• My revelation yesterday, that there is such a thing as musical dyslexia, has got me thinking.

    Speech music and image making are innate, primal urges. Watch any young child and they love talking and singing along with nursery rhymes, bashing along with a tambourine and scribbling away with crayons. They can get lost in these activities for hours. Their naivety allows them to experiment without the worry of “what people will think.”

    These activities soon become formalised in reading and writing, musical scales and Art. Each with it’s prescribed systems of notation and accepted styles and each with it’s barriers to entry designed over the years to keep the professions secure in their income.

    Although it seems there will be some learning of poetry by wrote in the new curriculum, the oral tradition has pretty much disappeared, replaced by an obsession with spelling and grammar. No one’s brains are wired up the same way. Dyslexics not only have to battle with making the words stay still on the page or having letters appear facing in a different direction to everyone else, they have then to worry first about the spelling and where the commas go. That is how their literacy skills are judged and approved of.

    If you can’t make head or tail of scales or musical notation, there is no place for you in the approved world of music. If the notes leap about and the staves vibrate on the page, you are not going to fit into the world of music. We rarely hear live amateur performances these days. Mostly we hear auto-tuned, note perfect music, timed to atomic clock perfection. That is how we judge ourselves and how we judge an amateur performance. What about all those no-hopers on The X Factor, that are such fun to laugh at, who are honestly crestfallen when they are told they are no good? Once upon a time they would have been the best of their communities, loved and encouraged, providing the only entertainment available.

    And the day eventually comes when a child is told to draw properly and stop scribbling. That is the end of experimentation and learning how the materials work. They have been judged to be scribblers. There is no point picking up a pencil if you are not going to make an acceptable work of art. And now we are so bombarded by images of perfection. Most are tweaked to withing an inch of thier life onphotoshop,

  • Read-Pillar-Box-SmallI will be at the Great British Family Fayre on the 31st August 2013. Why not come along?

    I’ll be with Derwent Pencils, showing off their great products and showing how to draw all sorts of things.

    To get you in the British mood, I thought I’d show you how to draw a British Pillar Box. There’s one of these on the corner of almost every street. It’s what you put your letters or mail in for the Post Office to come an collect and send to your frinds. You might call it a mail box. They are painted in “Pillar Box Red” except for one or two gold ones which are in the towns where Olympic Gold Medal winners live!

    You can tell how high they are by the amount of black showing at the bottom. The more black, the higher they are. I learned this when I was younger and could not go past a pillar box without leap-frogging over it!

    In this video I used my nice new set of Derwent coloursoft pencils.

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  • DyslexicNotesI was just watching a trailer for a new movie called Embracing Dyslexia. A faltering piano tinkles in the background as the music track. I was half listening to it when… BLAM! Everything made sense. Dyslexia must affect the reading of music too!
    A quick search took me to the British Dyslexia web page on the subject. I’m 50 something years old and I only just figured it out!

    I loved music as a child – it was something deep inside me. I sang all the time and was thrilled the day I learned to whistle. I wanted to be just like the Beatles when I grew up. But I couldn’t make head or tail of written music. Oh, the frustration! Every time I tried to learn music they put those dots in front of me and every time those dots jangled about the page like a room full of bluebottles. Why wouldn’t they sit still on the stave? Actually the stave was a bit wobbly too, vibrating like guitar strings!

    So it would be suggested that maybe I wasn’t quite ready to learn the guitar or piano or whatever. Singing in the choir was easy. I just sang what the person next to me was singing. I was so sensitive to the music I could pretty much guess what the notes were anyway, getting a bit cross when the composer put in a weird, unexpected modulation to make it more interesting.

    I eventually learned to play the guitar when I discovered that they drew little pictures of the chords above the misc and even showed where to put your fingers. But lead guitar meant nothing to me. The scales didn’t either and they still don’t make sense. Semitones are the same as “i before e”. I know the rule and can recite it backwards, but I still spell cieling wrong! Ceiling just doesn’t look right.

    And the black keys on the piano… why? I just don’t get them. When I watch proper musicians I’m amazed. They follow those notes and stick to a tempo: tick, tick, tick. It’s why I was never any good playing with other musicians. Music to me was a purely emotional art form. Tempo, like Space Time, was relative. The tempo of a song that I wrote depended entirely on how I felt that day, what my voice was like, and the emotional intensity of the song at that precise moment.

    When I performed the songs I wrote. I started and finished. I couldn’t remember any of the bit in between because I’d been there, in the story, enveloped in the emotion, in the moment, performing.

    Like the observer effect in particle physics, as soon as I turned the tape recorder on to play a proper performance, in time to a click track so I could layer harmonies and overdubs, it all fell to pieces. I could sing along quite happily in playback as an emotional response, but as soon as the record button went down I could see those notes bouncing up and down – marching ants crawling along the staves – swallows collecting up on telegraph wires – and ill all went to pieces – thinking about it too much.

    Weird! But I feel liberated having finally understood. Maybe I was never really meant to be in a band after all!