The Catch-22 of drumming

I started playing the drums in July 2019 and am in my second year now of daily practice. First and foremost, I would consider myself a guitar player because I have played for more hours on the axe than on any other instrument. If you already know one instrument, it will be easier for you to learn a second, even easier to learn your third and so on. Mastery on multiple instruments is comparable to polyglots who speak several languages. It gets easier and easier to acquire a new one, the more you already know. In this post, I will focus on how some important lessons I have learned in my drumming. Some techniques translate well from the guitar, and others do not translate at all.

Acoustics, Engineering, MusicRikard ÖqvistFebruary 27, 2021drums, guitar, practice, consistency, growth, analogyComment

How to learn any song

Back in 2012, a friend of mine asked me if I would like to come along to a concert with Tommy Emmanuel. I had never heard about the guy, but apparently, he was some kind of world class acoustic guitarist that was touring in my hometown Umeå. I said sure, it is always fun to expand one’s musical horizon. I went to the concert with zero expectations and it turned out to be one of the best things I have experienced in my life. Tommy Emmanuel is an absolute genius and a treasure of a human being. The things he creates with his guitar does not resemble anything else I have ever heard. He is the literal definition of a one-man band. In his own words: “When I was a kid, I wanted to be in show business. Now, I just want to be in the happiness business. I make music, and you get happy. That's a good job.” I don’t know of anyone who does a better job at that, than Tommy Emmanuel.

Music, EducationRikard ÖqvistJanuary 30, 2021tommy emmanuel, guitar, acoustic guitar, learning, practice, consistency, habits, concertComment

When the tables are turned for a recording engineer

Yesterday I spent a day in a recording studio for the first time – As a client. I have been working in studio environments probably for thousands of hours and have recorded hundreds of songs. But I have always been the one in control of the recording process. A sound engineer recording himself as a musician is a completely different thing than a sound engineer being recorded as a musician, by another sound engineer. By entering the role of a client for just one day, I learned some lessons that aren’t apparent from the perspective of the sound engineer. This is an invaluable experience which can be applied in any domain, not just music.

Acoustics, Music, EngineeringRikard ÖqvistJanuary 23, 2021studio, recording, music, guitar, growth, acoustics, musician

Divine intervention

A long time ago I was introduced to Stanley Jordan’s rendition of Elanor Rigby. When he plays the part at around 1:00 into the song my jaw dropped. He used the guitar in a new way that I had never seen before, and it sounded beautiful! I believe he called the playing style “touching”. It is basically two-handed tapping where your left hand plays the chords, and the right hand takes care of the melodies. I instantly started to read up on the method and practicing on my electric guitar. It soon dawned on me that the guitar would need some adjustments and optimization to play the touch style. Some examples are alternate tunings, extremely low string height and deadening the strings on the first fret with a piece of cloth so that they stop ringing as soon as you lift your fingers. However, that would have rendered the guitar unusable for normal playing. Touch style is very difficult even on a properly setup guitar, and if you try to play it on a regular guitar it becomes even harder. Frustrated, I started looking for a smarter way to do it, and that is when I learned about the Chapman Stick.

MusicRikard ÖqvistJanuary 9, 2021music, chapman stick, tapping, touching, guitar, bass, drums, piano, vision, dream Comment

Designing the ultimate home studio

When designing a room, you need to balance and prioritize certain aspects against each other. For a home studio, I consider the following three to be the most important: 1) Acoustics, 2) Aesthetics and 3) Functionality. I am currently building my fourth home studio in my garage. Each iteration has had a different priority order and the results have varied accordingly. As with any project, you need to write down the purpose of the room, to understand how the parameters should be rank ordered. In this article, I will describe what I have learned from my different home studios.

A change of tool changes your perspective

One of the things that I HATE is to solve a task using an incorrect tool. The perfect example is to use a Phillips screwdriver bit on a Pozidriv screw. Or when you don’t have the bit of the right size. It makes my blood boil! But what if there is a smarter way to complete the task using a different tool? Certain tasks are more inclined to have a “right” and a “wrong” way of doing them, but if we get locked in our minds that there is only one way to solve a problem, we risk stagnation. However, it makes a lot more sense to try out different guitars to play the same song, than to use different screwdriver bits for a given type of screw. The latter would be the equivalent to play death metal on a Harp. If your desire is to play the harp, you are probably better off choosing a different musical genre than death metal.

Art, Engineering, Philosophy, MusicRikard ÖqvistSeptember 5, 2020tools, productivity, wacom, drawing, speedsketching, screws, drawing tabletComment

Can we hypnotize ourselves?

Many of you (including my past self), perhaps think of the entertainers on TV when you think of hypnosis. Not of something that you can use yourself daily. Have you ever experienced that feeling where you are so immersed in something that you are not aware of your surroundings any longer? People can stand right next to you, talking to you, and you don’t hear a single word of what they say. As a musician, I have had this experience several times, however I never chose to enter that state of trance by willpower. It was something that just happened. The idea of hypnotising myself came from a podcast I have started to follow called “Your mind is trying to kill you”, hosted by Alexandros Megas and Vincent Byrne. I was captivated by the thought of entering trance by willpower alone and have been experimenting with it for some weeks now. It turns out it works wonders!

Extreme goalsetting

What happens when you take on an extreme goal? I have found there are many benefits with this approach that can maximize your development in any discipline. First, you will never surpass the level of your greatest expectations. An extreme goal will quickly filter out most of your options until you are only left with one way forward, thus making the problem well-defined and thus easier to solve! I tried this approach out in 2017 for the first time and this was my goal “I am going to sing Nessun Dorma at least as good as Jussi Björling” and these were my constraints “and I shall do it within one year by practising 15 minutes/day.” The results blew my mind.

Habits, MusicRikard ÖqvistMarch 7, 2020goalsettingComment