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.