lowquality.net

It is 2:30 AM. I should go to bed. I have a big gig tomor­row as well as a paper and a speech to pre­pare for the end of my third term at ECPI.. which, by the way, has been get­ting the best of me.

I don’t have any issues with the sub­ject mat­ter, and I have bet­ter grades in my classes than I have had in a long time. I just don’t feel like I fit in the tech-school envi­ron­ment at all. It’s kind of reas­sur­ing because I’m not all that fond of the envi­ron­ment. Some of the peo­ple can be tough to warm up to. Sel­dom does any­one get my jokes, or my per­spec­tive, I am fre­quently met with blank stares by my fel­low stu­dents and even a few teach­ers. I get tack­led by com­puter geeks with musi­cal pas­sions who want to talk music with me and then pro­ceed to trash this band and that band because their music isn’t com­pli­cated enough– and they expect that I am right behind them (“because you went to Berklee”) and I have to politely change the sub­ject because I don’t want to get into it.

ECPI has helped me to really respect the time I spent at Berklee Col­lege of Music. I am so glad I went there now that I see what the stark con­trast between a four-year art school and a two-year tech school can be like. At Berklee every stu­dent has a per­sonal agenda, they have an idea about they are doing or want to be doing when they grad­u­ate. It could be said that, in a way, Berklee stu­dents are more or less experts on the way into admis­sion, they just want to improve. ECPI is basi­cally for peo­ple who have no skills and need to find a new job, or kids who have skills and want to jump into the field as quickly as pos­si­ble. Some classes at Berklee may be gen­eral but every­one makes an effort to take what they learn worth a grain of salt in order to apply it directly to their inter­ests and their instru­ment. If you write a series of four-part chords in tre­ble clef on the board in a Berklee har­mony class, every musi­cian in the class– no mat­ter what instru­ment they play– can almost innately under­stand that the chords can be moved around, rehar­mo­nized, and put into dif­fer­ent keys or clefs. At ECPI, f you write “NTFS is a Win­dows file sys­tem that looks like pur­ple smoke com­ing out of my ass” you can be sure that half of the class will take that as lit­er­ally as they can and one nitwit might even write it down just in case it’s on the test.

I am not slag­ging ECPI.. not really. I am just reminded of the Myers Briggs test I took in Eddie McGrath’s class my least semes­ter at Berklee, and how that test demon­strated the fun­da­men­tal per­son­al­ity dif­fer­ences musi­cians have from the rest of the pop­u­la­tion. I never thought of us as being all that dif­fer­ent until I saw these sta­tis­tics.. I’ll dig them up some­time and share them with you.

Going into this ECPI, I was con­vinced that being a musi­cian was going to some­how mag­i­cally affect the way I learned and per­formed there. I mean, abstrac­tion isn’t a com­mon skill in tech schools and I was con­vinced I had some­thing to offer by being a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. I have all but aban­doned that fan­tasy. The vibe I am get­ting here is that they want con­for­mity and stan­dard­iza­tion and that really bums me out. Being a musi­cian has noth­ing to do with com­put­ers.. and I know that must seem like a very obvi­ous, if not hilar­i­ous, state­ment for some­one to make with any seri­ous intent. I am already sick of going to school, even though I know I am in it for the haul now. I have no other options, because I owe a lot of money in stu­dent loans, and, some­day, I’d like to be able to move some­where else and music isn’t going to pay for either of those things on it’s own.

Oh well. I’ll tell you guys how the King’s X gig goes on Sun­day. I’m going to bed.