http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/muc/740633831.html

http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/muc/740633831.html


This may seem like a stupid rant. But I think there is a group of musicians that will agree with me.

I recently left my band. My replacement happens to be a Berklee grad. I went to see the guys play, I'm still friends with them, and took the opportunity to talk to the new guitar player to see how he was getting along with my buddies. He broke the Ice by asking me what my influences were. To which I replied: Hendrix, Page, Blackmore, Van Halen, Paul Gilbert, etc. I could see utter disgust in his face, and he interrupted me by saying "You know, rock players, some of them can play, but the real players are George Benson, Tal Farlow, that's where the real vibe comes from". He then proceeded to ask me what my experience with music was, my background. To which I proudly replied "Self taught, I have been playing for the last 24 years in bands, both covers and originals". His reply, "Man, I play jazz, plus I'm a Berklee grad".

Ok, I'll continue by saying that not all Berklee grads are assholes, like my buddy here. But This is not the first time that I encounter a "schooled" musician being a total jerk to other guitarists and being absolutely condescending. With all the people graduating Berklee every year, how come we don't see them dominating the music industry, if they are so good? I have seen many guitarists that have graduated that school and I have to say, I am totally unimpressed with their abilities. They all sound the same, you know, the "Berklee Sound", and I finally figured it out. Berkelee will teach you music, but will not give you the balls or the spirit to play rock and roll. I can safely and proudly say that, as far as Rock and Metal goes, I can do everything a Berklee grad does, and better. And there are scores of self taught musicians that can do the same.

Why do they go to school then? To be able to look down on people and treat them like crap, with complete disregard for fellow musicians and their experience? May be that's the reason that players that went to Berklee and became famous, only went to that school for a semester or two. I think that Berklee should ad another course to their curriculum. Ethics, along with humility. These guys seem to forget that the founder of that school was not even a full time musician, not even a schooled one.

I see now why some musicians, particularly in rock, refuse to play with Berklee grads.

Thought that was an interesting read. I've experienced it once or twice too, being a self-taught musician myself.
NOT ALL Berklee people are condescending pricks though - just some.

Apparently all other music schools look down upon berklee too. My friend is a trained saxophone player and is absolutely disgusting and he was talking about how shitty their performance program is compared to other schools.

yea, i've seen videos of students in "performance labs" and it was clown shoes for the most part

LEARN to much and strip away your soul...ruin your ear.
Got lost in mathematics and in doing so, forget feel...

Sure some of my Berklee bros can site read like a mutha fucka and they have amazing chordal / scalar knowledge but they cant write for shit. UBER METACOGNITIVE abilities are nothing more than a hinderance at some level...

Hey! Tell me what to play and I can play it....sounds fulfilling!

You can learn soo much at Berklee and get incredibly nasty. If you're willing to work. That's all it boils down to. And yes, a lot of people are dicks. Welcome to life.

Meh. If you suck at songwriting and have no spark, it probably doesn't matter what you know or don't know. It's like, if you're a writer, does knowing more words and rhetorical techniques hurt your ability to write? Only if you don't have a sense of tasteful writing to begin with.

I've personally thought for a while that I think they need to CHANGE the way music is written nowadays. I'd much rather read music as descending numbers rather than reading notes on bars.
Then again, I learned writing music in DOS.

dood, thats a sick concept right thurr. descending #'s? fackin cool.

haha my high school music teacher was a "Berklee Grad" and he was a doooooosh. he would spend more time in class reminding us of that than actually teaching us anything. They say if you actualy graduate Berklee you are a musical failure because when you are there you will obviously meet dudes and get a killer band together and just drop out. However my cousin did the Berklee thing and he is a great player and can comp to many styles and is very modest, so yeah not all of them but I would think more than the later.

there's a big difference between Composers and Musicians. It's hard to find a good composer; it's much simpler to find a good musician. It's the rare breed of people that are good composers and musicians.
I'm with Corpus on this one - Emotion in music is stripped with more and more technical work. I'm not saying I don't like technical stuff (I love it), but emotion in music sounds better to me at least.

...the battle bewteen hemispheres of the brain.

i dont know about other instruments but when it comes to drums either you have that rythm/soul or you dont...i've seen guys in their 40s who's been playin for decades and still suck...but then there's people who start playing drums and then after 3-5 years are awesome at it

A friend of mine went to Berklee for 2 years for guitar. When he realized that everyone he knew that graduated from Berklee worked at convenience stores, and warehouses he dropped out.

The last I saw of him was when he abandoned an unsuccessful juice bar business to move to Key West. Currently he works as an unsuccessful art salesman, and plays in a band with Brother Love from the WWF.

You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't.

i took some lessons when i first started...about a month's worth or so and then just took it from there until i got to college. I had an awesome drum teacher in college who really opened me up to thinking about playing without trying to tie me down with things like theory and (too much) sight reading. He knew i didnt have much else to learn in the vein of playing, so he just refined the fuck out of me. I wouldnt be half the drummer I am now without the guy.

bastard in a basket!

the purpose of music theory in my opinion is too open up more possibilites for composition. sort of like how the bible is supposed to give you moral guidelines on how to live a good life. it all comes down to intrepretation and usage.

ahaha love when people tell you what the bible is "supposed" to do.

it was an opinionated analogy.

'opinionated analogy,' is that like psudeo-intellectual bullshit or cocktail talk?

Berklee is alright. I know and know of a few grads and students. Some are douchebags, some rule. I mostly agree that the trend at Berklee isn't to learn to write good music but to learn how to play it. I'd love to go to Berklee to get to know guitar as an instrument better but that's all I'd want. I know a good amount of theory already and I don't feel as if I need a bunch more.

Either way, I have only two words left to say...

David Davidson.

all i will say is pat metheny. yeah hi, i started teaching there at 19.

no thats like making analogy based on my opinion.

I think the majority of Berklee people are just heartless fuckers who think with theory taught to them rather than emotion they have in their heart.

ive heard from a few different sources that its not even hard to get into berklee as long as you have the money to pay for it.

ahhhh. this must be what an epiphany is like.

bingo

I am self tought, i know theory, i know my rudiments, i can sight reed... but i am self taught, and berklee grads are still condescending to me even when i outplay them. They think if i didnt spend the money they did, I COULDNT have learned as much and put in as much time.

I seriously considered going, but decided instead that it might change how i feel about music, so i learn from books, videos, take lessons from all different drum teachers i meet, even from touring bands, the new drummer for vital remains in gonna give me a couple lessons in september when he comes back to the east coast, (I AM FUCKIN THRILLED ABOUT IT) etc... etc... so all in all, with a little effort and a LOT less money, the same valuable resources are available if you just look.

my brother was accepted for bass, but he found that UMASS Lowell had a better music program.

you can get to be a great player if you work period.
you don't need to be a music student to be a great player, but you do need to be gifted to be a great player without having instruction. having a good teacher can help someone with moderate skill to become great.
being a great player doesn't mean you can teach though. berklee has lots of great names teaching. how many of them can actually teach? i don't know.
that being said, berklee got it's bad reputation from accepting 74% of their applicants, only requiring (and i use the term "requiring" loosely) 2 years of "study" on the applying students "primary instrument". (white boy with dread locks steps out of daddy's BMW with a bong and a djimbe... faggots)
however, berklee is now being far more strict with their acceptance policy and the quality of the average student there should become much better over the next couple years.
they wanted fuckin money. that's all.
i went to UMASS Lowell. i majored in music education. i am very confident that i can at least play up to level of (probably totally fucking school) any berklee bassist.
schools like berklee give you a big head.
real musicians think with their balls and heart, not their brain.
i still believe that if you graduate from berklee, you have actually failed.

To all my fellow musician. i applied to Berklee in 90 to 91 and my interview for drums was about ten minutes long and that included waiting to be seen. All they asked me was the guitar bars and then I was accepted. I am happy to say I was privately taught by a berklee student and had so much fun for 7 years and just as better. One reason i did nto go was I could not put a double bass set in the lockers to jam on my personal time. SO i said no and other things.

I took Jazz Guitar for a few years from my instructor in Hanover when I was a teenager, then I was gonna audition for Berklee. I decided not to, and am glad I didn't. I was so into Slayer and Venom by then I feared they'd try to squeeze the metal out of me.

the best way I learned guitar was playing along with Among the Living and Never Mind the Bollocks.

I don't read music, and am not really concerned with theory nowadays. I just try to look for dissonance and weird voicings.

playing with music is by far one of the best ways to learn, i learn how to play all the stuff i like on drums, and it translates into me writting like those bands.. IE: I learned a BUNCH of meshuggah songs, and wrote a part in (OUCH) that later was the main beat for the most recent single off of their new record. Swear to it, my bass player Narkybark played the song for me, and i was like "FUCK DUDE, THAT'S MY BEAT!?" and alas it was. And its not like meshuggah beats are real COMMON. So it really made our song sound like i ripped off theirs. Oh yeah, it's called bleed. With the Triplet, One pattern on the bass drum ( A 3 beat pattern), while the hi-hat is on the one of every four (slightly polymetric) and the snare on the third of every four.

As far as theory: it can be really useful when you know what intervals will have the distinct sort of dissodance you want, or which pinches will scream the loudest together. Obviously you can do it by ear, and in the end you should always trust your ear, but theory can be used to help locate the right note relationships faster.

I dont want to read any of this crap, but just let me say that all musicians are douchebags

And Berklee people have big heads?

Something does not compute here. Have you ever been around the Berklee bass department dude? There are some sick sick players there, mind-blowing even. Unless you are spending 3-4 hours daily practicing by yourself, in addition to extensive ensemble playing, I doubt you can play on the level of some of the best performance bass majors at Berklee. And you are definitely coming off in your post as being cocky and having a chip on your shoulder, so I guess Berklee isn't the only music school producing people with attitude issues.

+1

As for the whole "theory kils your soul" "I prefer emotion to theory" yadda yadda crap - I consider theory to be exactly that... THEORY. It's meant to explain the techniques and choices that have already been DONE. If you're relying on theory for anything other than interpretation or a learning tool, you're missing the point. Theory should be used when LISTENING and PRACTICING, leave the writing to muscle memory.

Just because you don't know theory doesn't mean you're not using it. Just because you do know theory doesn't mean you're using as well as the other guy. And just because you went to Berklee doesn't mean you're the best death metal drummer ever to live - even if your mom tells you so!

what i meant by mentioning my school and major was you don't need the name and a basically worthless degree in performance to be a good player because in the end, no one hires you because you have a piece of paper worth 180 grand. if you could get a job (other than teaching private lessons) with a performance degree then i would have done that, and i probably would have gone to berklee myself. it is a good school and it can get you places others can't. you get what you put in. same old story.
do i have a chip on my shoulder? sure. i'm incredibly bitter that no one can make good money playing music anymore in this area.
but there is a difference with being cocky and overconfident. my post came across really gay. sorry if i pissed you off. being overconfident has put my own foot in my mouth a couple times but it's also gotten me a lot of good gigs with some great people and made me spend the time it takes to not suck. you don't get a call back if you can't back up what you say you can do when someone offers up a great gig to you.

What kind of an idiot idolizes Jazz? Those players are masturbators.

Theory is vital. So is knowing art. Very few in rock, jazz or blues have that intersection at all.

You fancy your self some hot shit doncha boy...

No, but I've been around long enough to know what I hate.

I sympathize with the original article. Generic rock/jazz fusion playing is tedious.

What they call 'theory'...is a subset of theory.

Knowing theory is great, but the best make music that is both theoretically sound and artistically meaningful. Think Beethoven, or maybe Gorguts.

I'm of the view that rock music is a product, and always has been a product, and is part of how the State controls you.

whip the guitar with your chord.