Music Lessons

Long ago I promised my mom if I ever got famous, I wouldn’t trash my childhood music teachers. Well, I’ve never really been famous and I’m certainly not famous now…but I assume the deal stands regardless. I’m fascinated by the ways musicians learn how to make music, so I wanted to delve into my own process, mining for some insight.

The truth is, most if not all my music teachers and mentors have been great. In the earliest phase, they were simply the wrong choices for me. My parents did their best to provide a music education for me, though my eventual real education came primarily from my community of fellow musicians. I’ve benefited from formal training, but my language as a musician has mostly either come from collaboration or just listening to records. It’s been a journey, and therefore I have no shade for those who attempted to light the way.

Part 1: The Underachiever

The music ed thing started when my mom brought me around age 4 to a session by a well-regarded local music educator, Ruth Boshkoff. It’s one of my earliest memories, a rare and thrilling moment of clarity and insight where I felt seen and acknowledged by an adult. In a rhythm class for preschoolers, Mrs. Boshkoff gave all us tykes assorted percussion instruments to make unstructured noise, more or less playtime. We had a blast playing on our own but making a cacophony as a group, loosening up.

Then she sat with each kid, one by one, and had us repeat rhythm patterns of increasing complexity. By all accounts I ran the tables. I stuck with her challenges far longer than the next best kid. At the end she took my mom aside. “He’s very talented,” she said. “You should make sure he gets music lessons.”

My mom followed Mrs. Boshkoff’s advice as well as she could as a non-musician - she always had me in some sort of music lessons from an early age. I loved music and I wanted to make music more than anything, but the lessons didn’t really do much for me. If the goal is to reproduce the sounds on rock & roll records, the recorder probably isn’t the best starting place.¹

A couple years after my recorder lessons my parents got divorced. I seized a moment of opportunity and said I wanted to learn guitar. They bought me an inexpensive Japanese gut string guitar and signed me up for lessons at the downtown music store, Smith Holden. I liked to get to the store a littleearly to ogle the wall of electric guitars, fantasizing about someday having an entire wall of different guitars to choose from. I’d spend a few minutes messing around on the Baldwin Fun Machine, comparing the programmed Rhumba to the Cha-Cha. The Fun Machine is where the fun ended. I’d schlep up the stairs at the appointed time to sit in a cramped room with my teacher, a skinny, bearded conservatory grad student with black framed glasses with octagonal lenses. He never smiled.

We used the Mel Bay guitar method, volume 1. I never made it to volume 2. We never discussed what kind of guitar playing I wanted to do, and perhaps he saw the gut string as evidence I wanted to play in the classical style. My parents bought me a guitar - they probably didn’t give much thought to the type of guitar, or what it said about my interest.

The Mel Bay Method - like all my earliest music lessons - focused on reading music. Since reading music isn’t valued like it used to be, childhood music education doesn’t default to teaching reading as much anymore. Most professional musicians I know don’t read traditional notation much at all. I remember my mother-in-law being shocked when I told her people don’t really read music anymore. I’m The Mel Bay Method is a tried-and-true resource, but it was as boring to me as a math book. It started by focusing on reading single lines in the open position, bits from classical pieces and corny songs from the 1950s. During those lessons, I felt my teacher’s disappointment when I hadn’t learned the simple songs. I felt vaguely ashamed, but I just couldn’t make myself focus on the notes on the page.

Because neither of my parents play music, they had no basis to assess my progress - though I’m sure their private chats with my teacher didn’t make them feel they were getting their money’s worth. It must have been confusing for them, because I clocked in my half hour a day of practice. I mostly messed around and tried to pick out melodies by ear. I remember trying to teach myself the intro to Roundabout by Yes - the excitement of learning how to coax harmonics by gently touching and releasing when I plucked the string. I remember picking out Iron Man and Smoke on the Water - knowing it’s a code I could crack, if only I had some help. It must have sounded enough like music to not question whether I was focused on my lesson. In reality, in the course of a half-hour of guitar practice, I’d spend about two quality minutes on my lesson.

My dad expected measurable progress that he could understand. He wanted me to accompany myself with the guitar singing actual songs. To him, beginning guitar was singing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” to simple chord accompaniment. He wasn’t wrong; it’s just that I hadn’t even learned a single chord yet (except the few chords I’d learned from an article in Dynamite Magazine - G, C, and D).

Dad would say, “I expect you to be playing and singing within a month or else I’m going to stop paying for these lessons.” I’d push back mildly, telling him I wasn’t learning that sort of guitar playing just yet. But I didn’t really care that much, because I wasn’t learning anything remotely interesting.

I wanted to learn Kiss songs and how to play like Jimi Hendrix. I wanted to make the magic I heard on my favorite records. Things didn’t seem to be moving in that direction, so I lost interest. As promised, he pulled me out of lessons after a couple months. The guitar stayed in its flimsy black case in the closet the next several years, making me feel a small stab of shame tinged with regret every time I hung up my coat.

I briefly took up piano around age 11, a required prerequisite to play percussion in 6th Grade concert band. I encountered similar frustrations, and caused similar frustrations for my parents. My teacher, Jim, was a middle-aged real estate agent who lived across the street from us with his elderly mother. We had this old upright piano a neighbor painted blue to match their rec room, gifting it to us when they upgraded to a Baby Grand. I dutifully walked across the street to Jim’s house every Sunday evening for lessons. Jim was patient and kind; but just like my guitar teacher, he clearly became frustrated with my work ethic. At the end of every lesson he’d say the exact same thing: “Go home and practice.”

I’d sit at the piano for required half-hour, but I never really practiced as expected. As with all my music lessons, we focused on reading. Despite years of lessons, I never really learned to read. Instead, I would listen carefully as Jim played the piece. I’d try to commit the melody to memory then I’d go home and try to pick it out by ear. I’d perform the piece in my lesson, pretending to read the notes on the page. Of course I’d get it a little bit wrong every time, and he would call me out and gently expose me as a fraud. I know he was impressed by my ability to fake it; he even said so a couple times. But ear training wasn’t the point. I got through my required year with a decent ability to fake it at a keyboard - something I’ve done many times ever since with better results.

Part 2: Putting It Together

I turned a page in 6th grade - that’s when I started playing drums. I excitedly signed up for lessons when I started middle school band. I had a great teacher, a laid-back jazz drummer named Scott McCord. He taught me technique, but he emphasized improvisation once I had basic technical skills in place.

When my lessons moved from snare drum to drum set, he really started to push me, and I actually practiced. For example, once he assigned for me to play a 2-minute solo on the hi-hat cymbals. The assignment terrified me, so I spent a week playing about a hundred 2-minute hi-hat solos. I learned to explore the different parts of the cymbals, the different tones I could get on the different parts of the cymbal, and by adjusting the tension of my foot, using parts of the stand. At the end, he told me I did fine - there wasn’t a right or wrong way to play a solo. It was a lot more like Mrs. Boshkoff’s session than the rest of my music lessons had been. Thinking about it now, I believe he cracked open a door with that exercise.

Because I was really there to learn to become a rock drummer, Scott used a fantastic instructional book titled Realistic Rock, by Vanilla Fudge and Rod Stewart drummer Carmine Appice. It came with a flexi-disc, with Appice posed on the cover behind a massive drum kit looking like some sort of rock n’ roll pirate. Realistic Rock provided a perfect foundation to play drums in a band. It’s just a collection of a couple dozen strong hard rock beats and cool fills that suit the groove.² I learned that book cover to cover. I finally learned to read rhythmic notation fluently because I was finally unlocking the secrets. That helped me immensely at Berklee and had to read music for real. By 8th grade I played with enough proficiency to join a band if I wanted, which I soon did. That’s when I really became a musician. In fact, that’s where my music education began for real. It’s when I joined a community of musicians and expanded my base of knowledge. It’s when I started to really put in the work.

Around the time I had my first band as a drummer, I decided to pull the old gut-string guitar out of the closet. I started learning chords by studying people playing guitar in rock magazines. I learned the “E” shape barre chord from a photo of Mick Jagger playing a Gibson SG on stage during the 1981 Rolling Stones tour. I learned the “A” shape from the guitar player in a cover band I played in. I took lessons, but I also learned from the guitarists and bassists in my bands. I’ve written about my development as a guitarist on this page before - how I found my sound. I practiced A LOT from then on, but it didn’t feel anything like those awkward half-hour sessions on my childhood. I might play for five or six hours, like my life depended on it. Maybe it did. That was the period when I really learned to play confidently. I needed to get to the skill level where I could be an asset to a band - that became the goal.

By the time I started at Berklee I’d achieved enough proficiency to fill in the gaps by learning the basic music theory and sight-reading that I needed for school. I wasn’t a standout guitarist at Berklee, but I didn’t care. I’d started playing guitar a couple years ago - of course I wasn't a standout. I didn’t care about having high profile at Berklee any more than I cared about my grades. I was there to get in a band.

By second year at Berklee and the beginning of Blake Babies, I’d more or less plateaued. I had the vocabulary I needed, and my learning focus became the music business, and how to make a living. The time I spent obsessively learning music was gradually replaced by learning how to write songs, and learning how everything worked. I’ve been walking those paths ever since.

Part 3: Lessons I’ve Learned

I believe Mrs. Boshkoff calling attention to my talent wasn’t anything unusual. As one of the great music educators in our community, of course she would encourage talent every time. She knew I wasn’t any sort of prodigy; that’s different. I’ve known and worked with child prodigies and former child prodigies - they are a special breed, wired differently. I was all over the place as a kid, mostly wasting time - like most kids. Prodigies will choose to work on music ten hours a day in pursuit of mastery. I’ve been astounded by these sorts of virtuosos all my life, thank God for every one of them. It could never have been me.

My story’s pretty common among people I’ve known who have some sort of success in music. Many don’t really start learning in a meaningful way until adolescence, then at some point it becomes a consuming passion. When I started to become proficient, I saw how it could change my life and I wanted it. I was motivated by ambition that wasn’t there in the beginning. More importantly, it started to bring immense joy. It became what I love to do.

Most of my intensive learning happened in a decade from my early teens through early twenties. Since then, it’s been fits and starts. I learn what I need to make the music I want to make. I taught myself to fingerpick a decade ago to change my songwriting. I took Bryan Sutton’s online flatpicking class during the Pandemic because I thought it would be fun to play bluegrass. Mostly, I spend my creative time writing songs.

Part 4: Paying It Forward

It’s funny that none of my kids have wanted to pursue music. They all love music. They’re all musically talented. They can each play a little, and I’ve always encouraged them to play any of the dozens of instruments lying around the house. If I’m ever feeling disappointed, I remind myself that I was so motivated to make music because I craved human connection. I wanted to find community through music because I felt isolated. If my kids didn’t long for connection like I did, maybe it’s a good thing. Musicians are my people, but we’re not always the most mentally healthy tribe. I’m sure I’d be proud if one of my kids grew up practicing violin 12 hours a day by choice - but I suspect that wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun as the times we’ve had.

If anything, maybe I’m a little disappointed because music is how I’ve always connected with people. Would it deepen our relationships? Music is the point of connection for so many of my most rewarding friendships, and I feel especially connected to people when we’ve made lots of music together. Perhaps that means I should make more music in coming years. Make more music; make better friends! I’ll have to put that to the test.

Still, music making is mostly a hobby for me now. Maybe that will change, maybe not. Music-making is a hobby, but music is my profession. My role has gradually changed, so that now the most valuable work I do is to serve fellow musicians and advocates to light the path. That’s something I only know how to do from spending most of my life with musicians and music people, immersed in music. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.

1. My recorder teacher, a concert-level early music enthusiast, was Jake Smith’s mom. Jake was my bandmate in Antenna who has been married to Freda from Blake Babies for over 30 years.

2. When my son briefly took up drums, I found a copy of Realistic Rock on Amazon. My copy didn’t have the flexi-disc. This is a note to self, next time I’m alone in the house, to see if I can remember how to play the solos.