The entire guitar BMS department is guitastically thrilled to bring you this guitarrific event.

GUITOBER GUITALENDAR:

Thursday, Guitober 16th: Guitar Night I
Student Concert at Bakalar Recital Hall, 7:30PM
An open recital for guitar students at BMS. Talk to your instructor if you are interested in performing.

Friday, Guitober 17th: Garageband for the Guitarist
Studio J, 7:30PM
Scott Pittman is teaching a special edition of his Garageband class designed specifically for guitarists. Learn to record, edit & practice with this easy-to-use program. Sign up with Hollie Fleming (617-277-4593; hfleming@bmsmusic.org). Must be a BMS student to attend.

Saturday, Guitober 18th: Clinic Day 1 (Open to the Public)
3:00 – Duets: Brendan Burns, Will Dick & Valerie Thompson (cellist for Goli & Fluttr Effect ) talk about playing guitar with other musicians. This clinic demonstrates techniques for expanding or simplifying your playing style to fit any situation. It also covers ways that different instrumentalists look at music and how a guitarist should present written music to another musician. A great clinic for those who want to jam, play or write music with other musicians.
4:00 – Songwriting: Will Dick & Brendan Burns discuss how to write songs from a guitarist’s perspective. Whether you are writing songs for other people or singing and playing the guitar yourself, a guitarist’s way of writing music can be unique. Will & Brendan demonstrate some common song forms, playing techniques, and compositional exercises to get the songwriter in you out and into the music world. Songwriters are welcome to present material of their own.
5:00 – Finger-Style: Bob Ward, Will Dick & Brendan Burns demonstrate the wide ranging stylistic opportunities that finger-style techniques present to the guitar. Classical, Flamenco, Folk, Rock & Jazz styles will be explained and put into context with the a brief history of the finger-style guitar.

Sunday, Guitober 19th, 2PM: GUITOBER at the MFA!
Come to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to see and hear the Guitars in the museum’s fabulous instrument collection! Curator Darcy Kuronen promises to show us “a broad range of really cool and significant guitars.” To sign up, contact Hollie Fleming (617-277-4593; hfleming@bmsmusic.org) BUT HURRY! Our group is limited to 25. Must be a BMS Student

Tuesday, Guitober 21st: Guitar Night II
Student Concert at Bakalar Recital Hall, 7:30PM
An open recital for guitar students at BMS. Talk to your instructor if you are interested in performing.

Saturday, Guitober 25th: Clinic Day 2 (Open to the Public)
3:00 – Blues: Jason Yost, Joe Conley & Brendan Burns talk about Blues fundamentals from the 12-Bar Blues form, to comping & lead techniques. Chord Voicings & Pentatonic forms will be discussed. This clinic is a must for any guitarist interested in the Blues and/or Early Rock.
4:00 – Guitar Effects: Joe Conley, Jason Yost & Brendan Burns will explain and showcase their favorite guitar effects and stomp boxes. Jason, Joe & Brendan will demonstrate common pedals and their different playing possibilities.
5:00 – Guitar Repair: Jay Cannava, from Mr. Music, will share his wisdom of servicing & repairing hundreds of guitars in the Boston area. Jay will show us what to look out for when caring for a guitar and explain how to diagnose and fix some simple problems such as intonation, loose jacks, warped necks and changing strings.

Friday, Guitober 30th: Faculty Concert (Open to the Public)
Bakalar Recital Hall, 7:30PM
We’re turning the tables and putting on a concert for our students. This is our chance as teachers to say “Thank You” to our students for all the great work they do. The Guitar Faculty will play solo pieces & in small ensembles for a night of guitar awesomeness to remember.

Thanks from the 2008 Guitober Team: Will Dick, Bob Ward, Jason Yost, Joe Conley, Scott Pittman, Justin Meyer & Brendan Burns.

Guitober – It’s Guitabulous!!!

Members of the 2007-2008 Brendan Burns GUITARMY:

Austin Cohen
Myra Johnson
Helen Huang
Coco Wallace
Parker Wallace
Charlie Guerra
Neil Jones
Kavoi Mutisya
Christopher Zarins
Shaan Shivdasani
Sam Roffman
Masaki Norton
Isabel Wallace
Hadassah Stanhill
Olivia Siegal
Max Josef
Gabriel Mininberg
Daniel Getz
Nick Page
Alvin Taylor
Sarah Simon
Shani Breiman
Nico Jochnick
Claire Chin
Keir Shields
Elana Shlosman
Sophia Spirounis
Sam Mills
Aaron Corn
Micaela Corn
Greg Smith
Abby Fink
Maria Meletlidis
Vincent Webster
Eleni Papadopoulos
Yanni Papadopoulos
David Cohen
Tommy Larkin
Nick Gill
David Kahn
Jason Boyle
Livia Merrill
Cyril Vallet

Isabel Leader
Noa Leiter
Sam Altsher
Sarah King
Alex Horn
Alex Verbitsky
Kevin Wu

Students of Brookline Music School & Newton Music Academy

Cambridge – Tunefoolery Concert Ensembles from Cambridge, a group of 50 musicians living with mental illness, has a simple yet powerful message: Emphasize people’s strengths and focus on abilities, not disabilities.

In May, Tunefoolery members will share their music with the release of a new CD, Tunefoolery II, and a CD release concert. The two-disc CD is a compilation of 32 songs covering early and classical music, jazz, gospel, folk and rock. The concert, featuring more than 30 musicians, will be held Sunday, May 18, at 3 p.m. at the YMCA Theatre in Central Square.

While most psychiatric treatment programs are focused on minimizing the effects of depression, hearing voices, etc., Tunefoolery helps its musicians move away from the mental health patient role and embrace new identities as professional musicians and performers. This transformation is essential for women and men with long-term illnesses who often get the message that they are not “well” enough to be creative contributors to our communities. As one member puts it, “Tunefoolery is a great example of how non-traditional mental health treatment truly can change people’s lives. Music is powerful medicine. I have a tremendous feeling of belonging with Tunefoolery. I have found great friends here. It’s a job and a creative outlet at the same time.”

The Tunefoolery musicians, who perform as solo acts or in small ensembles, play 75 to 90 gigs every year at mental health treatment programs, hospitals, nursing homes, and anywhere else where music can bring joy and inspiration. To increase the level of professionalism, Tunefoolery also offers its musicians music lessons, workshops, and a yearly three-day retreat in the Berkshires. Another inspiring project is the education outreach program, where musicians visit schools and other institutions educating children and adults about psychiatric disabilities, focusing on people’s strengths and abilities rather than on the negative effects of mental illness.

Tickets, at the door are $8 for adults, $5 for children under 13 and consumers of mental health services, and $22 for families. The CD will be sold at the concert and is also available at the Tunefoolery Web site at www.tunefoolery.org.

I had a wonderful time at my Faculty Recital last month. Vessela Stoyanva, Valerie Thompson & Will Dick all provided themselves as great musicians and amazing associates for the evening. Thank you to all my students who attended. I’m so happy I could share my work with you. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to teach, perform and share with the amazing community at Brookline Music School.

Here are two mp3s from the show:
Au Clair De La Lune – This is a duet by Will Dick & myself. I had so much fun playing with Will at the show and rehearsing with him the weeks before. We intentionally did not set an arrangement of this tune and just relied on listening to each other to give each other the support that was needed. Will is a phenomenal player and it was great to interact with him on this tune.

Ellen’s Tune – This is a song that I wrote for my mother a few years back. I think of it as a sweet country/jazz waltz. Vessela & Valerie were kind enough to lend their beautiful musicianship to the tune. It was really nice to play with them.

Last year I showcased music for the WAlbum, this year I will be featuring music that I’ve been studying, writing and transcribing. It will be made up of the most significant work that has come across my practice stand in the past 18 months. Selections include pieces by Pat Metheny, Ralph Towner, Sylvain Luc, Tim Miller, Wolfgang Muthspiel and an original composition. I’m very excited to share this music that is very important to me, and I’m thrilled to have a great list of guest musicians.

Valerie Thompson will be joining me on Cello, Vessela Stoyanva will be playing vibes and the chair of the guitar department at Brookline Music School (Will Dick) will be assisting on guitar.

If you want to see what I’ve been up to, stop on by:

Brookline Music School (Bakalar Hall)

25 Kennard Road

Brookline MA

Wednesday, January 23rd 7pm

The MXTabs website describes their new service:

“users are encouraged to create, edit, rate and review their own guitar tablature interpretations of their favorite songs.”

Now this is all fine and dandy, but we’re talking about tablature made up a hyphens and numbers:

—3—3—0—5—3—0—

These are really bare-bones transcriptions that started back in the early 90′s. They have no rhythmic notation and are often without lyrics.

I’m a big fan of Musicnotes.com. I use their services often and I participate in their affiliation program (see sidebar). I think they do a great thing by offering sheetmusic online, but this is a low-ball approach to online tabs. Powertabs.net has been putting out scores with tablature, standard notation, midi file and community inteativity for a while now. This push back to the hyphen, hyphen, number format is not development, and feels kinda trashy for such an established music notation site.

Without another resource for smaller or more obscure artist tablature, I’m sure I will use MXTabs and recommend it to students due to it’s relation to MusicNotes.com and their revenue sharing for artists. But can’t we come up with a better system?

—0—2—0—3—

In other design news, I just wanted to share how creatively satisfied I am writing XHTML & CSS. For a while, I thought learning all this web design stuff was really a distraction and procrastination from my music (even though sometimes it is), but recently I’ve found that writing code has been helping my musical mind. It’s hard for me to demonstrate this, but designing in code is very similar to writing a composition. It’s similar to seeing compositional forms in TV shows or novels. They are all related. I wish I had more to say about this, but I’m still trying to understand it.

OBSERVATIONS:

• This was a lot of work.
• I’m proud of some things and embarrassed of others.
• I learned a lot about myself and how I work.
• It was great fun and very satisfying to create work that I could share and perform.
• This project stressed me out a lot; though, that was kind of the idea. I needed a push to get this project done. The blog helped so much with that. It was my weekly accountability marker.

• “Weekly Blog Posts:”
  I decided early on that I wanted to do weekly blog posts to give myself motivation with a deadline. It was great way to use peer pressure to my advantage: tell everybody I’m going to do something, and then go get it done.The problem was that I don’t work this way. I often dive headfirst deep into a project and let it consume all of my free time and thoughts. My last project like this was my web-redesign. I worked so intensely, that I injured myself. I know I work this way, but rather than I embrace it, I tried to hide it.I wanted to show off that I could work disciplined and diligently on something to produce a product just like the “real people” do, with deadlines, work reviews, brainstorming meetings, etc.
  In the end, it didn’t work out that way. The weekly post showed how difficult it is to go against the grain. I ended up procrastinating and working from the wrong direction on a lot of this until it became too much.
• “Shared Development:”
  I feel like I missed the goal of sharing my creative process. I wish I had shared more of how a fragment gets developed into an idea, and then fleshed-out into a composition.

MOVING ON:
I have a lot of love for the music I created the past few months and hope I can continue the spirit of the WAlbum in the future. I think the next version of the WAlbum will take on a form that looks more like the “shared development” topic (mentioned above).

FINAL THOUGHTS:
From this perspective, the project feels like a work-in-progress way to find out what I want to do with writing tunes and bloging. There are some things that I really liked about the process and some others that I did not.

I feel grateful for the experience and for the lessons learned. It gave me a lot of inspiration, motivation and stress. All in all, I’m happy to have completed and excited to move on.

• The Gamelan: Learning a new piece from Alit changed the way I think about music. Playing the Museum of Science with Robots, Kresge Hall with Alit, & an outdoor concert at Copley Square were all memories I will cherish.
• Tim Miller: I had a great year studying with Tim. He helped out a lot with prepping for a NEC future that never came, and gave me great advice & help with the Walbum. I’m looking forward to continuing my studies with him in the new year.
• Charlie Banacos: A little bit before Thanksgiving I sent Charlie a letter requesting that I be put on his waiting list. He gave me a call a few days later and said that I was in queue, and that I would hear from him in about two years. Cool! Studying with Charlie has been something I’ve been thinking about for years. I’m glad I finally took action.
• Teaching: I had a great group of students this year, and a lot of new ones since I’ve started teaching outside of the house at BMS, NMA & Tune Foolery. My students are a blast. Everyone has been a great source of inspiration, challenge, and joy.
• Student Concert: This year’s student concert almost didn’t happen. I thought I wouldn’t have enough people interested, but boy was I wrong. It was great fun and it turned out so well I think I might have another one in the spring.
• Liza White: I had a great experience playing a small suite of music for Liza White, a composition student at BU. One of her pieces was remarkably challenging. It gave me great satisfaction to work on it bit by bit and then bring it up to tempo. The performance was chalked up as a learning experience because I didn’t have my head on straight. Something about the performance environment confused me and I wasn’t “in the moment.”
• Fluttr Effect: I watched that band move leaps and bounds this year. 2 new albums came out, one with the trio and one (long-awaited) with the full band. It’s been fun going to shows and see them develop as artists, musicians and professionals.
• Friends: I got to see two good friends become parents and two others continue down their awesome road of parenthood.
• Solo Guitar: I had a lot of fun driving up and down the coast this summer playing for weddings. I played in many a nice location including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which was just amazing.
• I started working at Tune Foolery this year, teaching guitar to musicians with Psychiatric Disabilities. It’s been an incredible experience.
• Ralph Towner: I used to check Ralph’s website weekly to see if he was coming anywhere near Boston on tour. In June, he did. Valerie & I got to have a date at the Regatta Bar. We had some cheese & wine and listened to Ralph Towner and his guitar.
• I learned that a car in MA needs to have impeccable wiper blades to pass inspection. Not even the slightest tear gets by.
• I finally got my GK amp fixed since being broke back in the Summer of ’05. It had seen so many technicians and gotten so many different diagnosises, that I thought it was dead. All it needed was new speakers. Yeah!!!
• My Dad turned 60, and I turned 30. I still think that’s neat. That doesn’t happen every year.
• The Hand: I finally went to the doctor because my hand problem got so bad that my fingers were going numb. I worked several months with a Neurology team and had weekly visits to the Physical Therapist. As a result, my computer set-up substantially changed, I’ve learned a lot about my hand and I learned that I need to take better care of myself. I do exercises to increase my upper body and core muscles, and as a result, I think I’m a little taller; or at least I slouch a little less.

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Consider this my official push for Powertabs.net: This is a site with midi encoded tablature. They have a player/editor (you have to download it) that can view, print and play transcriptions. The transcriptions I’ve seen so far have both standard notation and tablature. The Playback tempo can be sped up or slowed down. It’s good. Check it out.

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I’m working on learning expression engine right now. My goal to is to slim down this blog to more personal and random stuff, and put more of the guitar lesson related material on a subdomain: http://www.lessons.brendanburns.com. The truth is, a lot of this is a little over my head right now. I’m working hard, but we know what happened the last time I did that. Please bear with me as this site takes another turn down reconstruction alley. Hopefully, the site will be more accessible, easier to navigate and thusly more informative. Stay tuned….., then check it out.

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Performance: I’m making a rare public performance (1st one in ’06) at the Brookline First Light Festival. I’ll be playing solo guitar at Serenade Chocolatier, 5 Harvard square Brookline village from 6:15-7:15 on Thursday, November 30th. Check it out.