not only good therapy and a pleasant "escape" from my daily tasks, it actually assists me with those tasks by forcing me to think differently - aural design as opposed to visual design. Painting pictures and creating textures with sound.


Like good design, a great bass part, excellent guitar lead or clever chord melody arrangement all require the ability to leave in only what is necessary to communicate a given idea and remove anything else that might be distracting.

[cozmik_cowboy]

I have several friends who, when giving up on a playing career, went into programming; they tell me that it's a good match, as the thinking is the same.

Peter

[peoplechipper]

For me, I am a trained Goldsmith working in a pawnshop as a day job; that job is total cross-training! Anyway, when I'm working on jewellery at home I'm listening to various music which is often inappropriate to the task I am doing, like UNSANE while stone setting...seems wrong but maybe helps train focus? I also regularly change scale and work on guitars and sometimes furniture...helps me, but it's probably tangential cross training...but that's the likely effect anyway...Tony

[Zut8083]

Hi, guys

These are some really great and really cools insights into how your music innervates your day to day work and how your day to day work innervates your music.  I often play music loudly when alone, either when I was surrounded by chemicals and a fumehood/workbench, or now a range, countertops, and cats, but in both cases it was a sense of a dense and numinous atmosphere as it was ritual that facilitated the tasks at hand.  I've also always wondered how a cherry'd out Griswold Erie, USA cast iron might make for a resonator or a banjo body if properly reclaimed, fabricated, and seasoned. 

I would, in this mien, fail the total concentration part while working, as I'd listen to things that caught my attention in my ears or my head, and then I'd start thinking about them to the extent that I could/can while working on something else.  While singular focus is gone, and thank goodness I am not a surgeon, but the work and the music would, for me, have that complementarity or symmetry between what I was doing, a universal time pressure, and the act of using my hands.  For example, much of chemistry and many other such fused intellectual/technical endeavors involves several manipulations, and then a bunch of "hurry up and wait", like many jobs.  If I had to do something really technical, read: gloved, wearing sealed intro to high-school chemistry goggles that mist more than they are transparent, and wear a "fire retardent" lab coat, and possibly even chem/acid loaded respirator because fume hoods die off all the time and you might handle something REAL nasty, I would do the work which required the "Spaceman KISS outfit" I had on, and then during "wait", I would invariably start looking at the reaction and zone out while thinking about the bass breakdown from Welcome to the Jungle, the intro to Sails of Charon, George Benson's jazz guitar, John McLaughlin, Jeff Beck, Vai, Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, George Lynch, Billy Sheehand, Jack Bruce, Lemmy, etc. as individuals, while still vaguely watching the thing in the fumehood and the timer, or I would start thinking about something musical but not super technical like the breadth of the the Winterland 1968 version of Sunshine of Your Love vs. Cream's numerous live and single studio versions and how that one Hendrix version, in my opinon, was better than most of Clapton's renditions, or even the same three day stint's renditions of Tax Free by Hansson and Karlsson, or Purple Haze where the signal path from Hendrix's huge hands to the tape was the best live album I think RYKO, or anyone has ever released, that I have heard (Jimi Hendrix Live at Winterland).  I am not saying there are not better, but I can feel adrenaline in my arms signalling into my spine welling around track two or three all the way to the epilogue, so I might be a touch partial.  Yadda, yadda, yadda, nothing blew up, caught fire, sometimes it worked, but I don't think this was pretending to be Jann Wenner in my skull that lead to failure; a 5% success rate in science means you're a star.  \

But, someone once told me something that complements what I once read from Duff McKagan that is pure gold as far as advice:
<Post-doc> "Always listen to what the science is trying to tell you about itself so you can run the right experiment or make the right hypothesis to see what it is saying.  And it may tell you through an accidental finding or serendipity"
<Duff McKagan> "Always serve the song."
These compliment each other in my mind as serving the song is not a static or even reproducible thing given the tons of variables seen in any real world endeavor.  For instance, salvaging a bunk experiment, if you can, doesn't have a protocol on the back of a Duncan Hines box; salvaging bad music, or even bad ideas for the rudiments of something simple because you are over-invested in it is also a case of knowing what to do, when to do it, or even cut bait.  Any sophisticated cognitive effort, as far as I have learnt, really has subsumed a LOT more training and made use of more experiences of varied quality and intensity to build any intuition and contribute to any intellectual gains that can bring this tasteful problem-solving set to bear on any task and resolve it elegantly, musical or otherwise.  Or maybe it's all really easy, and I really suck at music, science, and cooking.  There are those devotees of that opinion.  Heretics. 

Nonetheless, this isn't meant to sound effete, really, it was just an attempt to clear up what had appeared to be wonky and unclear before.  Thus, there is no snoot, snark, or "harumph" intended, none, in what I am trying to say or how I am mangling it.  But I really think there has always been some synergy in how we as musicians, professionals, and people, in real time, find a  NECESSITY to use our experience, brain, intuition, a critical eye or ear, and so forth along with the cerebral component of playing music or doing something demanding as an airstarter for playing music or doing something demanding, as was mentioned by 5 A quilt top: that the doors swings both ways, and that you can reverse the particle flow through the gate.  I agree that music can be in the spotlight or play a supporting role for other endeavors, and I have found this really useful myself.  Thank you for the correction and introducing the converse to what my perceived argument was.  Cheers.

I am going into this detail as I apparently may have been obtuse in my phrasing: it isn't the primacy of a job or music or an activity, per se, just that they are complimentary and by doing one thing, in general, it seems in my own life experience will start from one place and can end up shoring up or complimenting other endeavors.  I wondered if other musicians who also had other professions, talents, and hobbies that were actively used felt a similar synergy.  I don't intend to imply there is a right answer, I just wondered if there was similar experience on the forum where others may see a correlation between musical appreciation and acumen, and the refinement of existing abilities or the adoption of next modes of thinking.

It's really cool to see that there is, and how this relationship works for different people.   Thanks again, and cheers.
-Zut