In Persuit of Mediocrity

BobF
Mediocrity is the new Excellence

And somewhat paradoxically (in jazz, at least), since Wynton Marsalis, excellence has become the New Mediocrity.
 
Go figure.
 
Spelling has suffered as well.
 
 

Did sum juan sea mi speeling wuz bahd?

bapu
Did sum juan sea mi speeling wuz bahd?

Know.

Almost sorry I posted this. Was a bit depressed for a spell. Long posts probably my therapy.
 
Friend of a good friend came out on vacation to see the eclipse. Brought his 12 year old daughter.
 
We had a post eclipse jam with the locals and the girls dad said she wanted to come to jam too. Dad said she was learning electric and brought her gear and wasn’t bad for a 12 year old girl.
 
All I was thinking was there would be alcohol there and who knows what else and a 12 year old girl destroying the jam.
 
Came jam time and she was late. Her finger nail polish wasn’t dry yet. She showed up, said it was a special polish to keep her nails from breaking while playing. The little waif had butterfly hair clips, dayglo metallic pink to match her nails to match her shoes.
 
Her rig was the same dayglo pink ¾ size Jackson with a matching cord and matching Crate amp. The guitar had a Hannah Montana decal on it. She proceeded to ask the drummer if she could play where he was sitting. Please please. Anything for the little princess. Gave her the spot where she said she would get the best effects. Asked her in small talk who her guitar idols were. She said John someone and Linda someone. Never hear of them and asked her where they were from. Linda lived next door and John was in her English class and was 13 years old. (Good grief)
 
Asked her if she needed a pick but said she never learned to play with a pick yet. Asked her what effects she used and said none, just her guitar, amp and the room.
 
We started to tune up the instruments. Keyboard man gave us an E from the VB3 Hammond. The girl didn’t tune and was frowning. Said she couldn’t tune with the swirly sound and asked for a sine wave, specifically A 440. This was getting unbearable, but anything for Miss Barbie.
 
A 440 provided and she slowly tuned her A string. At least she had a good sense of pitch. Then a game changer was upon us. Ding,ding,ding, ding, ding. A flurry of harmonics almost like church bells. What just happened?
 
Shook off the momentary confusion. We decided to warm up with some blues. Young miss can’t break a fingernail said I could take the first lead as she very softly played some actually neat chords. I was impressed and any fear we had about her ruining the jam vanished.
 
It was her turn for the lead and started with a long feedback sustain note. Understood what she meant about having to be where she was in relation to the room and amp. Then all hell broke loose. Van Halen on steroids. Graceful crescendos and tapping harmonics. Incredible vibrato. She was shooting back and forth from jazz to metal. At one point I put my guitar down and took a seat, told her I just wanted to listen for awhile.
 
I know better than to compare skill levels, because there will always be someone better. Having fun is all that matters if you don’t have to make a living out of it.
 
Still, felt like crap. Got home and tortured myself with the E-Bow for 3 hours trying to get some semblance of her vibrato style. Ended up with blistered fingers and realized I could practice till the end of my days and not get to a tenth of where this kid is. Makes me wonder what John and Linda sound like.
 
I did noticed when she packed her guitar away, the back had another decal of Hannah Montana with the crossed circle over it and the word “NOT !!” under it.
 
Oh well, back to practice. Still having fun chasing mediocrity.
 
John

John, maybe you need to go search out Linda and John. 

Bapu,
 
You are right. On top of that, the imprinting thing. Like ducks that got something like 32 hours to get their act together after birth before they are ruined for life and stuck in a rut.
 
May not be as defined or as short a time, but convinced it happens to guitar players also.
 
Trauma for me about the kid was that I'm used to seeing guitar gods and goddesses on Youtube, but never been on stage with one that blew me six feet under.
 
Her visual was as incomprehensible as the sounds. The tapping thing I will never understand. Van Halen started it mainstream as far as I know.
 
Not only do they learn faster, but if they start with the tap thing, it is the new normal. You don't see too many of us or many long term pros that have been able to take up the technique after getting cemented into habits, establishing a style (style=limitation).
 
God bless our youth and the freshness they bring.
 
John

Zeno had the right of it. We can never get beyond half way.

More kids like her and there may be hope yet for Gibson.

bapu
For the most part I'm convinced kids learn faster today than we did back in our day.

You may be biased due to individuals close to you who may "ahead of the curve". I teach middle school (6-8 grade, advanced to special ed) and have for over 30 years in an upper middle class neighborhood. Allow me to assure you, kids are NOT learning faster. I am actually frightened by how dense students have become. When I and my fellow senior teachers think to ourselves about the current crop of students, "These are tomorrow's leaders", we shudder. 
 
That's not all, BTW. My wife teaches seventh grade special ed. The problems she sees the students she teaches exhibiting are far more serious. Whereas kids she taught a few years ago had a two-year differential from their expected reading level, it is now not unusual to see up to a five-year gap.
 
Perhaps, most tellingly, these kids have no ethics. Cheating is entirely de rigueur for them; in fact, they do not seem to have any understanding as to why there is an issue with it. This is not entirely surprising: when speaking to their parents of the problem, it is not unusual for them to not show any perception of a moral problem with cheating either. They are simply unconcerned and are often irritated that they were alerted to the issue, much less that it was necessary for someone to punish their child for an infraction.
 
If you seriously believe that today's kids are brighter, you couldn't be more mistaken. Yes, there are individuals who are advanced for their age. There always have been these students, but even on this issue, their achievements do not often meet what was considered remarkable a few years ago. On the whole (from advanced down to special ed), however, students' accomplishments today do not measure up to what their predecessors did several years ago.  I wish I could report otherwise.
 
Please do not speculate that my comments are due to bitterness resulting from my many years of teaching. Nothing could be further from the truth; I love each and every one of my students. I cannot, however, allow my affection for them to color what I know to be the case: the great majority of them are not as intellectually acute as those that went before. 

 

bapu
I need to clarify that I was speaking in relation to musical ability only.

Yes, you are and so I understood you. I am commenting on a wide spectrum which includes music. My remarks are not to be considered as excluding music.  I am simply connecting your one area of concern to what is endemic to education in the main.

bapu
For the most part I'm convinced kids learn faster today than we did back in our day.

Bapu, you were just slow.  bless your heart.

eph221

bapu
For the most part I'm convinced kids learn faster today than we did back in our day.

Bapu, you were just slow.  bless your heart.

It's always seemed to me that my parking brake was perpetually engaged.

JohnKenn
Outland,
 
From your perspective, how much of the deficit can be blamed on a lack of focus, lack of a more strict educational system as we dilute down the rights of educators to keep our kids on track. Maybe a receding artifact of the old school mentality.
 
As crude and abominable as this may seem, back in the day, we either got our act together or got the coach's initials welted on our butts with a heavy wooden paddle. No ADHD, no kumbaya psychoanalytic tirades and lawyer oversight threatening every move of an educator with a lawsuit.. Ripple of mental distress in this age, there's a drug to numb it and a lifetime of public support ahead as we try to redeem a life.
 
We got it together under the understanding that it was get it together or else. We thus learned to read, add subtract, become functional citizens because that was what was expected.
 
Don't know if we have improved on the approach in this enlightened new age. Not to say that we don't understand deeper dynamics of disorders that may stand in the way of a clear learning experience. Nor advocating beating an outlier into a pulp to force compliance, but have we swung the pendulum too far in the other direction.

Hi John:
 
I don't think that I'm about to offer a huge analysis of the problems in public education here. Your observations mention part of the problem (with an exception to teachers doling out corporal punishment. I've got no problems with a spanking, per se. It's just that it's an option that should be permitted to parents and guardians only for more reasons than I can count). The general lack of personal responsibility as you mention is a huge hassle, but (and this is where perhaps we'll part company somewhat) we're long past the stage where over-diagnosing ADHD and similar disorders was an issue; these difficulties are now pretty well understood (at least in our district). Getting parents to administer the necessary (and correct!) medication is often a problem, and to a point, getting past parental resistance to a proper diagnosis can be a hassle, but over-diagnosis as such is not much of an issue anymore.
 
Certainly, I'd agree that our society is far too litigious; no teacher in our district would disagree. Interestingly, we are now not only seeing parents who are willing to litigate if the system recommends remediation for their very needy children (they don't want their children "labelled"), we are now getting parents who are willing to sue if their very normal child isn't classified and giving extraordinary measures they don't need. And, of course, we will always have parents ready to call their lawyers if their Precious isn't recognized as "gifted" and always given an "A+". Usually, a teacher offering a comparison of the work of the student in question and another student (who actually deserved and received an "A") is enough to cause the outraged parents to calm down and back off, but this doesn't always work. Some students and parents feel they are just entitled to be lauded for a brilliance that doesn't exist.
 
One of the stranger things teachers often see now is homework that is completed by parents. Sometimes this can get downright hilarious as a teacher tries to explain over the phone to a father who is an upper-level financial manager of a Fortune 500 company why his "child" (*wink*) received only a "C-" on book report for not following all the directions. I really would not want to be the father's telephone receiver given all the sputtering that occurs as the father trips over himself trying to cover up the fact that the author of the report wasn't really only eleven years old. The teacher, of course, knows fully well who wrote the report; sentence structure and vocabulary are not within the realm of what little Johnny is capable. He can't define "homogeneity", much spell it.
 
I've touched on a few things here and could go on. I've avoided political and societal influences which are detrimental, largely because I don't want to raise hackles on anyone's back. BTW, if you were wondering, not all teachers are particularly liberal on social issues. I, for one, tend to be very conservative, though fiscally/environmentally, I'm fairly liberal. I'll say this along these lines (and only this): the basic social unit cannot be redefined de jure without those decisions coming back to haunt the children involved in those basic structures de facto. How often have I personally seen those children damaged? 100% of the time. None of the children involved was unharmed. One is still institutionalized to keep her from harming herself (about 5 years and running). Others exhibit a range of odd behavior(s). Not a one is without an issue of some sort.    
 
But I'm sure that we, as a society, know, oh, so much better.
 

Before this thread goes off the bottom into obscurity, there were a couple things I learned from the jam that I should pass on for what it may be worth. Haven’t tried either one yet, but makes sense.
 
We had promised Chelsea thru her father we’d not start the party without her, as per her pretty please request.
 
She already had us irritated having to hide the booze in Coke cans. Then she showed up late because her finger nail polish had to dry.
 
When she came into the room, first thing she did was go around clapping her hands. I thought, the little twit, applauding already and I haven’t even started to play. Then she asks the drummer to move his set so she could play where he was.
 
She later explained that she was testing the acoustic response of the room to allow for maximum guitar feedback. The first sweet spot was where the drummer was, where there was max reverb response from clapping. She had to locate a second sweet spot equal or only slightly less than the first to place her amp facing directly at her. She would have preferred an off axis mic going thru a monitor to not impede the amp to pickup communication. Amp location had to be 10 feet or less away in a normal room without acoustic tiles. Any further and she would need her big amps for excess volume, and she only brought her 10 inch Crate in the car. She said the more open air environment or dead the reflections, and the amp has to be closer or louder.
 
She showed me her preferred method of finding resonance spots. It was one of those metallic Halloween clickers. She said she sensed that she was under the gun for being late and didn’t want to freak everyone out and it would take too long to explain what she was doing. She shared that when the drummer moved his set, the room acoustics changed and the sweet spot shifted with him. She was too shy to ask for another adjustment and said she took it as a loss and played with a handicap.
 
Result of her positioning was incredible. E-Bow without an E-Bow and surpassing the one string limitation. She had the ability to take any note or combination and get infinite sustain. The child would do a kind of dance into and away from the amp to get max feedback. I have only seen two other guitarists who could do this. Ted Nugent and a late backwoods savant from our here. Interestingly, they all had one thing in common. Guitar, a cord, an amp. No effects. Playing the room acoustics was the effect.
 
She said she always played with her amp turned up to maximum, tone controls in the middle. She let fingers and room acoustics do the rest. Had to rely on the guitar volume control if in a sonic crisis, though I saw her use the volume to swell up incredible string ensembles. Her Jackson had one modification, which was a phase inverter for the neck pickup. Chelsea said she had little use for the bridge pickup and rarely used it because the feedback was less responsive, and did not like the sound of the mixed pickups. The inverter was to minimize noise or help with the feedback depending on where she was playing.
 
Goodwill stores here are doing a pre Halloween sale, so plan to pick up one of the clickers and experiment.
 
Her second tip was on her finger nail polish. Part of her style was to “scratch” the strings into resonance. Fingernails could take a serious hit, so she used a home made mix to render normal nails into concrete for the task. Artificial nails a no no because they interfere with the sense of touch way more than the polish.
 
One part normal finger nail polish, but has to be metal flake for structural stability. Does not have to be her favorite bright pink color. Mix with one part super glue gel. Note, gel only, not the liquid as per her recommendation. Paint on fast because a detail brush quickly turns to stone and is expensive.
 
Looking back, I’m scratching my head more than the strings trying to understand what came down, so will put Chelsea’s macho finger nail blend on the back burner until I too can give up the pick.
 
John